“Going to See the Volcanos”
Edel Rodriguez for the Texas Observer in partnership with palabra
After unprecedented protests swept Cuba in 2021, a wave of people left the island to cross the United States’ southern border. One was journalist Jesús Jank Curbelo, who tells his story of being smuggled through Central America and Mexico.
Editor’s note: This story is a collaboration between The Texas Observer and palabra.
Haga clic aquí para leer el reportaje en español.
Words by Jesús Jank Curbelo, @jankcurbelo. Illustrations by Edel Rodriguez, @edelrodriguezstudio. Edited and translated by Lygia Navarro, @LygiaNavarro.
—
I meet Coyote 1 outside the airport in Managua, Nicaragua. I’m calling him that for my safety. Even though coyotes already use one- or two-syllable aliases, keeping him anonymous protects me. After weeks of talking on WhatsApp before I left Cuba, we’ve arranged everything. He knows I’ll be wearing a white t-shirt and gray Nikes. And he’s seen my face.
In the lucrative human smuggling trade, coyotes are the bosses. They control a web of guides and other subcontractors who provide different parts of the service. Every country, a new coyote.
In his car, counting to $1,200 from the wad of U.S. bills I’ve just handed him, Coyote 1 informs me: “You don’t have to pay again until Guatemala.” I start to hide the rest of my money in my shoe. (I want to keep it safe; I’d saved for years for part of it and borrowed the rest.) “You’re going to get your feet wet,” Coyote 1 says, smiling. “Find another hiding place.” He gives me a local SIM card, loads me into a silver Toyota, and I never see him again.
The next seven hours: on the highway driving to Jalapa, a city in northern Nicaragua near the Honduran border. It’s October 1, 2022, and I’m en route to becoming one of the nearly 30,000 Cubans who’ll cross the southern border into the United States this month.
‘In Cuba, the government declared war on independent journalism.’
I drift off, wake up and it’s already nighttime. There are houses and then everything turns into countryside. Houses. Countryside. The farther we get from Managua, the more poverty. I pray the whole journey will be this smooth. Then, I fall asleep again. I’m woken up to change cars. I fall out of the car a zombie. 10:27 p.m. The new driver, who I can’t really see, shows me my own face on his cell phone.
“Never go with anyone who doesn’t have your photo,” he advises.
I’m pressed into the back seat, amid who knows how many others. The stereo alternates between trap and narcocorridos.
Ever the journalist, I take notes about everything on my phone, in case I can write about this later. Some of the other migrants around me look calm. Not me.
I’d already visited Miami, and pretty much understood how capitalism works. In 2019, I was invited to a journalism event, and everyone in Cuba urged me to defect to the United States. But the monstrous loanshark system made me feel so small in just two weeks that I ended up fleeing. Back home in Havana, State Security (the Cuban military organization tasked with counterintelligence and repression) cornered me and threatened me so intensely that I also had to flee.
It’s not like I was actually a threat, from my perspective. I thrived on spending weeks in the field looking for stories, interviewing people, trying to live what others did to tell the story for the independent Cuban press. Apart from that, I just ate and slept. But in Cuba, the government declared war on independent journalism. And it got to the point where I feared leaving home, afraid I’d be followed by plainclothes government agents.
So I fled through Nicaragua. Destination: Dallas, Texas, where my father lives. I become stateless, and am as terrified of setting foot in the United States as I am of not surviving the trip.
The fenced-in house in Guatemala where I spent the first day of the trip. Photo by Jesús Jank Curbelo
***
His arm outstretched searching for a signal, the Cuban video-called his girlfriend. He pointed the camera at the landscape of Jalapa, Nicaragua: mountains in every direction. “Those trees, do you see them? That’s Honduras over there.”
The day after arriving in Managua, eight of us Cubans were fenced in at that safehouse in the jungle. I awaited my departure signal.
And the Cuban from the video call awaited his. In his 36 years of life, his only time on a plane was the one from Havana to Managua. He was anxious to get to Miami.
I needn’t ask why. We’d been injected with the idea that utopia begins with U for United States. The paradise where all dreams come true: sports cars, $100 bills, supreme laws, Captain America. And, on the other coast, Cuba, primitive, in crisis for decades, designed to trap you in an asphyxiating cycle: bread, transportation, electricity, a vase, internet, optimism. Whatever: in Cuba there is none. But you need it. And breaking your back to acquire it devours your life.
