Everything You Need to Know About Latino History by Himilce Novas

Author:Himilce Novas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

What is the wet-foot/dry-foot policy?

Instead of repealing the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 in the wake of the 1994 Cuban rafter refugee crisis, President Clinton signed migration accords with Cuba that same year that grant the United States the right to return to Cuba all Cubans picked up at sea—even if they are found just a few meters from U.S. shores—by the U.S. Coast Guard (those who reach dry land are exempt and are given special refugee status) in exchange for allowing twenty thousand Cubans to immigrate to the United States annually through a legal visa lottery system in place in Cuba. Approximately half of those Cubans who obtain such visas are admitted as “parolees” through the parole authority vested in the U.S. attorney general, which means that they are eligible for refugee benefits, while the other half are treated as immigrants with no special refugee benefits.

The so-called wet-foot/dry-foot policy—that is, the extension of special refugee status only to those Cubans who flee Cuba and actually touch American soil (dry foot) and not to those floundering miles or even just meters offshore (wet foot)—has made the prospect of finding freedom across the Florida Straits much more remote for Cubans. The policy has also angered and frustrated many in the Cuban American community and beyond, who deem it barbaric. The occasional national television coverage of desperate, dehydrated Cubans floating or swimming just off the Florida coastline, struggling to outwit U.S. Coast Guard boats pursuing them as they attempt to touch dry land, underscores the poignancy of the situation.

The debate over wet-foot/dry-foot turned especially bitter in early 2006, when the U.S. government deported fifteen Cubans who had fled Cuba and on January 4, 2006, had made it as far as some pilings of an abandoned, partially collapsed bridge in the Florida Keys, as their small boat filled with water. The U.S. government concluded that since pieces of the bridge were missing and it no longer connected to land, its pilings did not count as “dry land.” Had the fifteen Cuban migrants made it to the new bridge, a hundred yards away, the U.S. government would have in all probability allowed them to remain in the United States. In February 2006, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. government’s conduct concerning the fifteen Cubans had been unreasonable, and it ordered the government to make every effort to bring the Cubans back to the United States, something Fidel Castro is unlikely to permit.

Hoping to improve their chances of touching American soil and obtaining asylum, Cubans have increasingly turned to people-smuggling operations in South Florida to provide them passage across the Florida Straits. In a way, the smugglers have made the journey from Cuba a bit safer for those fleeing the island, because they travel by speedboats, not by rickety rafts and makeshift boats. Since 2001 an increasing number of Cubans have forsaken the heavily patrolled Florida Straits altogether and have attempted to reach Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory with commonwealth status, by first flying to the Dominican Republic and then making the voyage by boat from there to Puerto Rico.

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