The Cubans
I sat in a fluorescently lit makeshift office of an albergue with a woman in a cheetah-print dress, Gucci belt wrapped around her waist, and high heels that kept tap-tapping at the linoleum floor. Her face was steeled before me. I was yet another person asking for her documents and date of birth, where she had been and where she was going. Although she didn’t say much, by the click of her heels against the floor, I knew she was nervous. Her husband stood in the corner with their belongings, gripping the handle of their elephantine suitcase, looking over at her more in the spirit of child to mother than husband to wife. His belt was Gucci too, along with his loafers, but on him I doubted their authenticity.
I took no pleasure in whatever official guise I might have possessed. Behind my desk with my little stack of papers and list of instructions, I was another bureaucrat in the way of this woman’s goal: the United States. Over the past four years, how many real officials had she met, with clipboards and badges and batons and accents strange to her ears? What games had they made her play? Just to get here, to answer to me. Certainly with more self-possession and grace than I could muster in a similar situation. I was fascinated by them, these improbable people. I seemed to be the only one, however, because none of the other volunteers wanted to work with the Cubans.
In March of 2021, I was volunteering at an organization in El Paso, Texas—let’s call them La Casa—that helped migrants, or “guests,” as we were encouraged to call them, find their way to their sponsors living in the United States. For many, we were the first Americans they met who weren’t Border Patrol agents barking orders at them to keep their masks on and take their shoes off. Two months into the Biden administration, the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing. A wave of migrants came in on the wings of Biden’s promise to fix problems at the border. The real backlog, as the volunteers labelled it, were the migrants subject either to Title 42 or to what was dubbed the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Migrants who had travelled from every corner of the world to cross the border through a designated port of entry, as they were told to do if they wanted to be considered asylum seekers, were forced to stay in Mexico indefinitely until notified by the Department of Homeland Security. Once they received their court date and an I-94, a document that proves legal entry and is necessary for finding work in the country, they were allowed to cross. La Casa made sure the guests received medical care and food after their arduous journeys. All of this was handled in what the volunteers called the albergue, a Coca-Cola factory stripped of machinery and converted into a sprawling floor filled with three to five hundred cots, depending on the number of people that had come in. Volunteers greeted guests at white, fold-out tables, backdropped by floral murals with saints and quotes by Gloria Anzaldúa. The organization took care of logistics pertaining to the guests’ final destinations, making arrangements for bus or plane travel in English, but it did not pay the fare.
I began volunteering with La Casa for a few reasons. Due to the pandemic, I’d ended up back where I’m from, in El Paso. I consider myself a “border boy,” someone who was raised going back and forth between Ciudad Juárez and Texas, crossing the bridge over the Rio Grande as many as three times in a day. So many of us were used to playing jump rope with the river, before it became so tedious. Two decades ago, all one had to do on their way back to the United States after shopping for wares or eating barbacoa in el centro was mutter the word American to an indifferent immigration official. This may sound baffling to consider after the September II terrorist attacks, a cartel war that engulfed Juárez in scarring violence, multiple presidents who bungled policy about a place they hardly understood, and Trump, who stands apart for his particularly disastrous influence on perceptions of the border. Our history is so often reduced to commodifiable nuggets—headlines, bullet points or talking points, sensationalized images—that its living and breathing substance is rarely understood.
Another reason I volunteered at this albergue is embarrassing. Let’s just say it was an easy way for me to flirt with someone I had met and to waste no time after our shifts to take her dancing. Admittedly, I spent my first week there trying to impress her. I’d haul as many heavy cases of water to the intake station as I could or organize donations to a meticulous degree. The likes. I discovered I was more useful than anticipated because of a hidden talent specific to this context. My grandmother, godmother, and other family members who’d raised me were Cuban. The accent, como se come las palabras, of eaten r’s and half-pronounced words was natural to me. When I was six years old, my tío Alberto warned me not to become a doctor by lifting up his shirt and gesticulating at the scars on his stomach, showing me where he’d been stabbed during a riot in Havana. Niño, no quiere’ ve’ la violencia de la vida cada día, he yelled. He didn’t want me exposed to daily violence, but I was more afraid of test taking.
One day, the person I was interested in, let’s call her the Dancer, was put in charge of caring for eight hundred new entrants in the span of a few hours. No small task, even with a platoon of other dedicated volunteers at her disposal. Many of them lived on site and spent months at a time tending to the needs of the guests. The depths of their empathy and patience, the lengths they’d go to for just one person, defies explanation.
