Will Intervention Cause a Migration Crisis in Cuba?
The risk is real, but another Mariel is less likely than Washington assumes
I’m excited to share our first guest post on Popular by Design from Gil Guerra. Gil does some of the best migration research around at the Niskanen Center, grounded in hard demographic data, and it shows in his feel for what actually drives people to move. I found his read on the potential Cuban migration persuasive and constructive without being complacent. Follow Gil and his new work at Points of Entry.
Speaking on Face the Nation this past Sunday, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued that the greatest national security risk posed by Cuba to the United States is another massive refugee outflow along the lines of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. This sentiment has been approvingly echoed by established experts as an inevitable contingency the United States will have to deal with if it does intervene on the island.1
While no one can predict the future with certainty, this point seems intuitive at first glance. Cuba has a well-established history of weaponizing migration toward the United States, and the Syrian Civil War has ingrained the association between violent conflict and mass immigration in people’s minds.
But on a closer look, the specifics that govern how large a Cuban departure wave can actually get all point in a generally conservative direction. Four features of the present moment should make us rethink the conventional wisdom and expectations around another Cuban migration crisis.
The people most likely to leave a crisis have largely already left. Migration waves recruit disproportionately from the young, the working-age, and the mobile, and Cuba has spent four years exporting precisely that cohort. The regime conceals the magnitude (it counts emigrants as residents until they have been gone two years) but an independent reconstruction by the demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos puts the actual resident population near 8.62 million and total departures since 2021 at roughly 1.79 million, a figure consistent with Cuban arrival counts in the United States and elsewhere.
Composition matters more than the total here. An estimated 77 percent of recent Cuban migrants are between 15 and 49, a slight majority of them women. The Cubans who remain on the island today are older, sicker, poorer, and likelier to stay. A recent estimate I authored for the Niskanen Center caps a weaponized scenario at 60–75 percent of a Mariel-equivalent event on these grounds alone.
The regime has reduced incentives to encourage irregular migration. Cuba has a long record of wielding migration as a coercive instrument before, and part of the reason it worked according to political scientist Kelly Greenhill is because this type of coercion played on American humanitarian concerns and domestic political pressures over the treatment of Cuban migrants.
Whether you agree with the administration’s positions or not, it’s hard to argue that they are overly concerned with migrant wellbeing or popular approval. In our present state of affairs, any attempt to facilitate (let alone actively encourage) irregular migration would almost certainly be treated as casus belli by a White House seemingly itching for an excuse to intervene.
The calculus might change in the event of American military action on the island, but as I’ll argue in a forthcoming paper for Florida International University, we haven’t seen a migratory surge out of Venezuela following Operation Absolute Resolve, and Venezuela has a much larger population and geography that is better suited for mass migration.
Migrants would have only one feasible route, and the United States should be prepared for it. During both the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the 1994 Balsero crisis, the United States largely had to scramble to mount an adequate response under the pressure of a migrant wave that was already underway. In the present day, the Coast Guard appears to be running its standing maritime interdiction program (Operation Vigilant Sentry) at an elevated level. The most recent public disclosure from 2024 put our assets in the area at roughly eighty cutters against a baseline of thirteen. It’s possible, but unlikely, that the administration has wound this down given how telegraphed its willingness to confront Cuba has been so far.
While recent migration waves from Cuba have come by other means, at present the sea is the only theater where a mass migration event could take place. The 2021-2024 spike in Cuban encounters came from Cuban flights through countries like Nicaragua followed by travel on foot to the southern border. Nicaragua revoked visa-free access for Cubans in February 2026, and Mexico has stepped up interior enforcement to stop migrants from reaching the border.
Thus, migrants determined to leave Cuba for the U.S. will have to take their chances via the Florida Straits, where chances of interception are high and where their ability to leave at all will have to clear difficult hurdles like vessel quality and availability and favorable weather conditions. The fact that the dire conditions Cubans are currently experiencing on the island haven’t led to more irregular migration attempts suggests that Cubans are pricing in these factors in their decisions on whether to try to leave, which is the subject of the final constraint.
Cuban migrants have no reason to expect their journey will end well. Migration responds to expected outcomes, not to push factors alone, and the expected outcome for a Cuban reaching the United States in 2026 is an unpleasant detention and removal.
Every pathway that structured the last wave is closed: CHNV parole has been terminated, CBP One has been shut down, the Cuban Family Reunification Parole program was also terminated (but is in active litigation), a travel ban is in force, USCIS processing for Cuban nationals is paused, and the Cuban Adjustment Act is functionally inert.
A prospective migrant weighing the crossing confronts a harder route and a near-certain unfavorable result at the end of it, and that calculus dampens the pull even when the push is acute. The underlying factor that convinced many Cubans to undertake the treacherous maritime route to the United States during previous migrant crises was the “Wet foot, dry foot” policy, which guaranteed them a reasonable chance to pursue legal residency if they could reach the United States. No equivalent to this exists today, and there is no reason to expect one to appear in the near future.
What should the U.S. do? No one can be fully sure of whether a migrant wave will occur after a hypothetical conflict in Cuba or how large such a wave would be. But the administration can do two things now to ensure that minimal harm befalls ordinary Cubans seeking to leave the island if a military conflict does trigger a significant exodus.
The first is for White House officials and civil and military planners to craft a more detailed and long-term migration mitigation strategy on the island. The plan that exists now seems to be a holding pen: the head of SOUTHCOM has testified it would support DHS in a Cuban migrant crisis by standing up a camp at Guantánamo Bay. This answers where an outflow goes but not what happens once migrants get there. A camp without pre-set screening criteria, release standards, and a defined endpoint makes the base a ticking detention problem. Contingency planning here is prudent, and seemingly incomplete.
The second is that the administration, in partnership with Congress and with the help of the South Florida delegation in particular, should be negotiating third-country humanitarian arrangements for Cubans now, while flows are low, rather than improvising them under the pressure of a wave. Brazil, Uruguay, and Spain are already informally absorbing the redirected Cuban flow. Structured agreements that include specifics like resettlement slots, orderly processing, and burden-sharing in exchange for diplomatic and economic considerations would convert an unmanaged diversion into a managed one and free Washington from the hard choice of taking fleeing migrants ourselves or leaving them trapped on the island. The time to build that channel is before the boats are in the water.
By “intervention”, I am referring to comparatively restrained scenarios that range from targeted strikes, a naval blockade, or a limited regime-change operation conducted offshore. A full-scale occupation and ground campaign would have a more unpredictable effect on the considerations listed below, but would not alter their fundamental nature.
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