Despite the threat of imprisonment in Cuba and the dangers of sea swells, storms, drowning, sharks, dehydration, and starvation, increasing numbers of Cubans still try to cross the ninety miles of ocean between Havana and Florida each year. According to the Pew Research Center, 43,635 Cuban refugees entered the United States in 2015, and that number was surpassed in 2016 by October. In recent years, many Cuban refugees have skipped America’s “Wet Foot, Dry Foot” policy altogether and chosen to fly or sail from Cuba to Mexico or Ecuador, and then walk north into America—an alternate route observers nicknamed “Dusty Foot.” But as more and more countries south of the United States close their borders, more Cubans are heading back into the Straits of Florida on homemade boats and rafts. Again, according to the Pew Research Center, 9,999 Cuban refugees entered the United States through the Miami sector in 2015. That same year, the US Coast Guard apprehended 3,505 Cubans at sea. And there is no way of telling how many Cubans die in the attempt each year. In 1994, the year of Isabel’s story, an estimated three out of every five Cuban refugees who attempted the journey died at sea.
In 2014, President Barack Obama and Cuban president Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother, announced that Cuba and the United States were reestablishing relations with each other, and in 2015 President Obama announced that formal diplomatic relations between the two countries would resume, including the reopening of their respective embassies in Havana and Washington, DC. As a part of the normalization of relations, the US government relaxed travel restrictions that had barred most Americans from visiting Cuba, and in August 2016 the first commercial flight from America to Cuba since 1962 landed in Havana. On January 12, 2017, in one of his last acts in office, President Obama announced the immediate end of the “Wet Foot, Dry Foot” policy. How these changes to US-Cuban relations—and the death of Fidel Castro on November 25, 2016—will affect the future of Cuba and its people remains to be seen.
MAHMOUD
As I write this, Syria is in its sixth year of one of the most brutal and vicious civil wars in history. The city of Aleppo, Mahmoud’s hometown, lies in ruins today because it is home to a large group of rebels who oppose Bashir al-Assad’s war on his own people. The city is under siege, pounded daily by Russian air attacks and Syrian army artillery. If they didn’t leave by 2015, when Mahmoud and his family went on the run, the remaining citizens of Aleppo are now trapped in a war zone. According the United Nations, more than 470,000 people have been killed since the conflict began in 2011. That’s roughly equal to the entire population of Atlanta, Georgia. And more people are dying every day. In just one week of fighting in September 2016, the United Nations reported the deaths of ninety-six children. That’s like an entire grade level of children dying every week. In a major offensive in December 2016, the Syrian army conquered an estimated 95 percent of Aleppo’s rebel-held territory, spurring a new humanitarian crisis as hundreds of thousands more civilians were caught in the crossfire. Fighting in Aleppo continues today.
And those who survive often have nowhere to live. The Guardian newspaper estimates 40 percent of the city’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. Whole neighborhoods lie in ruins. Markets, restaurants, shops, apartment buildings—nothing has been spared. Almost no one goes to work anymore, or to school. Every tree in the city has been cut down for firewood, and when they ran out of trees, the Syrians had to burn school desks and chairs to heat their homes. Hospitals, if they still stand, have no medicine or equipment to treat patients.
It’s no wonder then that more than 10 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes. Of those 10 million, the United Nations estimates that 4.8 million Syrians have left their country as refugees. That’s more people than live in the entire state of Connecticut, or Kentucky, or Oregon. And more are fleeing every day, leaving behind everything they owned and everything they knew, just to escape the war and bloodshed. Just to survive.
But where do they go? The United Nations reports that Turkey is already home to more than 2.7 million registered Syrian refugees, many of them in refugee camps like the one in Kilis that Mahmoud and his family pass through. Other countries in the region, like Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, have all received huge numbers of Syrian refugees, but their resources are stretched to the limit, and public sentiment in many countries has turned against the influx of immigrants. Millions more refugees try to reach Europe, where countries like Germany and Sweden and Hungary have accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees. But getting there is difficult, and often deadly. According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 3,770 refugees died trying to cross the Mediterranean by boat in 2015. And once they reach the European Union, refugees still face persecution and imprisonment from countries that don’t want to deal with them or don’t have the resources to handle the huge influx of people. Hungary was the first country to build a fence to keep out Middle Eastern refugees walking north, and more and more countries are building walls. Even Austria, which has been incredibly welcoming to refugees, began building a fence in 2016.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, between October 1, 2011, and December 31, 2016, the United States admitted just 18,007 Syrian refugees—less than one half of 1 percent of all Syrian refugees who have resettled in other countries. On January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, indefinitely suspending the entry of all Syrian refugees into the United States. The Executive Order was titled, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” despite a report by the Cato Institute that says that no person accepted to the United States as a refugee, Syrian or otherwise, has been implicated in a major fatal terrorist attack since the Refugee Act of 1980 established the current system for accepting refugees into the United States. The states of Washington and Minnesota have challenged the executive order in court, but as I write this, the outcome—and the future of Syrian refugees in the United States—remains unclear.
The experiences of Mahmoud and his family are based on things that really happened to different Syrian refugees. In 2015, a group of about three hundred refugees who had been detained at a Danish school/refugee camp finally had enough of being held for no reason. As one, they marched up the highway toward Sweden, forming a human chain that stopped traffic. And cheering bystanders really did stand on overpasses and toss down food and water. A similar protest took place in Hungary a week before, when thousands of refugees marched from Budapest to the border of Austria. I have combined the two events in this book.
Mahmoud and his mother and father are composites of different refugees I read about. But Waleed is specifically based on a now-famous photograph of a five-year-old boy from Aleppo named Omran Daqneesh. In the picture, Omran sits alone in the back of an ambulance after surviving an airstrike, his feet bare, his face bloody, his body covered in dirt and gray ash. He’s not crying. He’s not angry. Maybe he’s in shock—or maybe he’s just used to this. This is the only life he knows, because his country has been at war as long as he’s been alive. He is a member of what the United Nations warns will become a “lost generation” of Syrian children if nothing is done to help them now.