{"id":253875,"date":"2022-06-07T17:32:11","date_gmt":"2022-06-07T21:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=253875"},"modified":"2022-06-07T17:32:11","modified_gmt":"2022-06-07T21:32:11","slug":"his-name-is-manuel-and-he-is-in-the-pass-of-the-north","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba\/his-name-is-manuel-and-he-is-in-the-pass-of-the-north\/","title":{"rendered":"His name is Manuel and he is in the \u201cPass of the North\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019m going far away, father; that\u2019s why I\u2019m here to give you the notice.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd where are you going, if I may ask?\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m going to the North.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cAnd there for what? Don\u2019t you have your business here? Aren\u2019t you in the pig business?\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cI was. Now not anymore. It doesn\u2019t give. Last week we didn\u2019t manage to eat and before last week we ate only quelites. There is hunger, father; You don\u2019t even realize it because you live well.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you saying there?\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cBecause there is hunger. You don\u2019t feel it. You sell your cuetes and your saltapericos and the gunpowder and with that you get by. As long as there is work, the money will rain down; but not me, father. No one raises pigs at this time. And if he raises them, he eats them. And if he sells them, he sells them expensive. And there is no money to market them, other than this. The business is over, father.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd what the hell are you going to do in the North?\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cEarn money. Don\u2019t you see.\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Juan Rulfo, \u201cPass of the North\u201d (1953).<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Manuel P\u00e9rez Mendoza, a 32-year-old Cuban from Isla de la Juventud, has been in Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez since Monday, May 2. He was returned there by the Border Patrol after holding him for a week and a few days. Despite being told that he would be taken to a religious institution, supposedly in U.S. territory, he was transferred along with other migrants to the Mexican side of the border, where personnel from the National Migration Institute (INM) and the National Guard were waiting for him.<\/span><\/p>\n

There they informed him that the policies had changed for Cubans and, like the rest of the migrants who arrived illegally at the border, he was being returned to Mexico by virtue of the revitalization of \u201cTitle 42\u201d<\/span>1<\/b><\/sup> or the \u201cQu\u00e9date en M\u00e9xico\u201d Program,<\/span>2<\/b><\/sup> they did not specify more.<\/span><\/p>\n

The screams, tears and protests were useless. Manuel was abandoned on the bridge that joins and divides identical geographies and different worlds; a bridge ironically named \u201cPass of the North\u201d that rises, ignorant and alien, over the broken dreams left by migrants in their wake.<\/span><\/p>\n

Born in 1990, at the beginning of the deepest crisis that Cuba suffered after 1959, Manuel\u2019s childhood and youth were marked by better and worse experiences, with illusions that things could improve and sinkholes that made those around it plummet and have to start over.<\/span><\/p>\n

The son of some young people from the eastern provinces who went to study on the Isla de la Juventud and established themselves there, he has experienced decade after decade the accumulation of disappointments and dreams that hover on a small island within a larger archipelago, where the economic difficulties have increased, along with the reduction of its population through emigration to other areas of Cuba or abroad. In that continuous tide that snatches away dreams and people, some of his relatives, including a brother, arrived in the United States through Ecuador before Barack Obama repealed the \u201cwet foot, dry foot\u201d policy, while he started his self-employment (building and rehabilitating homes) with the socioeconomic transformations promoted in the \u201cRaulista era.\u201d<\/span>3<\/b><\/sup><\/p>\n

However, like so many other Cubans, he decided to take the road to \u201cthe North\u201d because he \u201ccouldn\u2019t take it anymore, couldn\u2019t take it anymore.\u201d With a young child, the <\/span>coronavirus<\/b><\/a> pandemic, lack of economic options, \u201cpower cuts\u201d and the ever-increasing difficulties of daily life, \u201cleaving\u201d has become the only possible option in his opinion: \u201cthe queues to get anything, especially when there are small children; begging people to buy for you with their cards, because you have to have cards in dollars, otherwise they won\u2019t sell you anything\u201d; and because \u201cyou know that things are not going to get better, everything is for the worse.\u2026 You thought that with the changes things were going to get better but nothing, everything is getting worse and worse.\u2026 My brother had to leave and now it\u2019s my turn.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

With the money that his relatives managed to borrow in Miami, Manuel was able to pay for the plane ticket to get to Havana and from there to Nicaragua, the country most used to start the journey to the United States because it does not currently request visas from Cubans. In Managua he paid the \u201ccoyotes\u201d to cross him through different nations and borders: El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala until they reached Mexico. In that last country they put him in contact with Mexicans in Tapachula who took him with other migrants to an isolated and deserted place between Chihuahua and Texas, a journey that was not easy at all, full of delays, dangers and difficulties that ended in a vehicle overcrowded with people near \u201cEl Paso,\u201d where a U.S. border patrol detained him and took him to a shelter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Already consigned, Manuel hoped that, as he had learned from the rumors that spread among his friends and the Cubans he met along the way, they would carry out the required interview, take his fingerprints and send him, sooner or later, to join his family in Florida to wait for the judge\u2019s decision on his case, or the usual year and a day to benefit from the Cuban Adjustment Act.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cuba, current migration crisis: characteristics and testimonies (I)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n