The USA Should Not Close the Legal Door to Cubans
HAVANA TIMES – Cuba has become a country of divided families. Children live an ocean away from parents. Brothers and sisters build separate lives in Havana and Miami, Madrid or Mexico City. Grandparents watch grandchildren grow through telephone screens. In almost every Cuban family, someone has left, someone is preparing to leave, or someone is trying to figure out how.
The scale of the exodus is extraordinary. As Havana Times recently reported in examining Cuba’s continuing population loss, the island is experiencing the largest migration in its history. The departure of so many people is reshaping families, communities, the labor force and Cuba’s demographic future.
The Cuban government bears enormous responsibility for this national unraveling. Economic collapse, political repression, shortages, blackouts, low wages and the loss of confidence in a better future have pushed Cubans toward the exits. United States immigration policy did not create those conditions.
But Washington still has to decide what kind of exit it wants Cubans to take.
For years, the United States has urged Cubans to use lawful, orderly migration channels rather than smugglers, dangerous sea crossings or irregular journeys through Latin America. That is sensible immigration policy. Legal migration can be screened. Families can plan around it. Governments can control it.
Yet during the past 19 months, Washington has been moving in the opposite direction, narrowing one lawful avenue after another.
The sequence matters.
On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump ordered a government-wide review of whether foreign governments were providing enough information for the United States to screen and vet their nationals. That order did not itself bar Cubans from traveling. It directed federal agencies to identify countries whose screening, information-sharing or other deficiencies might justify restrictions.
Cuba soon became one of them.
On June 4, 2025, Trump issued Proclamation 10949, imposing partial travel restrictions on Cuba effective June 9. For covered Cuban nationals, entry as immigrants and as B-1/B-2 visitors, F and M students, and J exchange visitors was generally suspended.
Washington gave several reasons, including Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, inadequate sharing of law-enforcement information, difficulties involving the return of removable nationals and visa-overstay rates.
Whatever one thinks of those justifications, the June proclamation contained an important recognition of the human reality between Cuba and the United States: immediate families were treated differently.
Spouses, minor children and parents of US citizens seeking immediate-relative immigrant visas received a categorical exception when they could establish their identity and family relationships. Adoption-related immigrant visas were protected as well.
Washington had restricted Cuban migration, but it still drew a line around the closest family relationships.
Six months later, that line moved.
In December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security terminated the Cuban Family Reunification Parole program, ending a mechanism that had allowed certain beneficiaries of approved family petitions to enter the United States on parole while waiting for immigrant visas to become available.
Then, on January 1, 2026, a new presidential proclamation took effect. It continued Cuba’s partial travel restrictions but eliminated the broad categorical exception for immediate-relative immigrant visas.
The rules did not revoke visas that were already valid when the new proclamation took effect, and exceptions and case-by-case national-interest determinations remain possible. But simply being the spouse, minor child or parent of a United States citizen no longer provides the categorical protection that existed under the June 2025 proclamation.
For Cuba, that is not an obscure change in immigration law. It reaches directly into one of the defining realities of Cuban life: families divided between the island and the United States.
The restrictions continued to accumulate.
Effective January 21, the State Department paused immigrant-visa issuance for Cuban nationals under a separate policy affecting dozens of countries while it reviews concerns about potential reliance on public benefits. Applicants may continue to apply and attend interviews, but issuance is generally paused while that policy remains in place, subject to stated exceptions.
That same day, Cuba became subject to the State Department’s visa-bond program.
On August 3, the Department made that program permanent, allowing covered B-1/B-2 applicants whose cases can otherwise proceed to be required to post US $10,000, US $15,000 or US $20,000 before receiving a visa.
The bond is refundable if the traveler complies with its conditions, including leaving the United States on time. It is not a US$15,000 visa fee.
But a Cuban family still has to find US $15,000.
And the State Department’s own experience shows what happens when applicants are confronted with bonds of this magnitude. During the pilot program, roughly 20,000 applications were determined to require bonds and nearly half of those applicants ultimately did not post one. B-1/B-2 visa issuance among participating countries fell 83 percent compared with the corresponding period a year earlier.
Washington emphasizes that overstays also fell dramatically. That matters. The United States is entitled to expect temporary visitors to obey the law and leave when their authorized stays expire. But there is another lesson in those numbers: one very effective way to reduce visa overstays is to reduce the number of people who travel.
For Cubans, the problem is cumulative.
The family-reunification parole program disappears. The travel restrictions remain. The categorical protection for immediate family members narrows. Immigrant-visa issuance is separately paused. And for some temporary visitors whose cases can proceed, a five-figure bond may stand between visa eligibility and actual travel.
Each measure has a different legal justification. But Cuban families do not experience US American immigration policy as a collection of proclamations, regulations and government notices.
They experience the result.
A wife waits for her husband. A mother waits for her child. A sister cannot easily visit a brother. A student sees another route become uncertain. A family that did exactly what Washington asked — filed the paperwork, waited its turn and tried to migrate legally — discovers that following the rules may still mean years of separation.
That matters because legal migration pathways are not merely favors to migrants. They are tools of migration control.
When people believe there is a credible process for eventually reuniting with family or traveling lawfully, they have a powerful reason to use it. When every legal route looks narrower, slower or less predictable, the desire to leave does not disappear. It finds another route.
For some Cubans, that may mean building a future in Spain, Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America. For others, desperation can mean trusting a smuggler, taking a dangerous journey or reaching the United States first and trying to solve the immigration problem afterward.
That is precisely what an orderly immigration system should be designed to discourage. This is not an argument for open borders. Every Cuban who wants to emigrate does not have a right to enter the United States. Washington has legitimate interests in national security, identity verification, preventing visa overstays and ensuring that people seeking admission comply with American law.
Nor should Cuba’s government escape responsibility by blaming Washington for every family that leaves.
Havana cannot suppress political dissent, preside over economic deterioration and a collapsing infrastructure, offer young people diminishing prospects and then pretend that the historic exodus is simply another consequence of United States policy. Cubans are making rational decisions about the lives available to them.
But acknowledging Havana’s responsibility does not answer the question Washington now faces.
Does closing a lawful migration channel actually reduce Cuban migration, or does it merely redirect it?
That distinction should be central to American policy.
If Washington has concrete security or vetting concerns about Cuban travelers, it should address them directly. If Cuba is failing to provide information the United States reasonably needs, Washington should make that clear. Legitimate temporary travelers should be evaluated individually wherever security permits. Extraordinary financial barriers such as visa bonds should be based on evidence and periodically reassessed.
And legal family migration should remain credible. That last point is especially important because family is not incidental to the US-Cuba migration story. It is the story.
Decades of migration have created a Cuban nation that extends far beyond the island. People in Havana depend emotionally and economically on relatives in Hialeah. A Cuban living in Miami may spend years trying to reunite with a parent. Children grow up belonging to families stretched across political systems that have spent generations fighting one another.
Those families cannot repair relations between Washington and Havana. But they should not unnecessarily become casualties of them either.
The Cuban government must answer for why so many of its people have concluded that their futures lie elsewhere.
The United States must answer a different question: whether the immigration system it is building gives those people a meaningful incentive to choose the lawful route.
Washington says it wants Cuban migration to be safe, orderly and legal. That strategy can work only if the legal part remains real.
Cuba is already losing its people. The United States should think carefully before making the lawful road between those people and their families even narrower.
*Richard T. Herman is a US immigration attorney and founder of Herman Legal Group.