There was love in their hearts for all, except for the Cubans.
I would hear the volunteers curse them under their breath. The fucking Cubans. They’re hawking cigarettes again. They’re using the phones to call their girlfriends. They won’t shut up. I observed the constant frustration from a distance. The volunteers’ Spanish ranged from that of a middle schooler to perfectly fluent, but even for the latter, the Cuban accent could be indecipherable. Those with a loose grasp of the language never stood a chance, bless them.
To impress the Dancer, I offered to help the overworked volunteers. I could talk to the Cubans, help with intake. She looked apprehensive. Are you sure you want to do this? she asked. Sure, I said, they can’t be that bad. No, really, you don’t have to do this, she told me, but I insisted. She was simultaneously relieved and worried for me. With so many guests arriving at the same time, she had little choice but to accept.
Go with God, she said, sincerely. I laughed it off, not particularly concerned.
How could Cubans legally enter the United States? If you spun a wheel to land on any given year between 1959 and 2025, you might get a different answer to the question.
On the record, a 1994–1998 bilateral agreement between the United States and Cuba granted exactly twenty thousand citizens of the island nation permission to emigrate, if they applied for and won the visa lottery. Outside of this, Operation Pedro Pan (1960–1962), the Freedom Flights (1965–1973), the Mariel boatlift (1980), the Balsero crisis (1994), and the infamous “wet foot, dry foot” policy (1994–2017) were ad hoc unilateral policy exceptions. Once olive-coloured fatigues descended on Havana, an open-door policy welcomed a mostly privileged upper class who brought with them their bank accounts and Bautista-era prestige. The U.S. government even chartered planes during the Freedom Flights to shuttle migrants off the island. Cubans were the “exception” among Latin American immigrants because of their status as refugees of communism.
In 1980, Fidel Castro allowed thousands of Cubans to emigrate all at once, despite years of corralling his people on the island to prevent dissidence. The United States echoed the same policy it had maintained for twenty years, welcoming refugees who sought to escape the woes of an anti-capitalist nation. But as more Cubans came into the country, a shift occurred in media coverage within the span of a few months. Goodwill toward intrepid ex-communists turned into a fear of criminals trying to take advantage of the American dream. Wages were down, inflation was up, and rising crime rates peppered the columns of newspapers across the country. When a recession hits, as it did in 1979, immigrants are often the easiest to blame. The narrative had changed.
Rumours circulated that Castro was emptying Cuban jails and prisons for his benefit, simultaneously ridding the island of social pariahs and burdening the United States to ensure they’d never entice defectors again. This became the widely accepted storyline, despite the impossibility of verifying any information with the Cuban government. Castro is sending their worst, their criminals, their murderers: That was the common appraisal in articles across the Miami Herald and Sun Sentinel. Familiar rhetoric of the current administration.
In fact, only 1.4 percent of those taken in during the Mariel boatlift were classified as felonious criminals. Of those considered non-felonious criminals or political prisoners, most of their offences would not have been punishable crimes in the United States. In The 1980 Cuban Boatlift, Alex Larzelere writes,
The overwhelming majority had been in jail for crimes which would not have resulted in prison sentences in the United States, could have resulted in prison terms but not necessarily, or crimes which occurred many years ago. Examples of these convictions include counterrevolutionary activity, refusal to work, refusal to join the communist party, refusal to join the army, traffic violations, loitering, gambling, drinking, fighting, and petty theft.
Exclusion hearings were assembled to put migrants on trial. Cubans with vulnerable circumstances, like those accused of anti-social behaviour (a coded term for homosexuality) or counter-revolutionary activities, were coerced into confessing to misrepresented criminal records in the belief it would help their chances of staying in the country. Instead, they were sent to prisons in places like Talladega, Alabama, or Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Their precarious circumstances left them at the whim of whatever the system decided for them, imprisoned indefinitely, despite several class-action lawsuits and organizations advocating on their behalf. In Talladega, 119 men were imprisoned eleven years without due process or a trial. Eventually, an uprising by interned Cubans forced a decision by the government, which resulted in the release of some. Others were deported or kept in federal custody. As hysteria increased around the influx of migrants, these hearings found myriad legal means to parole, imprison, or deport people. Those who boarded the Mariel boats didn’t understand these tremendous risks. Their decision to ride across the Gulf was based on a precedent of good faith the U.S. had set with previous generations of Cubans. When sentiments changed, the migrants’ legality was hastily cobbled together by arbitrators of narrative.