‘And then, suddenly, everyone was leaving. It seemed like the Party leaders and the military strongmen would end up governing only each other.’
As the 36-year-old Cuban finished the preparations for his trip, the last days before leaving Cuba convinced him that if he didn’t leave, he’d sink — country and all. A few days before the Cuban landed in Managua, Hurricane Ian slammed into western Cuba, with sustained winds of over 124 miles per hour. The local press reported three deaths and the loss of crops, roofs and other things about which the 36-year-old Cuban couldn’t care less.
His breaking point came courtesy of the National Electric System, when it collapsed and plunged the island into darkness from end to end.
“You could hear the pots from the airport,” he said, laughing, telling of the people banging out their frustration in protest.
The year before our trip — on July 11, 2021 — massive protests had exploded for the first time in the 62 years of Fidel Castro’s Revolution. The country was paralyzed. The people demanded freedom and food. The military took to the streets.
Once the explosion was controlled, every time people heard sirens, they peeked through their window blinds to see if the government was cracking down on a new protest. That’s how we lived. Waiting for the spark. One felt the constant boiling up of conspiracies, hunger and exhaustion. In the endless lines in stores, in the endless lines at bus stops, in the endless lines in hospital emergency rooms. A miserable torpor. But in whispers. Most people remained focused on staying alive: speak quietly, keep your head down.
And then, suddenly, everyone was leaving. It seemed like the Party leaders and the military strongmen would end up governing only each other.
***
Why Nicaragua? Because in November 2021, four months after the protests, Daniel Ortega’s government approved open visas for Cubans. The price for Havana-to-Managua flights skyrocketed. And the phrase “going to see the volcanos” became a synonym for exodus.
Anyone who had family off the island, had something to sell, or knew a moneylender, flew to Managua to undertake the 2,500-mile odyssey to the United States.
I’m sure that everyone in Cuba knows at least one person who went to “see the volcanos.” There were just too many. In fiscal year 2019, before the opening in Nicaragua, 21,499 Cubans entered the United States via the Mexican border. But with the Nicaraguan open visa policy, the number exploded tenfold in fiscal year 2022: 224,607 Cubans arrived in the country, with 98% coming in through the southern border.
Why the United States? Because, since the Cold War, the U.S. government has afforded Cuban immigrants privileges. The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act allows all Cubans who manage to enter the country to apply for a green card a year later. For immigrants from other countries, the process is much slower and more arduous. Or impossible: In 2021, the Pew Research Center estimated there were 10.5 million immigrants without legal estatus in the country.
What’s more, between 1963 and 1995, any Cuban who made it into U.S. territorial waters was allowed into the country. This propelled many to risk the Straits of Florida. Between the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and 1995, an estimated 100,000 Cubans died in the attempt.
In 1995, after the so-called “rafter crisis” of 1994, the United States implemented the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy, which allowed only those Cubans who set foot on dry land to stay. But since Obama ended the policy in 2017, Cubans risk both the sea and the possibility of being shipped back.
Despite this risk, in 2021 and 2022 social media was filled with stories of rafters. It wasn’t like you could just sit at the beach and watch the boats set off like in 1994, when more than 35,000 people fled the island. But many still took that risk, in part because Cubans continue benefiting from U.S. permanent residency through the Cuban Adjustment Act.
Between 2021 and 2023, 4.1% of Cuba’s population emigrated to the United States. One in every 25 Cubans.
It was a stampede.
***
I didn’t see the 36-year-old Cuban or his group from the fenced-in house again.
Don’t get attached to anyone. You don’t know who’s going to leave first, nor by what route, nor if you’ll ever see them again. And obey your coyote.
The third day of the trip, as dawn broke, I was led out of the fenced-in house in Jalapa with six Ecuadorians, jumping over puddles resembling rusted bathtubs, stepping carefully onto rocks, roots or anything more stable than that precarious mud created by interminable rains.
I spent the whole journey focused on five of the Ecuadorians: a woman and a man with three small children. She was thin and carried the baby on her back like a shell. Wading through those narrow, zigzagging trails was so difficult that I didn’t think she’d make it through alive. The man, equally skinny, carried the toddler on his shoulders, as well as a massive backpack. They looked like a long-married couple. Yet they’d just met. The third child was around seven years old and dragged a suitcase which was double his weight. The guide, with walking stick in hand and sombrero, tested the terrain: Careful there, go this way.
