One of the goals of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Cuba—including a comprehensive oil embargo, expanded U.S. Defense Department contingency planning, a U.S. indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, and increasing calls on Capitol Hill for a military intervention—is to foment internal dissent that would lead to the toppling of the communist regime on the island. But the efforts have failed so far because emigration, Cuba’s most reliable release valve for dissent, remains functional despite U.S. efforts to shut it down.
In previous periods of political and economic crisis, most Cuban migrants went to the United States. But a growing share is now heading to Latin America, including Brazil and Mexico. These destination countries bear the downstream costs of U.S. policy toward Cuba, giving them leverage that could shape their responses to Washington’s future actions in the hemisphere.
One of the goals of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Cuba—including a comprehensive oil embargo, expanded U.S. Defense Department contingency planning, a U.S. indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, and increasing calls on Capitol Hill for a military intervention—is to foment internal dissent that would lead to the toppling of the communist regime on the island. But the efforts have failed so far because emigration, Cuba’s most reliable release valve for dissent, remains functional despite U.S. efforts to shut it down.
In previous periods of political and economic crisis, most Cuban migrants went to the United States. But a growing share is now heading to Latin America, including Brazil and Mexico. These destination countries bear the downstream costs of U.S. policy toward Cuba, giving them leverage that could shape their responses to Washington’s future actions in the hemisphere.
This changing migration pattern is largely the result of the Trump administration’s restrictive approach to relations with the island. Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has implemented a maximum pressure campaign against Cuba and imposed limits on Cuban emigration to the United States.
The White House has included Cuba on a list of 39 countries subject to full or partial travel restrictions, as well as on a list of 75 countries facing an indefinite freeze on visa processing. It also terminated a humanitarian parole program designed to facilitate eligible Cubans’ legal entry into the United States and ended bilateral migration talks that occurred regularly under former U.S. President Joe Biden.
These measures mark a departure from decades of U.S. policy. In the years following the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s, there were repeated outflows of Cuban migrants during periods of crisis. The United States was the primary destination.
Early episodes included the 1965 Camarioca boatlift, during which Cuban leader Fidel Castro, seeking to rid the island of dissidents, allowed Cubans with relatives in the United States to depart from the northern port of Camarioca. Several thousand Cubans left the island this way and were assisted by the U.S. Coast Guard. The boat crossings were later ended by a U.S.-Cuba agreement establishing the more formal Freedom Flights program, which consisted of twice-daily flights between the two countries that ultimately brought hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees to the United States.
“Those who seek refuge here will find it,” declared U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in October 1965, as thousands of Cubans sought to escape the Castro regime. Johnson’s comments—and his later passage of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which granted lawful permanent residency to Cuban natives residing in the United States for at least a year—established the United States as the default landing place for future Cuban migrants.
Subsequent policies reinforced the United States’ preferential treatment of Cubans, including the 1995 “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which allowed Cuban migrants who reached U.S. soil without visas to stay and apply for permanent residency, while those intercepted at sea were generally returned home.
Later waves of migration followed a similar pattern. The 1980 Mariel boatlift—a larger, more chaotic version of the Camarioca boatlift—saw an estimated 125,000 Cubans leave the island. Years later, the 1994 Balsero crisis unfolded during Cuba’s so-called “special period,” when roughly 35,000 Cubans fled severe economic depression caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout these episodes, Cuban authorities allowed large-scale departures to alleviate domestic pressure. The latest exodus, which began in 2021, has seen between 1 and 2 million Cubans leave, according to most estimates.
The Trump administration’s policies toward Cuba have only exacerbated the island’s humanitarian situation, creating the conditions for a continuation of an exodus already underway.
Shortly after taking office for his second term, Trump issued an executive order stating that “the policies, practices, and actions” of the Cuban government “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” owing to Havana’s ties with U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia. As a result of Trump’s hard-line Cuba policy, including a monthslong U.S. oil embargo, the island’s economic situation has further deteriorated. Inflation is soaring, basic goods are scarce, fuel is gone, and Cuba’s aging power grid is nearing collapse.
