Referenews

A handful of airline companies have carried tens of thousands of Cubans from a half dozen Cuban cities to the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, with each paying up to $4,000 or more for the ticket, according to flight records and travel industry representatives.

Cuban stand-up comedian

Cristhian González

flew from Havana to Managua in October after a close relative sold his car in Miami and bought him a round-trip airline ticket for $3,600. 

After landing in Nicaragua, Mr. González received another $4,000 from his relative to pay for a smuggler who helped him and two dozen other Cubans make their way up through Central America and Mexico in a grueling, monthslong road journey to the U.S.

“It’s a mass escape,” says the 22-year-old Mr. González. “Every day I get news through Facebook or Instagram of another friend who is leaving Cuba.”

In the 12 months through October, around 244,000 Cubans were apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol after fleeing economic misery and political repression at home. Most of them came via this expensive airlift through Nicaragua, and were released into the U.S., according to U.S. officials.

It is the largest number of Cubans to arrive in the U.S. in a single wave since the late

Fidel Castro

came to power in 1959, twice the 125,000 who came in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 and almost six times as many as in the comparable 2021 period.

The number of Cubans being stopped at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard trying to reach Florida aboard makeshift boats has also soared. In the year through September, the Coast Guard interdicted more than 6,000 Cubans trying to reach the U.S., more than seven times as many as in the previous year. Since October, the Coast Guard has stopped nearly 3,500 more Cubans.

Cuban government officials attribute the exodus to the Covid pandemic, U.S. sanctions against Cuba and to the special treatment that the U.S. gives Cubans entering the country illegally. Due to a Cold War-era law, Cubans who are inspected and admitted or paroled into the U.S. can become residents a year after their arrival. 

“U.S. policies produce what is called the push effect, and also the pull effect,” said Cuban deputy foreign minister

Carlos Fernández de Cossío

in a response to written questions.

The expected lifting of Title 42, the pandemic-era policy that allows officials to quickly turn away migrants at the border, is unlikely to diminish the draw for Cubans to try to reach the U.S., although the Biden administration is expected to implement new, targeted policies to deter them. 

The rush to leave the island began after Nicaragua’s authoritarian government, led by close Cuban ally President

Daniel Ortega,

dropped its visa requirements for Cubans in November of 2021. 

Cubans who can raise the money have been quick to take advantage as their country struggles with its worst economic crisis since the early 1990s, following the breakup of the Soviet Union. At the same time, Cuba has increased political repression since widespread protests shook the government in July 2021. 

Basic foods are scarce, blackouts last for upward of 10 hours at a time, and few hold hopes things will improve soon. 

“When Nicaragua opened, I decided to go,” said a 22-year-old former physical education teacher. He said his brother, a Miami doctor, paid $9,000 to bring him to the U.S. He now cleans rooms in a Miami hotel while he studies to be a medical technician.

Cuban President

Miguel Díaz-Canel

last week lamented the island’s dire economic situation.

“It may sound like a joke, but it isn’t,” he told the Cuban congress. “We have a law on food sovereignty but there’s no food. We’re supposed to pass a law to foment cattle-raising and there’s no cattle, and we have a fisheries law…and no fish.”

The opening of the route via Nicaragua gives Cuba a release valve for its discontented population, and provides Mr. Ortega with cash, said

John Feeley,

a former U.S. ambassador to Panama who also held senior diplomatic posts in Mexico.

“And both get the desired result of making life more miserable for the U.S. government as it struggles to keep order along its border with Mexico,” he added.

Mr. Fernández de Cossío, the island’s deputy foreign minister, said Cuba didn’t ask Nicaragua to lift visa requirements. Nicaragua’s vice president,

Rosario Murillo,

who acts as the Ortega government’s spokeswoman, didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

“Obviously such high emigration flows aren’t desirable, for several reasons,” said Mr. Fernández de Cossío, noting that Cuba already has to contend with low fertility and lack of population growth. The island has the oldest population of any nation in the Western Hemisphere, according to Our World in Data. 

In most cases, Cubans already living in the U.S. finance their relatives’ trips to Nicaragua, migrants say. Others on the island sell their homes and possessions to raise the money, they add.

In January of this year, black-market demand for dollars to pay for the journey sent the Cuban peso into a tailspin, depreciating from around 70 pesos to the U.S. dollar to about 100, according to El Toque, an independent Cuban news site that tracks the currency market. In October, the rate reached 200 pesos per dollar.

Just the airfare to Nicaragua has cost would-be migrant Cubans and their family members about $800 million, according to what migrants and relatives say they pay for the flights. Payments to people smugglers shepherding them on the dangerous journey north to the U.S. would make an additional $800 million to $1 billion, based on the reported payments.

The flights are a deep concern for the U.S., which has been tracking routes, numbers and airline companies since mid-spring, said a senior U.S. official. The U.S. has held conversations with key countries in the region, with some success in closing and shifting some routes. 

But the flights are operating legally, making it difficult for the U.S. to take action. 

Mr. Fernández de Cossío said the U.S. and Cuba have discussed Cuban migration through Nicaragua, “a shared concern” for both countries. But such migration won’t cease until the favored treatment enjoyed by Cuban migrants and U.S. economic pressure on Cuba both end, he said.

Many of the airline tickets are sold in Hialeah, a migrant, working-class Florida city of strip malls crowded with small shops that cater to Cuban-Americans who buy everything from cellphone refills to electric generators for their relatives on the island. 

On a recent day, customers crowded Cubamax Travel, a large multipurpose business that sends remittances, food packages and electric bikes to Cuba. Seats were available on daily flights from Havana to Managua through Aruba Airlines priced at $3,999, an attendant said. Slightly cheaper flights, with brief stopovers at Kingston, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic, were available at $3,600 with Air Century, a Dominican airline.  

To purchase the ticket, the customer has to present a photo of the passport of the would-be Cuban traveler, as well as the passenger’s vaccination certificate, according to an attendant. After payment is made, the information is loaded into the computer and transmitted to Cuba where a ticket is readied for the flight, sometimes on the next day, the attendant added.    

Cuballama, another travel agency a few blocks away, offers direct flights from Camagüey in central Cuba to Managua twice a week for $3,899. It also had a few seats available from Santiago de Cuba, on the island’s eastern end, on Sky High Aviation Services Dominicana with a stop at the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, for $3,682, said an attendant. 

On Facebook there are offers, some from people based as far away as Dubai, who are selling tickets from different cities in Cuba to Nicaragua for as little as $2,200, a substantial saving from the average price of $3,500. Another post warns of possible fraud by people issuing counterfeit tickets for flights on which they have no reservations. 

The U.S. recently agreed to restart visa processing in Havana in January, a move analysts say could slow the flow of migrants coming illegally. And Cuba, which had ceased accepting most Cuban migrants deported from the U.S., has agreed to again accept deportees, according to U.S. and Cuban officials. 

“The administration is betting that it can get back the equilibrium that existed before when Cubans had a realistic chance of getting to the U.S. legally, but knew that they could be deported to Cuba if they came in irregularly,” said

Andrew Selee,

president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com