I tried to take notes and follow the group simultaneously, without losing speed. A steep curve nearly knocked me down. Left behind in a jungle like that, and not even CSI could’ve identified my cadaver.
Migrants walking next to a small river between Nicaragua and Honduras. Photo by Jesús Jank Curbelo
***
6:40 a.m. “Thank God for this beautiful weather,” the radio announcer said. I had no idea what country we were in. The sun was so hot I wished I was at the beach.
The waystation had holes where doors and windows would go, a radio, a dirt floor, the board on blocks where we sat. Some people took off their shoes. The baby cried for milk. Our guide counted Honduran lempira bills for a toll to use the trails. I had heartburn. I hadn’t taken a shit in three days.
“This is private land,” said the house’s owner. “Here, we care for migrants. But out there, it’s another story.”
I sensed my sweat drying. It felt like we’d been sitting there for years.
“One of the bikers’ axle casing got damaged,” the guide explained. “But it shouldn’t take long.”
The bikers were a group of toughs with acne and combs in their pockets. One pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead, asking me: “How much do you weigh?”
“I don’t know…200 pounds,” I answered. He laughed. “You’re going to sink my motorcycle.”
I had my knapsack on my back and, in my hands, the suitcases of my fellow migrants. The mother tied her baby to her chest, and the man held the seven-year-old boy in front of him and the two-year-old on one knee, hanging off like a sidecar.
‘I knew that what I had to do was not know what I was supposed to do.’
A roller coaster without seat belts, triple the adrenaline. This wasn’t a controlled danger of death; the Serpento 150 motorcycles turned at superspeed on tire-width precipices. Below, the palm trees resembled bonsais.
“Are we in Honduras now?” I asked once I saw the first groupings of houses.
“Honduras,” the biker responded, leaning toward the fuel tank like a professional racer. “This town is called La Esperanza Abajo (Hope Below).”
He told me he made two or three of these trips a week, for 500 lempiras (about $20) each. Half went to gas, the other half to his one-year-old son. He asked me to leave him a tip.
“Did you see about the accident a few days ago? They overloaded the boat and it sank. Several migrants died.” Then he said that, after he dropped me off, I’d have to cross a river.
“The same river as the accident?” I asked.
“The same one.”
Edel Rodriguez for the Texas Observer in partnership with palabra
***
The boat rattled along. It was a dirty, rustic little motorized thing, with space for around six people. I reached my hand out to the seven-year-old child and we sat facing each other. His mother tried boarding with the baby, but the helmsman insisted on only two at a time; she’d have to get on a different boat.
We crossed in two minutes. In silence. Without looking at each others’ faces. Without moving, to avoid destabilizing the boat.
I climbed out, and from the shore, focused on the river. Serene and gray, around 110 yards wide.
“Did you hear about the accident?” a cowboy who introduced himself as Coyote 2 asked. “Three drowned. That’s why we worked to get you all across safely.”
In front of a mangrove, he took a group photo, as if for a birthday party portrait. He also photographed our passports, to get us the safe-conduct documents that’d allow us to continue legally through Honduras. Then he loaded us into a pickup bed. Again, I offered my hand to the boy. He reached out his to his mother.
‘We migrants feel the constant, mind-bending stress of traveling illegally. If they capture you, you could end up in jail or deported.’
I already knew that women traveling without male accompaniment risk exploitation and sexual abuse as an additional price for the trip. I also knew other women become human trafficking victims, forced into prostitution. Rapes — of women, and of children as young as seven years old — are so common that some women prepare for the journey with long-acting contraceptive injections. Amnesty International reports that as many as six in 10 women and girl migrants experience sexual violence. Often, the assailants are state agents: police, military or migration officials.
I watched the Ecuadorian mother take her son’s hand, and hoped that nothing bad would happen to them on their journey. The truck started, and the motor jostled us.
***
The Danlí bus terminal, in southern Honduras, was a foul-smelling, labyrinthine torment. It was 10 a.m. on the third day and the group of Ecuadorians and I had been through so many twists and turns, and experienced so much hunger, that the smallest minutiae worked my nerves.