This is how immigration law operates. Legality becomes a function of perception. American values are not consistent or unassailable but clay shaped to suit the country’s present predicament. Two consistencies are political gaming and fear mongering. Another, I have found, is that, despite the risks and red tape and the inscrutable nature of “naturalization,” immigrants continue to put their faith and sheer will into finding better opportunities. Economist David Card has researched the impact of the Marielitos, as migrants from the lifts are known, on the places they eventually settled. Card found they improved the local economy and did not raise crime or reduce wages. This is in keeping with the immigrant legacy in Miami, a city elevated from a mid-sized port to a metropolis by Cubans previously deemed to have entered the country “the right way.”
It became a part of my job to make sure all the guests had arrived “the right way.” We were tasked with documenting each person who came in, which meant collecting information from their passports and crossing papers in case Border Patrol popped in to ask questions. To be there in the first place, guests had to have been processed by Border Patrol at a designated port of entry and granted an I-94, their de facto identification and visa. Everything had to follow the letter of the law, unreliable as it had been.
I’d sift through the disorganized clutter of paperwork in plastic or manila envelopes, shocked these strangers had willingly handed over their lives to me. At the time, I thought I was supposed to represent some sense of decorum. Many of the guests were quiet while I diligently asked for this or that form. They were understandably nervous in front of yet another “official,” especially one on this side of the border. This was not the case with the Cubans.
Many of the Cubans I met asserted they had come here “the right way.” Lo hicimos bien.
They were demanding. They wanted to know precisely what the hell they were doing at La Casa. When would they eat, where would they sleep, what time could they go? A flurry of questions I was unprepared to answer, and if I went in search of the answers they so desired, they’d trail behind me like kites. Hermano, hermano, was the constant word on my shoulder. Had their sponsor gotten back to us? Was there anything else they could do to move on? Did I have a spare cigarette? Their anxiety about the next steps was omnipresent. Because they spoke to me first, they generally disregarded the other volunteers. If another volunteer told the Cubans to stop yelling into their phones or using so many blankets or disturbing other guests in the middle of the night, such directives were roundly ignored until I spoke to them. Tranquilo, hermano, ya. Basta. Men twice my age reluctantly accepted my authority and became exceptionally warm.
I caught a man trying to sneak off and buy a SIM card to call his people in Yacksove, or Jacksonville. He cursed until I gave him two of my cigarettes. Then he filled my afternoon with jokes. For hours, one of the younger guys tried to persuade me to buy him a beer, and when I called him out, he said it was just to celebrate his first day on this side and offered to buy me one. I met a baseball player who wanted to organize a game with all the guests, which the volunteers reluctantly let play out. The players’ cheers engulfed the courtyard and annoyed everyone who wasn’t in the game, but I saw the joy in their freedom. Their journeys were nearing an end. They had come from opaque horrors and triumphed. Yet I’d painted a narrative for them that was simple and uninvolved. More guests, in and out. Until I met Yvette.
Yvette, as we’ll call her, never had to convince me she’d done everything “the right way.” When she clickety-clacked her heels into my office, she immediately commanded the room in her cheetah-print dress, doting husband in tow, but she reluctantly ceded her documents to me. All her paperwork came neatly organized in plastic folders and labelled with sticky notes. A blue folder for her, grey for her husband. Any time I struggled to find a document, she stoically pointed to it.
As I got more comfortable with the intake process, I’d started using a routine to break the ice. It was corny, sure, but most guests had come directly from their inspection with Border Patrol. I wanted them to feel comfortable, even if it was at my expense.
A gentleman is never supposed to ask a lady her age, I said, but can I please have your date of birth?
She stated the fact.
I asked for her passport and made a comment about Cuba. Muy lejos de casa. Igual de bonito aquí verdad? Igual que las selvas y la playa, no?
The joke was meant to be self-aware. To many migrants, El Paso was a terrible first impression of the country they’d fought so hard to enter. I love my hometown, but its harsh desert and overwhelming beigeness had an unsettling effect on anyone arriving from the technicolor Caribbean. No, this isn’t what you expected. Where you are from is probably very beautiful. But here we are.
She laughed a little.
No. Que tú cree. It’s not pretty, she said, but the food had grown on her.
