14ymedio, Havana, 18 December 2023 – Pictures of Diosmary, a 49 year-old Cuban who lives in the airport at Palma, on the Spanish island of Mallorca, accompanied headlines in the local papers this week. In her story of how she arrived there, what her migrant status is, and what she can do next, nothing is very clear apart from the pictures themselves – which show her with just one single suitcase, a coat and a few carrier bags.
“The Cuban Girl” – as she’s called by the newspapers, hoping to garner sympathy for her plight – says that she travelled to Spain in 2012 and that her travel documentation has been in a legal limbo ever since then. She boarded an aircraft as the partner of a Cuban who had Spanish citizenship, but who, she says, later abandoned her.
According to Diosmary – who doesn’t give her surname at any time, although she does say she was born in Pinar del Río – she had got married at the Spanish Consulate in Havana, with the intention of settling in the European country with her husband. However, on arrival on the peninsular the plan fell through and she says she went through innumerable difficulties, many of them to do with her immigration status.
At the time of telling her story at the immigration office, the woman offers a version somewhat riddled with ambiguities
Despite the photographs published by the Balearic press (Diario de Mallorca and Última Hora) clearly showing Diosmary’s situation, at the time of telling her story at the immigration office, the woman offers a version somewhat riddled with ambiguities.
To begin with, she says, the Spanish Consul in Havana asked her, before granting her a visa, for a letter of invitation from someone resident in Spain – this was obligatory even before the migration reforms which came into force in January 2013, but it was the Cuban government which demanded it. Without it, she says, they warned her that she could not return to Cuba, unless it