We wandered without knowing where, and asked the first person we saw where the migrant buses were.
“Are you with Coyote 2?”
The smugglers’ scheduling was impressive. He gave us our safe-conduct documents. Our group merged with another group of 35 and, every so often, we were shifted to a different bus. Six or seven times.
A police officer: “I’m going to need you to raise your hands when I say your nationality. From Cuba,” almost all of us. “Ecuador,” the rest. “Venezuela,” no one. “Haiti,” zero. “Nicaragua,” zip. He jotted something down. “Have a good trip.”
We were let off one of the buses at a vacant wasteland. I started to feel like they were letting us out to pasture. But even a lonely stray sheep wouldn’t survive there. I knew that what I had to do was not know what I was supposed to do. Do as I was ordered.
‘The operations were military checkpoints: armored Jeeps with six-foot-tall soldiers in balaclavas carrying long guns.’
Next to a bus, a Christian sisterhood handed out provisions. I helped with the distribution; my water was almost gone and maybe I could earn an extra bottle that way. Each migrant was given three medium bottles of water. And a bag of toiletries for each child, with shampoo and soaps. I pocketed two for the Ecuadorian kids. I’d seen the family raise their hands when the cop said “Ecuador” who knows how many transfers back. I returned to the bus. It was so compact no one could carry their bags with them, not even between our legs. I looked, seat by seat. The family was gone.
Seriously, don’t get attached to anyone.
Curtains down. Couldn’t sleep. I passed the time scraping my teeth with a nail. They were disgusting.
At two in the morning, in Agua Caliente, Honduras, the driver yelled: “Let’s goooo. We’re here.”
I got into a taxi and on we drove, dodging the avalanche of people on either side of the vehicle. In spots, they crashed in upon each other, like a stampede, and in others, they walked as if fused together in a slow, submissive pack. Amid the fog and police sirens, I heard someone say: “They’re going it on their own. Without guides.”
***
On the fourth day, I met Coyote 3 at a small, idyllic hotel at the entrance to Guatemala (the exact location of which I’ll never know). He brought me a bag of canned food “for the road.” The only one who did anything like that. He wore a smart shirt, fancy shoes. His kindness and elegance were panic-inducing.
At 10 p.m. they arranged us into three lines outside the hotel. About 80 of us. Divided by coyote: colored plastic bracelets placed on our wrists. Six at a time, we were sent to one of the taxis parked on the street.
“Turn off your phones so you won’t call attention,” the taxi driver requested. He crossed himself.
We shot off in a row at 60 miles an hour.
Traveling squeezed no longer bothered me. In fact, without knowing my fellow passengers, and without coordinating it, we took turns being — for a bit — the ones who had to sit underneath with others on our laps, and — for another bit — the ones sitting on laps with our necks pressed into the car ceiling. And, for a privileged bit, shotgun. Women and men, all jumbled together. We moved in and out of all of those spots without stopping; a living puzzle.
The taxi drivers were connected among themselves. They sent WhatsApp audio memos and texts for every operation in a group they’d named 🌋🤠🙂.
The leaddriver wrote: “Operation defeated.” And then all of the rest texted that they, too, had survived the operation. The operations were military checkpoints: armored Jeeps with six-foot-tall soldiers in balaclavas carrying long guns.
“Everything’s fine with the local cops,” the taxi driver said. “The gringos are the problem, because they send their own cops to crack down. Those don’t accept bribes.”
***
Near 2 a.m. on the fifth day, the line of taxis scattered. Our driver turned off the highway and slipped into an alley. The police had extorted money from the point car in an unplanned roadblock, he explained. Now the entire caravan had to hide until the checkpoint was closed.
“No one wants to risk having their cash taken. Not you, not us,” he turned off the engine and reclined his seat. “Don’t make any noise, because of the dogs. The neighbors might call the cops.”
Silently, we got out to stretch our legs, alongside dilapidated shacks and the stench of sewer. At five, the roosters began crowing, and we still hadn’t received the order to split. The driver walked to the corner, saw lights on in windows and the sky brightening, and became exasperated. It was my turn in the front seat. My head banged around so much on the curves that I crashed into the window.
We passed a roadblock. Our driver negotiated with the officials.
