Mexican President in Cuba on last leg of regional migration-themed trip

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico completed a migration-themed tour of Central America and the Caribbean on Sunday with a stop in Cuba, which has suffered its own exodus in recent months.

Throughout his trip, which has brought him to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Belize, Lopez Obrador has pushed the United States to assist fix the underlying economic problems that are fuelling the migration wave.

“The will of Latin Americans is not enough; we also need the United States to become clearly involved in solving a problem that also affects it and to contribute to financing” job creation projects, he said in Honduras.

Migration, he added, was “the result of the difficult conditions in our countries, from the Rio Grande to the south.”

And in El Salvador, Lopez Obrador argued that “the United States, a protagonist of the migration phenomenon, must, therefore, be jointly responsible for solving it, modifying its migration policy.”

Many thousands of US-bound undocumented migrants, most of them Central Americans, cross Mexico’s southern frontier with Guatemala each year fleeing poverty and violence.

In 2021 alone, Mexican authorities detected more than 300,000 irregular migrants.

US Customs and Border Protection have registered 7,800 undocumented migrants a day along the border with Mexico in recent weeks — almost five times the average in 2014-2019.

Cuba alone has contributed more than 78,000 via the US border with Mexico from October 2021 to March this year, according to US customs data.

With the communist nation facing its worst economic crisis in nearly three decades, Mexico’s president has repeatedly urged the United States to end its trade embargo against the island.

On his trip, Lopez Obrador has also insisted that all countries of the region should participate in the Summit of the Americas to be held in Los Angeles in June, but to which Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela were not invited.

All three countries are under US sanctions — Cuba for the past six decades.

Lopez Obrador arrived in Havana on Saturday in the shadow of an explosion at a luxury hotel in the city center that killed at least 30 people.

His visit coincides with the 120th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries, with Mexico remaining the only Latin American country not to join worldwide efforts to isolate Fidel Castro’s regime in the 1960s while preserving trade.

Lopez Obrador was greeted with military honours by his colleague Miguel Diaz-Canel on Sunday before the two men sat down for talks.