How bad is Cuba, really?
09.28.2006I like stats. And for a sidenote on something else, I came up w/ these numbers that really made me pause. It was on the question of Cuban defection, and whether it was really a problem. After all, is Cuba really that bad? I mean, we know people risk their lives to flee the island every year, but what else do we know?
So. I went to the USCRI (US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants) website & looked up their more recent 2003 figures for Cuban refugees. The number of Cuban refugees in 2003 was 28,200. Most went to Mexico, followed by the US (mostly Miami), followed by a few other countries in the hemisphere. That's a lot. But what does that number mean? If we take the 2006 estimated Cuban population (11.4 million), and divide the 2003 refugee figure by the 2006 population estimate, we get almost one quarter of one percent of the total population. Doesn't sound like much, does it?
Let's compare it to the US casualty figures for the Second World War, which was 0.32% of total population. But that was spread out over five years (1941-1945). The total KIA figures for US forces in Vietnam was 58,239 spread out over fifteen years, for an average of just under 4,000 per year.
That means that Cuba has lost in 2003 as refugees a figure seven times the average number of US battlefield casualties in Vietnam & something on the magnitude of twice the per capita US casualty rate in World War II. But that's been going on in Cuba (the refugee problem) for the past five decades. So. How bad is Cuba, really?
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ADDENDUM: The US has, since the 1990s, agreed to admit as many as 20,000 Cubans a year into the US. In 1994, more than 435,000 (4 percent of Cuba's population) applied for visas to the United States.
Posted by Miguel at 02:53 PM
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