‘A migrant is an upside-down bug, and the only way to save oneself from the fly swatter is to connect with other migrants.’
In an anonymous corner of Guatemala, we got out of the taxi on a dirt road. Three school buses waited. Let’s go! Let’s go! We’re late. Eight in the morning: we were on the way to the Mexican border.
The driver’s assistant hung outside the door. “When I tell you to duck, crouch really far down.” Pause. “Now.”
We rolled up like armadillos. I snuck a look over the edge of the window. We passed coconut plantations, a bridge, minimarts and a checkpoint with about 20 soldiers standing at attention.
“Done. Apologies, señores, but it’s for your security. Our security.”
The second time, we passed a gas station and a warehouse: “I’ll tell you when we’re done. Cooperate, please,” he said.
Six or seven more times. The last one was lengthy. Forty minutes crouching. Then, for the next one, we didn’t even have to duck: “What’s up, buddy?” the assistant said to a Guatemalan soldier, camouflaging the money with a handshake. The bus never even slowed down.
They let us out at a construction site in northern Guatemala, and separated us by groups, according to our bracelet color. Inventory: 98 of us.
View of the river at the Guatemala-Mexico border. Photo by Jesús Jank Curbelo
An emissary of Coyote 4 guided me to a riverbank. A celebration was in swing: paper flags, a pig roasting on a spit, peddlers, mariachis, the scent of grease, people in their Sunday best. A fisherman took me across the river, from Guatemala to Mexico, in a log raft atop truck tires, pushing against the riverbed with an oar. Like in Venice.
And on the other side, Chiapas. “AMLO Mexican pride” graffiti. Totally different. The transition surprised me. Coming from an island, the only transitions I was accustomed to were those of accents between provinces. Here, the two sides of the line had distinct accents and cultures, histories, traditions. In a matter of meters, I could feel it.
A 20-something tattooed guy picked me up on his motorcycle. At 75 miles an hour, we buzzed past corn fields and banana orchards. From afar, he saw something suspicious, flipped a U, hit the gas and then hit a pothole, which levitated us three feet in the air. The weight of my backpack pulled me down and, somehow, magically righted us.
“Didn’t you see it?” he yelled. “They were in a caravan.” The police.
That night, in the safehouse where we waited in Chiapas, I dropped my backpack on a mattress. Headed outside to smoke. It’s not that the haggard people there inspired confidence, but I didn’t actually think they’d steal from me. Anyway, robbing my water or my underwear would do me the favor of lightening my load.
I put out my cigarette and went inside to chat with my mattress neighbors: one in his 30s and the other not yet 18. By then, I already understood that a migrant is an upside-down bug, and the only way to save oneself from the fly swatter is to connect with other migrants. Even though you know, deep down, that you’re always alone.
In 15 minutes they were family, although they never learned my name, nor I theirs. I called them Guate and Ecuador. And I was Cuba (until, a few days later, when more Cubans joined, I ended up becoming Havana, because the rest were from Santiago).
‘We migrants feel the constant, mind-bending stress of traveling illegally. If they capture you, you could end up in jail or deported.’
Ecuador told me that he worked in construction. That a cousin in New York had loaned him the cash for the trip. That he had three kids but neither they nor his wife knew where he was headed. That he’d told them a job had come up near the border with Colombia. He’d call them when he arrived to explain.
Guate, on the other hand, didn’t say much. He spoke even less than I, and I’m not exactly a parakeet.
The room: dark and cold. The TV, on without an image — a white bulb lighting up the wall. A man entered, shouting: “We have to go! Hurry the fuck up!”
In a second, bags on our shoulders, we landed in formation on the patio. Like a military school.
***
The truck driver who picked us up handed me a roll of Mexican pesos secured with a rubber band, and instructions: “As soon as you get in the next truck, give this to the guy.” He dialed his cell phone. “I’m sending you the dough. It’ll come from … What’s your name?... A box named Jesús.” I imagined that box was another way of saying package. In the end, that’s what we were.
He drove for a silent hour between trucks equally as large and terrifying as his. In one of them were Guate and Ecuador, who I’d see again later. It was 8 p.m. when we stopped on a gloomy highway.
“Here’s where you get out.”
On the street, I froze, paralyzed, for a few seconds, though that’s a privilege in these situations. I ran, covering my head as if missiles fell all around me, toward the only light on the horizon: a gas station. Amid the gas pumps, a cop car. Like a reptile — hunting.
