Some visa services will restart in May in Havana, U.S. Embassy says
Four and a half years after it stopped processing visas in Havana, the U.S. Embassy in Cuba said it will start issuing some immigrant visas beginning in May, following mounting pressure over an ongoing exodus of Cubans trying to reach the United States.
“This change is part of the broader expansion of the Embassy’s functions to facilitate diplomatic and civil society engagement and to provide consular services,” the embassy said on its website on Wednesday.
But the services will only deal with the visa petitions for the parents of American citizens. Most Cubans wanting to reunite with their families will still need to travel to Guyana, as they must do now, to get a visa from the U.S. Consulate in that country.
The announcement comes after the Miami Herald reported Tuesday on the 46,000-plus Cubans that have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in five months.
Legal immigration and family reunification have been severely disrupted since the Trump administration ordered the evacuation of embassy personnel and the suspension of consular services in Havana after several diplomats became ill during mysterious events still under investigation by U.S. agencies.
The suspension and the COVID-19 pandemic created a massive visa backlog. According to the State Department’s most recent figures for 2021, there are 90,771 pending family-sponsored immigrant visa petitions for Cubans, up from 78,228 cases in 2020. A separate family reunification program that was also suspended has left another 22,000 Cubans in limbo.
In an interview with the independent news outlet Cubanet, Timothy Zúñiga-Brown, the head of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, said the effort to restart the services is linked to the dramatic increase of Cubans trying to reach the U.S.
“We’re working to maintain the security of our own staff and we think we’ve reached a point where we can expand consular processing, albeit gradually, to try to give more visas to Cubans at a time when we understand very well that there is an exodus,” Zúñiga-Brown said. “Many are leaving, and it is important to give them, the Cuban public, a way to legally, orderly and safely go to the United States from Havana. That’s what we’re trying to get to, and I think we’ll get there soon.”
On its website, the embassy said it has chosen to process applicants in the IR-5 visa category, allowing parents of American citizens to live in the U.S., recognizing their “unique age, health and mobility challenges.”
Cubans seeking short-stay visas still cannot apply in Havana and will need to go to a third country.
The embassy said there was no “exact date” to fully resume consular services in Cuba.
This story was originally published April 7, 2022 at 2:03 PM.