On August 29, around 30 people tried to set sail in three makeshift boats from this village of modest wooden houses located 30 km west of Havana.
But the aborted attempt ended in a protest by the population against the police to prevent them from confiscating the boats, and clashes broke out, half a dozen people told AFP a few days later. inhabitants, witnesses of the facts.
“Whoever wants to leave can leave, we are hungry, we need everything,” laments a 49-year-old resident, who did not want to give her name.
While emigration by sea is officially prohibited on the island, departures in makeshift rafts “take place throughout Cuba, but even more so here”, indicates this resident.
The beach “we call it terminal 3,” she says in a wry allusion to the international terminal at Havana airport.
During the clashes, at least four people were arrested, others beaten and the boats confiscated, testified to AFP another resident, a 32-year-old housewife, whose husband was arrested before being released overnight.
Contacted by AFP, the authorities did not respond.
– Without resources or network –
Another boat with six people on board, part of Isabela de Sagua, another village in the center of the island, popular with candidates for maritime emigration, has been missing since August 28.
Research has been launched by the Cuban Coast Guard, according to the local agency Prensa Latina.
Since October, at least 61 Cubans have died attempting to cross to the Florida coast (166 km), according to a mid-August statement from the US Coast Guard.
In the summer of 1994, more than 35,000 Cubans set out on improvised boats to try to reach the United States, the biggest wave ever seen in the country.
Since 2015 and the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Washington, maritime emigration has never been so strong. For its part, Havana accuses Washington of not respecting its commitment to allocate 20,000 annual visas provided for in an agreement between the two countries.
These departures at sea are part of a larger migratory wave, accelerated at the end of 2021 by the visa exemption for Cubans in Nicaragua, where they arrive by plane before continuing their journey by land to the United States border. .
According to the US Customs Service, nearly 179,000 Cubans entered the United States illegally between October and July, a record.
But such a trip costs about 12,000 dollars, a luxury that many Cuban emigrants cannot afford.
Around 5,000 migrants have been intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard, half of them since the start of summer, a season with more favorable weather conditions.
The sea route is chosen by “Cubans who have fewer resources and networks to migrate” and who do so despite the danger, in addition to the strong possibility of being intercepted and then deported by the American authorities, explains to AFP Juan Carlos Narvaez, researcher at the Mexican NGO Imalab-Social, specializing in particular in research on migration.
Cuba is experiencing its worst economic crisis in thirty years, with recurrent shortages of food, medicine, gasoline and daily power cuts, under the combined effects of the tightening of the American embargo and the consequences of the pandemic.
On Sunday, the Cuban peso in the informal market hit its lowest level since the 1990s against the US dollar.
In recent months several protest rallies have taken place in small towns across the country, a situation unthinkable before the historic demonstrations of July 11, 2021.
The inhabitants of El Cepem complain about their difficult living conditions and accuse the authorities of doing nothing to help them. “In the same way that they came for the boats, they could have come to see what we are missing”, regrets the housewife.