The Trump administration has so far been successful in keeping Cuban migrants from entering the United States. Irregular border encounters with Cuban migrants have dropped by 99 percent compared to similar periods under Biden. But data from elsewhere in the hemisphere indicate that Cubans are still leaving the island in large numbers, albeit for new destinations.
In Brazil, Cuban asylum applications nearly doubled from 22,288 in 2024 to 41,919 in 2025, making Cubans 55 percent of all asylum-seekers in the country and the single largest nationality group among applicants. A March 2026 report from the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Displacement Tracking Matrix found that net regular Cuban migration into Brazil nearly tripled over the same period, with no negative monthly balances recorded throughout 2025. Cubans now enter primarily through Guyana, for which they do not need a visa, before crossing into Brazil’s northern state of Roraima and continuing south toward São Paulo and Paraná for work, according to the IOM report.
Farther north, in Mexico, Cubans accounted for 23 percent of all humanitarian visitor cards issued by Mexican immigration authorities from January through November 2024. From January through July 2025, that number jumped to 78 percent—the clearest signal that Cubans are entering the Mexican asylum pipeline in numbers that Mexico has never experienced. Cuban shares of temporary and permanent residence cards also rose during the same 2024 and 2025 time periods, from 7 to 8 percent and from 9 to 16 percent, respectively, suggesting that an earlier cohort is settling in Mexico rather than transiting the country.
In Uruguay, meanwhile, the National Directorate of Migration recorded Cubans as the largest single foreign nationality requesting residency in 2025. Spain, where 2025 figures are not yet available, has likewise seen sustained growth in Cuban arrivals through both asylum applications and the citizenship-by-descent provisions of the country’s 2022 Democratic Memory Law.
Cubans have redirected themselves to these countries because they offer legal entry pathways, work authorization while immigration cases are pending, and established Cuban communities to facilitate arrival.
The shift in Cuban migration patterns could complicate the Trump administration’s hemispheric strategy. If Cubans were heading to Argentina, Chile, or El Salvador—all led by right-wing presidents who are friendly with Trump—the new destination states would be ready-made partners for the administration. Instead, Cubans are mostly settling in Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay—all of which are governed by left-leaning presidents whose disputes with Washington over migration, trade, and policy toward Cuba are matters of public record.
The leverage that these governments gain from absorbing more Cuban migrants could be considerable. Hosting large numbers of Cuban migrants could strain asylum processing and the provision of public resources and services—real economic costs of the United States’ Cuba policy that might empower countries to demand concessions in bilateral negotiations with Washington over trade, migration, or other priorities.
More immediately, the Trump administration’s hard-line approach to addressing migration in the hemisphere hinges on safe third-country agreements, forced third-country transfers, and bilateral agreements enabling deportation flights. Countries that are absorbing a significant number of Cubans, such as Brazil and Mexico, have even less incentive to participate in the U.S. migration framework. In fact, the only country that currently plays a significant role in regional Cuban migration and is aligned with the United States is Guyana, which attended the Shield of the Americas summit in March.
Havana has been here before. After allowing—and occasionally encouraging—a Cuban exile community to grow in Miami as a short-term survival strategy, the Cuban government found itself facing a formidable and durable anti-Castro lobby that gained real power in U.S. politics. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American who has long been critical of the island’s government, is only the most prominent example.
Growing Cuban diasporas in São Paulo, Mexico City, and Montevideo could seed analogous communities—though whether they cohere into anti-Castro pressure groups or assimilate into political cultures less hostile to the regime in Havana remains an open question.
Either way, the pressure those expatriates generate will be filtered through governments that are not partners in the United States’ containment strategy. Miami’s exiles live in a country already inclined to regime change in Cuba. The new diaspora is settling in countries whose alignment with Washington is conditional, negotiable, and increasingly fraught.
