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The Secret Agenda between Washington and Havana

Does it include a mass deportation of Cubans from the US?

Joe Garcia describes eight issues on the table including: political prisoners, the embargo, confiscated properties, internal reforms, and financial reintegration.

By Yunior Garcia Aguilera (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES – Much has been speculated in recent weeks about the secret agenda between Havana and Washington. But now, for the first time with this level of detail, a source with access to officials from both governments is putting a concrete roadmap on the table. Businessman and former Democratic congressman Joe García speaks of eight points ranging from the release of political prisoners to the lifting of the embargo. At the center of this possible negotiation, however, appears an issue thornier than any diplomatic gesture: the return to the Island of up to 500,000 Cubans currently living in the United States.

The figure alone is enough to shake both sides of the Florida Straits. Half a million people are not an abstract category in a federal file. They are families, workers, people who arrived under humanitarian parole, asylum seekers, and individuals with pending immigration cases. It would also include individuals deemed inadmissible because they committed crimes. Lumping them all together may be politically useful, but humanly dangerous.

In an article published by The Palm Beach Post, Garcia identifies eight main points in the conversations between the United States and Cuba: the release of more than 1,000 political prisoners, economic reforms, compensation for confiscated properties, political reforms, lifting the embargo, Cuba’s readmission into multilateral organizations, Most Favored Nation status, and the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Cubans.

This would therefore not be a simple immigration arrangement, but a return to the chessboard of the entire bilateral........

© Havana Times