FLORIDA: The United States Coast Guard is increasing patrols between Florida and Cuba in response to a surge in migration attempts over the last three weeks, since President Obama announced a historic change in US Cuba relations in mid-December.
The Coast Guard said it stopped 481 Cuban migrants during 37 total events in the month of December a 117% increase this past month over December 2013.
The USGC repatriated a total of 121 Cuban migrants who had attempted the journey between Cuba and Florida on “unseaworthy, homemade vessels that posed significant risk to the migrants.”
A total of 1,357 Cuban nationals were stopped while attempting to cross the Straits of Florida in 2013, according to the CIA’s World Factbook. Oftentimes they set sail on homemade rafts and boats.
Cuban migrants have made such dangerous runs to the U.S. for decades, with some hoping to take advantage of the country’s “wet foot, dry foot policy” that lets migrants who make it to land stay in the U.S. Those who are stopped at sea, however, are sent home.
In October, Reuters detailed a perilous journey in which a group of migrants were left stranded when their boat’s Hyundai diesel car engine broke 40 miles off the coast of the Cayman Islands. Less than half of the group survived after they were rescued by a Mexican fishing boat. The others died of dehydration or were lost at sea when they attempted to swim for land.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said he welcomed Obama’s move to create a “modern relationship” with Cuba, but Congress is not likely to alter the Cuban Adjustment Act or the U.S. trade embargo, until there have been significant steps by the Castro government.
“Major changes to a law like that or to the embargo are not going to happen unless people like me support those changes, and I’m not going to support them unless I see some movement toward freedom” Nelson told The Associated Press in December.
“The Coast Guard strongly discourages attempts to illegally enter the country by taking to the sea,” said Capt. Mark Fedor, Coast Guard 7th District chief on Monday. “These trips are extremely dangerous. Our main goal is to support national policy of orderly, safe and legal migration through deterrence of unlawful maritime migration, including migrant smuggling.”
