So I’ll be curious to hear about this immigration crisis. This is a long story from Spain’s El Pais, in Spanish, but this is the gist of it.

People are waiting outside consulates in Havana to try and get visas to Mexico or Panama. It used to be (at least for Mexico) that Cubans didn’t need visas, but now they do. Why? Because there is a serious migration of Cubans to the USA. Nicaragua doesn’t require visas, but to get further north, Cubans pretty much have to expect to spend thousands of dollars and put themselves into the hands of coyotes and pay bribes to local officials to look the other way.

The numbers from the US side tell it all. In the last six months, the number of Cubans crossing the border has gone from 8,000 in December, to 9,700 in January, to nearly 18,000 in February, 32,000 in March and 35,000 in April. It’s called a silent Mariel boatlift. And why is this happening? Deteriorating economic conditions in Cuba, basically. The causes of the exodus are very elegantly described in this one sentence:

Las causas del actual éxodo son diversas, aunque quizás la principal sea el deterioro galopante de las condiciones de vida y el calvario en que se ha convertido la sobrevivencia en Cuba debido a la agudísima crisis que el país atraviesa, agravada por la pandemia, la inflación derivada del llamado “ordenamiento monetario”, la ineficiencia del sistema productivo estatal y la lentitud de las reformas económicas.

There’s no good solution, either

There’s more in the article, if your Spanish is up to it, it’s worth a read. elpais.com

Also, Venezuela is desperate for money, so it is planning stock sales in publicly owned businesses (most of which were expropriated by the government under the Chavista and Maduro regimes). More in English here:

abcnews.go.com