Like many Cubans earlier than him, Roberto De la Yglesia left most of his household behind when he made his approach to the United States with solely his son in 2015, hoping that he may quickly deliver his spouse and daughters to hitch him.
Years later, the mechanical engineer in New Jersey and his household again in Cienfuegos, Cuba, are nonetheless ready — with a combination of renewed hope and skepticism — now that the Biden administration has mentioned it might reactivate the long-stalled Family Reunification Program, which permits Cubans legally within the U.S. to herald shut kin.
“My life is on pause,” mentioned De la Yglesia’s spouse, Danmara Triana, sitting on the couch of her home in Cienfuegos whereas surrounded by ageing images of the couple’s life collectively. A number of ft away, her 21-year-old daughter Claudia was awaiting the return from college of 7-year-old Alice.
“My day-to-day life hangs on this — to see my son, to see my husband,” Triana mentioned.
The 48-year-old accountant mentioned she repeatedly checks the web site of the U.S. Embassy in Havana for information.
“I get up in the morning and look at the telephone,” she mentioned. “Will I have an interview [for a visa] or won’t I have an interview?”
The Biden administration says that roughly 20,000 functions for family-reunification visas have constructed up since 2017. That’s when then-President Trump successfully shut down this system by withdrawing diplomatic personnel from Cuba in response to a spate of mysterious diseases amongst diplomats that many suspected have been the results of some type of directed wave assault.
But many comparable incidents occurred elsewhere — even in Washington — and the CIA has now decided that they have been unlikely to be the results of assaults by Russia or different international adversaries.
While the administration mentioned in April it might start resuming the visa program, it has not but provided a timeline for ramping up the U.S. diplomatic presence in Cuba.
So Triana and De la Yglesia wait.
U.S. officers advised the couple in 2017, shortly earlier than diplomats have been withdrawn, that they certified for this system, and in 2020 they believed that they had completed all of the paperwork and paid all of the charges.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, including to issues.
“I feel stranded. I’m not based anywhere,” mentioned Claudia, who mentioned she had dropped out of medical college, feeling “horribly unmotivated.”
The withdrawal of diplomats was solely considered one of many steps by the Trump administration to isolate Cuba and backtrack from a dramatic opening to the island beneath President Obama.
Get breaking information, investigations, evaluation and more signature journalism from the Los Angeles Times in your inbox.
You could often obtain promotional content material from the Los Angeles Times.
Trump enacted more than 200 measures, together with a ban on cruise ships, limits on cash despatched from the U.S. to Cuba and restrictions on U.S. guests to the island.
Biden introduced that he would undo some — but removed from all — of the Trump-era restrictions.
With consular operations idled in Havana, U.S. officers advised Cubans to hunt visas on the operations in Guyana, throughout the Caribbean on the South American mainland — a pricey and impractical possibility for most.
So with Cuba’s economic system in dire form, growing numbers have tried to achieve the U.S. illegally, attending to South America or Mexico and making their perilous approach to the U.S. border, including to a report wave of immigrants seeking entry.
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol says it detained Cubans 79,800 occasions on the U.S. border within the six months from October 2021 via March 2022 — more than double the determine for the complete 12 months ending in September 2021 and 5 occasions the determine for the 12 months earlier than that.
Next door to Triana’s home, 61-year-old Natacha González lives together with her two grandchildren. Her daughter, like De la Yglesia, now lives within the U.S. and commenced the reunification course of in 2017.
“I feel like I have no oxygen. … I’ve spent years at this, and it’s not right that we are still waiting,” González’s daughter, Yanelis León, mentioned in a video name from Florida. “I am not going to involve my children in a migration across borders where I am going to lose them. I want to do things right.”