The trucks we’d arrived in had left and I tried to walk as calmly as possible. We migrants feel the constant, mind-bending stress of traveling illegally. If they capture you, you could end up in jail or deported. But no one knows you don’t have papers if they don’t ask you for them. I went inside a motel next to the gas station. Hidden. Fearful. An old man in a security guard uniform appeared.
“You can’t be here.” But instead of kicking me out, he gave me refuge in his office.
I snuck a peek out the window. Another convoy of trucks arrived, and I ran toward them without knowing if they were part of the smuggling operation.
“Jesús?” A truck driver requested I hand over the roll of peso bills.
He was traveling with his wife; it was his first time doing this. As a truck driver, he didn’t do half badly, but his earnings were never enough. He knew that, if he could get a U.S. work permit, he’d make more in el norte. Even so, he never wanted to leave Mexico. And he didn’t believe he was harming anyone transporting migrants.
He chainsmoked. The way he checked his mirrors, his terror was obvious. Every so often, he’d open the curtain to the cabin where I was, ask if everything was ok, then close it up again.
***
Crossing southern Mexico the following day — the sixth of my journey — the police stopped us. I awoke, but feigned sleep behind the curtain. The sun rose. The cop’s flashlight in my face. My eyes pressed shut. The truck driver offered him a thousand pesos (around $60).
“A grand won’t cut it.” Our Father. “No?” Strange noises. I half opened my eyes. “A thousand more.” Your Will Be Done. “I don’t have that much.” The cop handcuffed the driver. Forgive Us Our Trespasses. “Fine, 2,000.” “I thought you didn’t have it?” “Yes, yes.” “Ok, nothing happened here. Don’t snitch or there’ll be trouble.”
Amen.
Thirty-one tense hours of driving. The driver said he’d paid more in bribes than he was going to earn. I pitied him. Gave him 100 pesos for a pack of Marlboros. His wife, mute, on the verge of weeping.
We walked alongside a bridge, on a narrow grass path above a ravine, gauging our steps and white-knuckling the handrail. With an OXXO gas station ahead, just like Coyote 4 had explained, we struggled down the ravine and ran across the highway. Piled into a car. (You never know for certain what’s happening or who’s who; instead, you constantly test fate.) The driver confirmed our faces matched the ones in his photos. Ecuador sat up front. Guate sat with me.
4:37 a.m. in Mexico City, in a safehouse.
“No sharing the location,” the house’s employee said, explaining her boss had ordered her to confiscate our phones.
The rules: zero noise, no smoking inside, don’t go on the porch. To make sure, she locked the door. With a key.
As everyone slept, I showered and sat on the toilet for the first time in a week. My thighs burned, indented from my underwear’s elastic. I had no idea when I last changed them.
At nine in the morning, “Get up!” shouted the boss, invincible tyrant of the house’s regime.
The same employee who’d welcomed us brought out a tray of tortillas and beans. Just then, five women and three men from Santiago de Cuba arrived, bringing with them such joy and raucousness that the boss ordered them to shut up. There, we were ghosts. We were only allowed to leave one trace: a useless piece of money from each person’s useless country, for the collection of bills taped to the door.
Without enough comforters in lieu of mattresses, we had to share them, two people each. And get up barefoot, careful not to step on an arm. And sleep with our knees bent. There weren’t enough blankets, either. It was cold.
Mexico City safehouse. Photo by Jesús Jank Curbelo
The Santiagueros had already been in transit for 40 days. The last 12 in Tapachula, Mexico, because their coyote had evaporated with their payments and without leaving SIM cards for their phones. Their families had no idea where to send them money. Sleeping in parks and panhandling, they wandered as beggars, until they found other Cubans who connected them to Coyote 4.
“You all have had it easy,” said a hairy Cuban. “You all are blessed,” responded Ecuador. “All you have to do is turn yourselves in at the border and they let you go. The gringos are nice to Cubans. Guate and I have to enter through a tunnel and run so they can’t catch us.”
A competition of misfortunes.
In 2022, even with the Cuban Adjustment Act, Cuban migrants still had to navigate a slew of different documents when arriving at the border. With one, you could enter the country with a temporary permit. With others, you either had to deal with immigration court appearances (which would complicate your green card application), or you were at risk of deportation.