I told her my grandmother had the same problem when she first came here from Cuba. Her face lit up.
Y de donde es ella?
Era de la Habana, I answered.
Ah la capital, she said with a passing judgment.
I told her I had never met my grandmother, but all my tías and tíos had told me stories about her over plates of congrí and pollo fricassee. Era muy bonita. Como usted. Yvette giggled. Do you know where you’re going? I’m sure it’ll be more beautiful than here.
Yes, she said. Columbus, Ohio.
I was always astounded by the cities the guests named. After all that work, after all the places she’d passed through, Columbus would be her final destination. Ohio. She said her father-in-law lived there and nodded her head toward her husband. I’d almost forgotten he was there.
Do you guys get along? I asked.
Her husband gave me an awkward smile. She laughed a little and tilted her hand back and forth. No tanto.
Her husband rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. I joked that even if you thank them a thousand times, it’ll never be enough with some family.
She actually laughed, but said, No, no, ellos me quieren mucho.
I asked her if she’d planned transportation to Ohio and how we could help. She told me her father-in-law would be paying for their bus tickets and gave me his phone number to coordinate with him. As I jotted down the digits, I said that hopefully this would be the last bus she’d be on for a while. God knows you’ve been on trains, planes, and buses to get here.
Y caballo.
Y caballo?
Yes, she told me. Over the border between Costa
Rica and Nicaragua the two of them rode horses through the jungle at dawn. It had to be dark enough to avoid the border guards, who had carte blanche to shoot trespassers, but light enough for the horses to see where they were stepping on the brambly forest floor. They rode along the coast with the help of a guide, hugging the ocean to keep their heading. She’d held her breath until the guide told them they had crossed and they were safely obscured by green canopies again.
She sat back in her seat, proud. She should’ve been. I asked her how many borders she had crossed, and after a moment’s calculation she said, Eleven. They had started their journey in Chile, taken more than a dozen buses through Bolivia and Peru, and then a plane to Colombia. From there, they went into Panama, crossing the perilous Darién Gap, and into Costa Rica where they stayed for a little while because it was a safe place to recover. Back on the road, they worked their way, on horseback or otherwise, through Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize. Their trip from that southern Mexico border to the other end of the country, Juárez, was seven hundred miles longer than their leg of travel starting in Colombia and ending in Guatemala. After months of travel, they were stalled and had been living in the state of Chihuahua.
The Remain in Mexico policy had been implemented in January 2019, a few months before Yvette and her husband arrived at the border. It was another Byzantine policy no one fully understood, enforced by an administration that understood its consequences even less. Before the policy, migrants seeking asylum would be allowed entry if they turned themselves over to Border Patrol at designated ports. Once in the United States, they could make their way to their sponsor to await a court date. But after the policy was enacted, migrants who had come under the presumption of asylum protocols were forced to stay in Mexico until their court date was issued. I met Yvette and her husband in June of 2021, a full two years after they had come to the border.
They had no idea about the policy’s implications until they arrived in Ciudad Juárez. People who months before would have been taken in on their status as asylum seekers were being turned away in droves. More rules, more changes, more inconsistencies.
When I asked Yvette if she liked Mexico, she quickly answered, No. But she had made the most out of it. They’d made a little life in Ojinaga, a smaller town about four hours’ drive downriver. I was shocked. That was quite a ways away. More shocking was that they had rented a house with a jardincito and operated a small business that they now left behind. They’d built so much, evidenced by the clothes they wore, the car they bought and sold, and the money they saved, never knowing when their real life would begin.
Was it hard to wait around like that? I asked.
Impossible, she affirmed. But it prepared her for anything.
And here they were. Their authority came from somewhere I could never understand. Empathy is not a preplanned destination; I was in awe of the improbable odds of making it here, of these improbable people. These two helped me recognize what official decrees or courts fail to express, and what I would impart en masse if it were in my power. They embodied what words could not capture. They were a testament to the dignity of survival and the perseverance of the human spirit.
Immigration has stripped its subjects down to bare parts: records, headlines, and statistics processed into a skimmable narrative for the overstimulated consumer. I had read few stories about the lives it affects: The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea and Crux by Jean Guerrero came to mind. This was different. Speaking with Yvette, I realized how much I’d missed with every person I’d met after their crossing. I was at a remove because of the distance I felt between their world and mine.
