Cuba and Venezuela are experiencing mass exoduses of their populations at an accelerated pace.
According to data from the National Assembly of People’s Power of Cuba, controlled by the Communist Party, The island’s population fell by 10% between the end of 2021 and the end of 2023.
The official figures, published in July of this year, show that Cubans in Cuba went from being 11.18 million to being 10.06 million in that period of two years.
A study published by the Cuban Research Institute of Florida International University (FIU) estimates an even more dramatic decline. He estimates that Cuba’s population has reached levels as low as 8.62 million of people.
Either figure shows that the last three years are the largest exodus in the history of Cuba, a country with a long history of emigration since the revolution triumphed in 1959.
At the same time, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, and IOM, the International Organization for Migration, estimate that Since 2014, 7.7 million people have left Venezuela, around 20% of the country’s population.
And they estimate that Venezuelans continue to flee at a rate of 2,000 people a day on average.
Silvia Pedraza, professor of sociology at the University of Michigan in Ann Harbor, and Carlos A. Romero, retired professor of political science at the Central University of Venezuela, took on the task of comparing the revolutions in Cuba and Venezuela.
The main contribution of his book Revolutions in Cuba and Venezuela: One Hope, Two Realitiespublished in 2023 by the University of Florida, is that it shows that, more than a mere effect, mass migrations of people are a factor that determines the success or failure of revolutions.
BBC Mundo spoke with Pedraza and Romero to investigate how diasporas have benefited and how they have harmed the revolutionary governments of Cuba and Venezuela. What follows is the conversation with the authors.
His book compares the revolutions of Cuba and Venezuela, which are two processes that are very present in the Latin American political imagination and whose similarities have been highly politicized. Broadly speaking, what similarities and what differences did you find?
Silvia Pedraza: The sociology of revolution is actually very developed, but studies have focused on the classic revolutions of the global north: the Russian, the French, the American, the Chinese.
What we add to the discussion is that, when one focuses on Cuba and Venezuela, one realizes the extremely important role that migratory processes have, which is something that had not been studied with respect to revolutions.
It had always been said that because of the French revolution so many went into exile, that in the Russian revolution so many left, etc.
What Carlos and I say is that the exodus is not only one of the consequences of the revolutionary processes, but it is truly one of the things that made the revolutions of Cuba and Venezuela triumph and consolidate, and then decline and end. on the edge of the precipice, as they are today.
As for the differences, well, the Cuban phenomenon is much longer. It has been there for 66 years, while the Venezuelan has been there for 25. So, the Cuban revolution took place in the historical mold of the Cold War, while the Venezuelan revolution not so much.
In the case of Cuba, I also emphasize the role of religion and race, which is much less important in the case of Venezuela.
Carlos Romero: They are revolutions that also occurred in a very different way.
The breakdown of the political status quo that happened in Cuba in 1959 is not the same as what happened in Venezuela in 1998, because in Venezuela the revolution came through elections.
You also emphasize that these are revolutions allied with each other…
CR: Yes, what allows us to compare these two cases is not only that there are certain similarities, but precisely that the Cuban and Venezuelan elites formed an alliance since 1998, which is what I call Fidel’s dream.
Since coming to power, Fidel Castro aimed to have good relations with Venezuela.
But no one thought that these good relations would reach such a point that Hugo Chávez said, as he did, that there was a need to think about Cuba and Venezuela being a single nation.
Let’s delve into this idea that these two revolutions cannot be understood without looking at the diasporas they unleashed. Do these diasporas benefit revolutionary governments or harm them?
SP: In Cuba, very deliberately, the revolutionary government—Fidel, Raúl, Che—pushed those who were in the opposition to leave. In fact, they couldn’t stay. With that, they externalized the dissent, the disagreement, the opposition.
That made them stronger at first. But, since this is a process that has lasted so many years and so many people have left, a couple of things have happened.
One is that some of those people who left joined politically, especially in the United States, as senators, as governors, as members of the House of Representatives, and through those positions, they have tried to influence the Cuban revolution. .
The best example that comes to mind is Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban origin.
As a senator, he has promoted very aggressive policies against Cuba and Venezuela, and now he is going to be Secretary of State (of the Trump administration). So surely everything that is going to come out of that Trump cabinet is going to be extremely harmful to both revolutions.
And the other way in which the exodus ends up harming the revolution, for me even more important, is the loss of resources, of good people, of capable people who loved their country.
All the people who have left took with them their resources, not only financial, but their capabilities, what is known in English as know how: what they knew how to do well.
So, a truly tragic situation of lack of these resources has arisen.
Fidel Castro spoke in his speeches that those who left Cuba were worms and that it was better for them to leave. What has been the speech of the Venezuelan government?
CR: The Venezuelan government has been a little more cautious. I believe that he does not want to add another problem, and there are also many Chavista leaders who have family members who have emigrated in these 25 years.
However, some government spokesmen have said that it is better for those who do not believe in the revolution to be outside.
There is an old thesis in Venezuela that says that the government is happy that almost eight million Venezuelans have left, because there are almost eight million Venezuelans who no longer have to care.
When people leave Cuba and Venezuela and build a life in another country, they are likely to end up sending remittances. How important are these in the equation?
SP: In the Cuban case, there is no doubt that they are very important.
Although the Cuban community in the US is very divided between those who agree with sending remittances and those who do not, the reality is that people in Cuba are currently living off remittances.
They depend totally on them, not to live in luxury, but to survive.
And of course, they are also a lifeline for the government.
CR: The Venezuelan case is different, because the country is not completely depending on remittances. They are of minor importance.
In Venezuela, there are still significant private resources, including informal ones, such as smuggling and corruption. There are still conditions to make money in Venezuela.
In what other factors do the Cuban and Venezuelan diasporas differ?