Now, in 2024, the process for Cubans is different: they aren’t allowed to cross the border. All migrants arriving at the border without official permission to enter the country have to register for an online program called CBP-One, and then spend who knows how long in Mexico waiting their turn to request asylum. Recent new rules from the Biden administration make it more difficult for people to apply for asylum if they entered outside an official port of entry.
But Ecuador and Guate will have to live without papers their whole lives in the United States. Unless they get married to someone with papers or have proof for a case of political asylum. We didn’t speak of this.
In Mexico City, I threw out half my clothes and filled the empty space in my backpack with snacks. In the neckline of the white t-shirt I knew I’d wear when I turned myself in, I wrote my dad’s phone number and Dallas address, since he’d pick me up on the other side, just in case they took everything from me at the border, including my memory.
At midnight on the seventh day, the boss showed up and took away a Santiaguero couple. Elderly folks. They exited crying. They weren’t from the same group as the others, but joined us after escaping from their own group, which had been caught by immigration.
Don’t get attached to anyone.
For the rest of us, the safehouse boss gave us the account number to which we were to transfer $4,000 each, the cost of crossing from central to northern Mexico. To him, we represented nearly $45,000 in that one room.
For smugglers moving Latinos to the United States, the trade generates between $3.7 and $4.2 billion per year, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). In reality, due to geographic and economic factors, even migration experts can’t agree on the exact average cost per migrant of being smuggled from Latin America to the United States. A UNODC report cited an average of $5,000 per migrant. I paid nearly double that.
***
It was the morning of the seventh day. We were in a truck, 16 people in a seat designed for three. One on top of another, on top of another.
Darkness. Curtain shut. A dull stagnancy, since the first thing the driver did was take away our phones. It was rank to breathe the air others expelled.
Next to me, three weak children stared at the wall with a mixture of confusion, tenderness and sadness. They looked like triplets, about 4 years old. As they sat atop their mother, she blew on them and tried to caress them as far as her hand could reach. They weren’t from our group, but had already been there when we boarded the truck.
A bit later: “Men, if you will, move on back,” the driver said.
I’d seen too many movie scenes in which the investigator opens the truck trailer and finds a bunch of frozen, half-dead migrants.
“Give us a phone, in case something happens,” Ecuador pleaded. The driver grabbed one at random and gave it to us.
An icy breeze seeped through the ventilation ducts, keeping us on the verge of hypothermia. I had a jacket and two t-shirts left. I put them all on.
The trailer measured about 50 feet long. A tiny shred of light entered through a hole in the floor, which, after hours inside, we peed into.
“I’ve got work lined up in Tampa,” the hairy Cuban told us. “My uncle has a garage there and hooked me up.” In Santiago, he’d been a mechanic. Piece by piece, he’d built a car, which he’d used to travel to Havana to resell plantains and avocados, which he could get cheaper in the countryside. That’s how he’d made enough money to leave. “I’m a fighter.”
Ecuador wanted to try roofing — that’s where the money was. But, if that didn’t work, he’d take whatever appeared. He intended to break his back so his wife and three kids could live like royalty. Even though he’d never be able to see them again.
And me, the journalist. Thirty-one years old with mediocre English. All I knew how to do was write in Spanish. What was waiting for me in Texas? Getting used to being undocumented for the first year until my permanent residency arrived. Never-ending shifts in a fast-food joint. Sleeping during the day because I’d almost always end work at three in the morning. Counting how many cents are in a minute and learning that time really is money. A new life.
But right then, in that truck, I felt so lost.
The truck driver called. We were nearing an x-ray checkpoint. He’d told us that, as we passed one, we’d have to lay down completely still, without breathing, to trick the machine. In the end, by some miracle, we made it to the border state of Nuevo León.
***
In Nuevo León, they locked us inside a two-story safehouse for three days. We couldn’t even go into the garden. We were clueless. Bored. Alert. Kept up with the news of deaths in the Rio Grande. Guessed if we’d cross the border through the river or the desert.
Each route was dangerous. In 2022, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) tallied 686 deaths and disappearances on the border between the United States and Mexico — the deadliest year since 2014, when IOM started gathering data. Even so, IOM recognized that the actual statistics could be much higher.