After Yvette, I grew bolder and asked more guests about their stories. Many told me about their days of waiting. They’d found inventive ways to keep their phones charged to refresh the Border Patrol app, CBP One, the platform migrants had to use to schedule their appointments at ports of entry. At ten in the morning, the app would release its first wave of appointments, and from there, the waiting game dragged on. Some slept in tents as close to the border as possible and in large groups to protect themselves. Men beat, robbed, or maimed them in the middle of the night. If the migrants complained, the authorities did nothing to protect them. The migrants learned to sleep during the day and keep guard at night. During the summers, the days were a hundred-plus degrees; during the winter, the desert nights plunged below freezing—an unforgiving place of paradoxes. Whether Yvette and her husband suffered similar circumstances when they first arrived, I didn’t know.
One young man told me he’d been kidnapped. He was short and stocky like a boxer and spoke with the typical lilt of a Guatemalan accent. It’s common practice in Juárez for migrants to be tossed into cars in the middle of the night, their phones taken from them, and their loved ones contacted through WhatsApp with a demand for payment. The ransoms are small enough to be within means, depending on an eyeball estimate of the victim. The young man I met was lucky because his abductors didn’t think he’d have much money to fork over. Nonetheless, they broke his nose and put a gun to his head while they made laps around the city. I couldn’t imagine receiving a call from someone I love in those circumstances. And if his family hadn’t picked up the phone? He might have been killed for ten thousand pesos, around five hundred dollars. Luckily, his sister answered. The kidnappers received payment and dropped him back off at the border, where he’d been sleeping under a car. He was so broad chested I didn’t know how he fit under the chassis.
Of course, the journey was worse for women. I met a Peruvian woman who was raped in a jail cell in Panama. She’d been on her way to meet her sister living in the United States and gave birth on the Mexican side of the border, three days before border officials let her cross. I couldn’t be certain if the timing was strategic, but I know she was processed with her baby. When I met them, the infant still had a piece of umbilical cord stuck to her belly button. I saw the dark nub extending from her stomach as the child sipped formula under a flashlight. The woman was confused about the pronunciation of her sister’s town. Looking over her paperwork, I was surprised to see she was going to East Hampton, New York, where her sister worked at a hotel. When I tried to explain what would be on the other side of her bus ride, maybe I hoped to see relief or excitement. Beautiful beaches, wealth beyond imagination—I assured her she’d do well there. But she just looked at her child. I don’t know what I expected.
When the Dancer and I talked about memorable guests, she mentioned she was partial to the children. The albergue received donated Christmas toys that lasted through the better part of the summer, so it was common to see kids running between rows of cots with bubble wands, toy soldiers, and strangely, glow sticks. They loved glow sticks. Many of the children met each other that first day and became fast friends, their laughter echoing through the metal rafters. It didn’t matter where they came from or where they were going. They took joy in their makeshift playground with new friends they would almost certainly never see again.
At some point, I decided it was time to move on as well. I’ve lived in New York for a few years now, following the path of some guests I’d met. I like to think we might brush shoulders on the train. More often, I consider the gaps they live in, between headlines about the Roosevelt Hotel and their detainment by agents wearing balaclavas under Yankees hats, surreal as their black-and-white portraits against a backdrop of the humpbacked dunes I grew up with, rosaries lost in the desert to unnamed owners, and the long, long fence. Often, I consider that space between the miraculous and the precarious.
I visit my family on the border as much as I can. Sometimes I volunteer for a string of days in a row, but that has proven more difficult recently. On my last trip, I raised donations to buy three Hefty bags of shoes and coats for an albergue I’d never visited. I also brought a friend with me. When we arrived at this new location, I tried to explain to him the magnitude of La Casa, the Coca-Cola factory that had been converted into a large centre for guests. It had been shut, stripped down, and left vacant. Not even the murals of the Virgin de Guadalupe or the Gloria Anzaldúa quotes survived. The Remain in Mexico policy was lifted by the Biden administration, but the Texas Legislature continued to curtail any efforts to help migrants. Governor Abbott’s rhetoric since the launch of Operation Lone Star, a joint mission between various arms of state government to “detect and repel” illegal immigration, has sparked several attempts to shut down shelters that provide help to asylum seekers who are legally in the country. Dozens of shelters, institutions that had existed for decades, have been shuttered in the last four years. The albergues that survive face a daunting legal battle to continue operating. Naturally, the current administration’s goal is to shut them all down.
The person in charge of this new albergue was someone I had worked with before, a woman from New York State who volunteered for months at time.
