Cuba’s population in freefall as Biden-Harris open border sparks mass exodus

This rueful joke has made its way around Cuba for decades: A foreign tourist, soaking up what he thinks are the advances of the communist revolutio꧃n, stops a kid in the street for a chat.

“What do you ജwant to be when you grow up?” the visitor asks.

“A foreigner,” answers the young Cuban.

Morbid humor has long been the staple of communist regimes, f🌠rom Czechos꧋lovakia to the Soviet Union, from China to the once-prosperous Caribbean island of Cuba.

People who have lived through communism, with its alternating bouts of horrors and tedium,💧 say it is one way to deal with such surreal surroundings.

But today, the joke meant to pour scorn on Cuba’s miserable conditions has become reality: Between 2022 and 2023, 10% of all Cubans have fled their social🤪ist paradise to liv𒁏e elsewhere.

That’s more than one million people, and most of them have come to the United States, courtesy of President Biden’s open-border policies and the miserable r▨ecord of his “border czar,” Vice President Kamala Harris.

They’re not just washing ashore inౠ Florida; many, many Cubans are showing up a♌t the southern border and waltzing right in.

These sad demographic facts were announced last week by Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, the head of the Cuba’s National Statistics and Information Office, at what &nb⭕sp;♌as a “somber moment” during a session of the rubber-stamp National Assembly.

It gets worse: The flight of 1,011,269 desperate Cubans contributed the lion’s share to the island’s massive drop in population, but wasn’t the only factor.

Deaths ൩far outnumbered births in Cu🐟ba in 2022 — 405,512 deaths versus 284,900 births.

It appears that the woeful medical conditions on the island with “free health care,” combined with such hopelessness t🌠hat couples no longer want to have children, have also shrunk Cuba’s population.

To make matters even more dire, the country’s socialist leaders have decided to double down on ce𝕴ntral planning, cracking down on what little of the private sector exists in Cuba, the Herald reported.

Cuba had already lost w๊ell over a million of her sons and daughters followi🍰ng the communist takeover in 1959.

Until then, Cuba had been a place of immigrants, not a country of emigrants.

Close to 800,000 Spaniards went to Cuba in the f🐽irst three decades of the 20th century,.

They followed other💃 hundreds of thousands who went to the island in the last half of the 19th century, during E🅠urope’s great outward migration.

For a small e𒉰xample, 13 of my 16 great-great-grandparents were born in either Spain or France.

Angel Castr🐟o, father of longtime tyrants Fidel and Raul Castro, was another one of those Spaniards (one who obviously should have stayed put).

But what European in his right mind ꦯwould emigrate to Cuba today?

Who, of any country?

Hait𒅌i, where cannibal gan💧gs roam the streets, is 50 miles away.

There are no Haitian immigrants to Cuba.

Meanwhile, Democr𝐆ats have created a powerful pull factor.

While political and economic conditions are awful in Cuba, they have been for over six decade෴s.

But since Biden took office and created a mass legal paro🐎le program that allows anyone to come to the United States, the exodus from Cuba has exploded.

Some 645,122 Cubans have entered the under Biden’s program, according t🧔o reports. And that’s not counting unknown numbers of “gotaways.”

“We have no idea who so🦩me of these p♛eople are. We have no idea if they have criminal records,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) .

And the illegal entrants are receivi🤡nꦺg generous benefits — infuriating immigrants who did it the right way, Rubio noted.

“One of the things I see a 🌸lot in South Florida are people that have been in this country, maybe they came from Cuba 45 years ago, they’ve worked here their entire lives,” the senator, the son of Cuban immigrants, said.  

“And then they run into somebody who just got here from Cuba three months ago, who’s 29 years old, doesn’t work, and is given $1,500 a month in benefits by our government because they’re a refugee. That refugee, a year later, is traveling back to Cuba 15 times🍌.” 

Nobody understand𓃲s better than an Ameriಞcan of Cuban ancestry the dire conditions of communism.

But the mess that Biden and Harris have created fixes things💙 for nobody, least of all the little Cuban boy in the old joke.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the co-author of “NextGen Marxism.”