One morning when we awoke, I couldn’t find Ecuador. Or Guate. In the room where they’d been, the beds were made and everything was tidy, as if they hadn’t even slept there. Their Mexican phone lines had ceased working. I have no idea what became of them.
On the tenth day of the journey, the coyote’s employees brought the rest of us out by car, two by two.
Our last guides built a pyre on the bank of the Rio Grande, and threw our clothes and other nonessentials on.
“You’re not going to need any of this over there, anyway,” one of the guides said.
We watched as the night burned. In a plastic bag, I’d stashed my phone, a $10 bill and my Cuban ID card. In order not to lose it at the border, I’d already sent my passport ahead to the United States with a Mexican guide for $100. The rest of my things, backpack included, went into the fire.
Crossing the river requires agility. The people who planned all this for us calculated the exact moment at which the river would be lowest, with a calm current. We entered the river in a line, with a guide ahead of us. To our waists. Quickly.
And I didn’t know how to swim.
For 20 minutes, I focused on balancing, placing one foot in front of the other. On not letting myself be swept away by the water. On staying alive.
Edel Rodriguez for the Texas Observer in partnership with palabra
A month earlier, nine migrants had died trying to cross the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, likely quite near where I crossed. Due to rain, the river had risen two feet in a day. Two months earlier, a 5-year-old Guatemalan girl drowned after being torn from her mother’s arms by a rip current. This was distressing. I tried not to think about them.
On the other side, amid the weeds, some people changed into dry clothes. I was wearing all I had. Soaked.
We walked alongside a security fence without knowing toward what. We followed a path through the brush for a couple of hours, until the authorities found us. The day dawned. I’d been on the road for 11 days. The border guards at Eagle Pass, Texas, arranged us by country of origin. All around, I saw ragged people, exhausted faces.
In a prison bus, we were taken to an immigration processing center everyone called The Icebox. The temperature felt below freezing the whole time there.
On a form, I printed my father’s address and the rest of my information, and joined a line where officials checked us in, leaving us with just our pants and t-shirts. An officer ordered me to hand over my shoelaces, saying, “They’re wet.” He threw them out, I imagine to avoid me using them as a weapon.
I stood in another endless line to have my fingerprints taken, and to have my shipwrecked face photographed for the only document I’d possess in the United States for a substantial time.
And on to the men’s cell. Two days there. No watch. No sense of time. No bars. Through a transparent door, I could see the officers. A porta-potty sat inside the cell. Again, so many mattresses on the floor that there was no room for our shoes. I snuggled under the disposable blanket they gave me, but couldn’t withstand the cold. I could only tell if it was day or night by looking through a tiny hole in the roof.
The most exciting thing to happen was mealtime. We deciphered whether it was breakfast or lunch by the size of the burritos. They also gave us apples, and boxes of raisins that I saved underneath my mattress to have something to eat later.
I was called to take a sample of my saliva. A year and a half later, I’d find out it was to get my DNA to send to the FBI. But in that moment, one thinks of nothing else besides getting out of there.
Inside, the migrants around me seemed happy, laughing and chatting, impatient to be freed. That hamster cage was — finally — the United States, after all. And outside, as they said, everything would be much better.
Jesús Jank Curbelo is a Cuban writer and journalist. He has collaborated with Latin American press outlets such as Cosecha Roja, Caretas and the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo. He has also published a novel, Los Perros. @jankcurbelo
Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban-American artist who has exhibited internationally. Born in Havana, Rodriguez and his family boarded a boat in 1980 and left for Miami during the Mariel boatlift. Socialist propaganda, western advertising, island culture, and contemporary city life are all aspects of his life that continue to inform his work. He has created over a hundred newspaper, magazine, and book covers. His artwork has received numerous awards from The Art Director’s Club and The Society of Illustrators in New York City. (Portrait by Deborah Feingold) @edelrodriguezstudio
Lygia Navarro is an award-winning disabled journalist working in narrative audio and print. She has reported from across Latin America, as well as on Latine stories in the United States and Europe. Lygia has reported for The American Prospect, Business Insider, Marketplace, The World, Latino USA, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Christian Science Monitor, The Associated Press, and Afar, among other outlets. She has also worked as a podcast producer, and her work has been supported by many grants and fellowships. @lygianavarro