Oh, it’s you! she exclaimed. She was grateful for the donations and said they would last her a while.
A while? I asked. I explained to my friend that, usually, a bag of coats was an immediate necessity, especially for those travelling to colder parts of the country. Many guests had never experienced proper cold weather in their lives.
As for footwear, it wasn’t uncommon for children under the age of five to arrive shoeless. Their parents would have worn holes through their own sneakers by the time the albergue could give them the Goodwill special. In the first days of the Remain in Mexico policy, Border Patrol would take migrants’ shoes and replace them with orange plastic slippers. Those slippers were meant to attract attention and called to mind the Department of Homeland Security’s admonition, “If You See Something, Say Something.” I remembered hundreds of those neon abominations lined up in the donation office.
When I asked how many people were staying that night, she took a second to calculate. A total of thirteen. A far cry from the days of eight hundred guests. I asked what the capacity of the albergue was.
C’mon, she said, let’s take a look around! Me dio mucho cariño.
Her grey bob swayed back and forth as she walked us from room to room. Despite being in her seventies, she had a spritely attitude I envied. I had hoped she’d show us around, so my friend could glimpse how these places work and because I wanted to understand what was happening in a world that had become distant, again, from mine.
This albergue was a converted convent. There was a communal area where I imagined the nuns once gathered. Each room had several bunks and a nightstand in between them. A lamp with a naked bulb lit the empty bedroom we stood in. The volunteer flicked it off then said, And can you believe they complain? This place is a luxury hotel in comparison to the others. I laughed with her, remembering the converted factory. We passed rows and rows of empty rooms.
In the courtyard, there was a marked gravesite. It was a square of inlaid limestone with a Bible verse about God’s forgiveness, flanked by pinwheels and plastic roses. A woman who’d been raped on her journey had a miscarriage while staying at the albergue. Even though the volunteers offered to cremate the remains so she could take them with her, she’d declined. There, before a humble stone with brightly coloured adornments, volunteers and guests sometimes took time to reflect and pray.
We met a family who had recently arrived. They were busy cleaning up after dinner. While we snooped around the industrial-sized kitchen, they mopped the floors and washed the dishes with toothy smiles they couldn’t put away. A little girl in a pink long-sleeved shirt followed us around. It struck me that she was the only child there; she had no one else to play with.
The volunteer told us they were a family from Guatemala. Like many other families who had found their way to the border during the last gasps of Biden’s presidency, they hoped to receive an H-2A visa, which allows agricultural workers to come into the United States for up to ten months. After that, they can apply to stay longer or with another type of visa. The need for cheap labour has been a constant throughout the country’s history. How workers are procured and under what circumstances they can stay is another variable entirely.
During Reagan’s presidency, millions of Mexican migrants were allowed to cross the border under the Bracero Program. They were granted visas similar to the H-2A. Under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, workers received green cards if they had been in the country prior to 1982. Between 1987 and 1988, lawful permanent residents and undocumented immigrants could even pay a one-time fee to become citizens. In hindsight, many consider Reagan one of the most progressive presidents in terms of immigration policy. Despite the questionable viability of his overall economic agenda, Reagan was perhaps practical enough to acknowledge the demand for underpaid labour. I doubt he understood that small businesses are statistically most likely to be opened by first generation immigrants or foresaw the ninety-eight billion dollars’ worth of taxes undocumented workers pay in a given year. When I hear complaints about the costs of immigration to the U.S. economy, I think of such figures. I consider, too, the abundance of wealth stolen from Latin American countries and the trade imbalance that led to cheaper consumer prices in the United States. A system built for political reversals, beholden to economic turns, conveniently revises historical narratives.
The guard changes, and with it, definitions of who is illegal and who is not. Cubans of my generation are most familiar with “wet foot, dry foot,” the Clinton administration’s interpretation of previous policy that permitted entry to Cuban migrants who crossed into U.S. territorial waters. With wet foot, dry foot, if migrants made it to land, they could stay in the country. If intercepted before touching ground, they were sent back. Obama attempted to normalize relations between the two countries with talks of ending the embargo. In his last year as president, he halted the dry foot proviso and reopened the U.S. embassy in Havana. Those doors remain open, but Trump shut many other doors to Latin Americans. According to incessant media coverage, Biden let in the immigrant horde—despite deporting at least a million more people than Trump had in his first term. The narrative is distorted, clipped, and repurposed. Now ICE raids terrorize families across the country without a gesture to due process. One at a time, immigrants showing up to their hearings are arrested without precedent or information about where they will be taken. A line is drawn, and judges stand idly behind the threshold of the courtroom door as people disappear on the other side.