CR: In the Cuban case, the exodus occurred much more quickly. There was a fraction of Cubans who left since the beginning of the revolution.
In the Venezuelan case, there were a few who left at the end of the 90s for ideological reasons, but really in the first years of the Chávez government there was not so much emigration because there was a favorable economic situation.
When Venezuela began to show symptoms of economic regression, in the years 2012 and 2013, a different type of exodus began, which is the one we see until today, motivated by economic reasons.
Also, the Venezuelan diaspora is more varied in terms of class background and is more dispersed around the world. The Cuban one is basically concentrated in the US and Spain.
In both cases, however, the reasoning of the people who leave is the same: leaving the country because it is becoming something other than satisfactory political and economic development.
In other words, the fundamental similarity is not agreeing with the regime, in most cases for economic reasons.
SP: Yes, the diasporas of Cuba and Venezuela are similar in that they are people who are fleeing a situation that they, subjectively, understand as a situation from which they have to escape, because they live in fear, they live without hope that there will be a better future.
Would you describe the Cuban exodus as a more economic or political migration? Does its nature change over time?
SP: Cuba’s political and economic systems are one. They are inseparable because there is a single institution, which is the government, that makes all economic decisions.
Now, there are people for whom politics is the most important thing.
Some people who are part of the Cuban exile were dissidents in Cuba over the years, they were people who were able to take risks for their political, ideological, and religious beliefs, and be against the system. But there are few people with that courage.
Then, at the other extreme, there are people who try to live outside of politics. They did it in Cuba and they do it now in the US or wherever they are.
These are people who try to live thinking about the robe they are going to put on the girl, on someone’s birthday, and so on. There aren’t many either, because it’s not easy to live like that in a society where everything is so politicized.
So, most people are in the middle, where the political and the economic are joined by a weld, they cannot be separated.
You say, Silvia, that the Cuban diaspora has become a relevant political actor in the United States. Where does that diaspora point ideologically? The results of the recent elections show that Trump managed to grow a lot among Latinos, and won comfortably in Florida, which is where the Cuban community is concentrated.
SP: Within the Cuban community in exile there are two sides: those who call themselves intransigent and those who call themselves moderate.
The intransigents do everything against the government—including not traveling to the island and not sending remittances—and for many years they have identified with the Republican Party.
Moderates often think they can influence the island and the people on the island through behavior that He accepts them more, understands them more and does not blame them for everything that has happened. These, over the years, have become closer to the Democratic Party.
Not long ago, when Obama was running for president, the majority of Cubans voted for him.
We still don’t know how many Cubans voted for Trump, but we do know that Latinos in general voted for Trump much more than expected, and I’m sure Cubans in particular did too.
That is to say, there has been a very big change in a few years between a diaspora that was very happy with the reestablishment of relations between Cuba and the United States that occurred during the Obama presidency and one that now, on the contrary, once again opted for a very harsh policy of isolation.
You refer to the relationship between Cuba, the US and the Cuban community in exile as an “impossible triangle.” What is it referring to?
SP: Precisely because, when the US does something that favors the Cuban government—for example, reestablishing Obama’s relations—the Republican Cubans in exile feel betrayed.
Now Trump will do whatever he does to favor those intransigents, but that means it will be against the Cuban government and the moderates.
In the Venezuelan case, has the diaspora also become a relevant political actor?
CR: Cuban political activism in exile has been much more concentrated than that of Venezuela. It has been an organized movement, which manages to move opinion and lobby in Washington in favor of the anti-Fidelist Cuban cause.
The Venezuelan political opposition is much more dispersed and divided.
There have been very big failures such as the provisional presidency of Juan Guaidó. And there is no consensus on what the way out of the crisis will be.
There are some who say the time has come to seek US military intervention. There are others who are seeking political change through transition.
That, however, has been changing in recent years. In Spain, for example, the Venezuelan exile is increasingly better organized and there has been a massive reception for Edmundo González. There is also more and more attention from public opinion, especially in the US and Spain.
His book was published before we saw the great movement that was built for the July elections around Maria Corina Machado. Has that made you reevaluate some of your arguments?
CR: I think that at this moment the Venezuelan opposition has much greater caliber. It has more instruments and more resources of its own even than Cuba, which depends a lot on the US.
What can we expect from a second Trump term for Cuba and Venezuela?
SP: On the island, people are very worried. During Trump’s first administration, he did many things that hurt people in Cuba.
For example, due to its sanctions, the Western Union platform for sending remittances stopped working. So, people had to do some pirouettes across Canada.
It was a very complicated thing to send a little money to those poor people in Cuba who cannot live without it.
CR: Some Venezuelans have believed that Trump’s arrival means the definitive end of the Venezuelan crisis. They have a kind of illusion that he will help political change in Venezuela.
But well, already in 2020, Trump supported and received Juan Guaidó in the White House, and we all know that this story did not have a happy ending.
Of course, a self-proclaimed president is not the same as Edmundo González, who has the electoral records to prove his victory.
More than 60 years after the triumph of the revolution in Cuba, we are seeing the largest exodus ever recorded in history. According to government sources, more or less one million people left the island between 2022 and 2023. What is this new wave of emigrants like?
SP: We have already had five or six very different waves since 1959. The one we are experiencing now is of very young and very well educated people, unfortunately for the country, which is once again suffering an enormous loss of talent.
In Cuba, educational institutions until recently were very good. Now they are suffering from the same decline as everything else and are bankrupt. There are almost no intellectuals who want to risk continuing to live in Cuba.
One of the last things I managed to include in the book was the anti-government protests of July 11, 2021.
Protests like this have not been seen again, but they are one of the things that motivates this great exodus in recent years. People know that when they try to protest, things get worse, because the repression is very high.
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