At the end of our tour, I asked if there were any Cubans staying at the albergue. The once-cheerful volunteer launched into a rant. Why are they so loud on their phones, why are they so intense, why do they never stop talking? I laughed. I had pulled a reliable lever, and it brought me joy to know at least one thing hadn’t changed.
There hadn’t been any Cubans at the albergue for months, she said, or so far as she could remember. They had stopped coming or stopped being let across.
The friend accompanying me was confused by our guide’s reaction. When I explained it later at a bar, it felt like the joke fell short. I guess you had to be there, was all I could say.
In my final jump-roping of the river, I made some last-minute stops in Juárez before heading back to El Paso and then New York. I went to the pharmacy, to buy my medication for a third of the price, and then to the corner store, to pick up cucumber-flavoured cigarettes and frozen Bubu Lubus. I needed coins to cross over.
As I walked into the OXXO, I heard the come-palabras of a Caribbean accent from the cashier. I’m not certain if he’d been arguing with the customer at the counter, but everyone in line had an expression of disgust or anxiety. Que sí, que no, hombre. The norteños frowned in the face of Cuban chaos.
After procuring some snacks, I was next in line. I asked for my smokes and told the cashier to make sure I got six pesos change. That’s how much it cost to cross the border by foot. Less than fifty cents, but you needed to have exactly the five-peso coin and the one-peso coin for the toll machine. The only inconvenience I had to suffer to cross the border.
Claro, claro, lo que tú dice. I asked about his accent, where he was from, and when he told me, I smiled. Mi familia, también. I told him about my grandmother, my aunts, and my uncles. There was a windshield repair shop, Cristales Cubanas, that my uncle once owned not far from there. The cashier raised his eyebrows, sarcastic or unimpressed.
Va, okay. I’m not sure what I expected.
When he gave me my change, I reminded him about the six pesos in coins.
Ah sí, es verdad, he said. Cada día me piden los malditos pesos. People cleared out his change every day.
Perdón, I said. I was the one caught off guard.
No pasa nada, he said.
I asked him how long he’d been waiting on this side, de este lado.
He laughed. De-ma-sia-do, he said, emphasizing each syllable.
Too long. He certainly had people on the other side in Gringolandia or back home in Cuba, but in Juárez, he must have been more alone than not. He was younger than me, short, with curly hair, a thin beard, and one or two tattoos. Just a kid. I asked him if he knew his court date, and he threw his hands up in the air.
Ojalá llegará pronto, I said.
Ojalá, he said.
I remember thinking, He’ll never cross. At least not in the way he had anticipated. This was two weeks before the Trump administration tore through immigration policy with merciless speed. On some level, I think he knew too, working in the last OXXO before the border. Would he go back? Would he try to find another way?
My family’s history was one of figuring it out. My great-aunts were Tropicana dancers that fled to the United States on the heels of the revolution. No one knows how my uncle Wilfredo came to his citizenship. My aunt and godmother married Americans to receive the nod. My father bought a woman a pearl-coloured Cadillac and gave her three thousand dollars to marry her for citizenship. His younger brother, my uncle, was the first born in the U.S. They were all Cuban. Whether they came “the right way” or not was a matter of time and place. There was a lingering hope of figuring it out and making a life.
Not anymore. In January 2025, the CPB One app closed the remaining thirty thousand applications it had in its cue. Petitions for asylum have plummeted, and the guidelines to apply are more nebulous than ever. The rhetoric is grim and becoming more so. I think about the man at the OXXO, a hair away from getting to the other side, who may never have that chance. From the corner-store window plastered with two-for-one specials on caguamas and Electrolits, he could see the Franklin Mountains and Texas flag high in the air. They were right there. How many countries had he travelled, terrains had he traversed, and borders had he crossed to get that close?
I took my coins and cajetillas and walked onto Avenida Juárez, bustling with traffic, horns, mariachi. I scanned another pharmacy, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, before paying the toll and walking over the bridge. Like a thousand times before.
Como si nada.
SEBASTIÁN WILFREDO MOYA is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He was raised on the borderlands of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez before receiving an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College, where he was a Truman Capote Literary Scholar. He teaches in New York City.
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