Cuba to Guyana, a peek in migrant’s world

Jul 12, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

Hard Truths by GHK Lall

(Kaieteur News) – Rain or shine, they are out there before first light. Cubans. In ones and twos and threes. Walking abreast. Waiting at an unmarked bus stop. Cubans and more Cubans. The number of them that is around in Guyana, the government is not saying. Maybe, they don’t matter now. Perhaps, they will, as it gets closer to 2030, and their numbers swell. The PPP has never let a vote go wasted. Who cares about illegals and eligibility? There are solutions for those situations. Remember 2025.

I pass a batch of people and know that they are Cubans. Their reactions to Roberto Delgado, Tito Puente, or Carmen Miranda playing on the set give them away. Brazil, Harlem, or other roots, just play. It’s the life of a people unrooted by hardship and hurled by the winds of desperation to find a way out of their trials. Guyana is the place to be. The airport may be the easiest barrier to scale. Thereafter the language, the culture, the opportunities can be formidable, each in its own turn. For a migrant hungering for any opening, opportunity is all that he or she seeks. The price will always be right. No matter how much tricked. How often cheated. Illegals have no standing. Employers in Guyana and America, usually all over, know when to twist the knife. How long to hang a worker on the masthead of his hunger. His willingness to do almost anything to get a little something.

The jobs are there. For Guyanese are in a throwback mode. Hours too long. Money too small. Too many days of that; that time is done. Get a Cuban. Grab another cold one and a smoke. The day is just warming up. Cubans running to Guyana to sell their labor. Guyanese running away from honest labor. Not taking ownership of their inheritance. The preference is for a platter to be place before them, by others at their beck and call. Guyanese millionaires can afford to live large. But not run-of-the-mill locals. They removed themselves out of the job market. Prefer some quick, side hustle. Cubans and Venezuelans, rush in to fill the labour vacuum created.

To use Wall Street parlance, it’s a buyer’s market. Employers hold all the cards, notwithstanding serious worker shortages. It depends on who is more desperate than whom. That is, who can’t afford to let an opportunity to snare some cheap labour go by. Versus those who cannot risk ending their day with nothing to show for it. There’s rent to be paid. The children need bread. The backlog of bills is not taking a holiday. What holiday, when passports may have been part of the hard exchange? Put differently, no longer in its owner’s possession. Business doesn’t operate on emotion. Coldblooded ruthlessness is an asset. Saw such in action in the Big Apple: some got a bigger bite. Some got no bite at all. The weak, those with no standing, often got savagely bitten. The rat race has to have its casualties.

In transformed boomtown Guyana, I see Cubans, hear Cubans, know Cubans. Home. School. Church. Their experiences bring back memories of decades gone by. Starting at the bottom. Working to separate from it. Trying to make it to the top. The clawing, the fighting, the pushing down to keep stuck to the bottom. The exploiters. The schemers. The hucksters. Guyana has them, or it wouldn’t be Guyana. When a man has wife and children, he has given hostages to fortune. It may be Balzac. It is migrant Guyana. In Florida, there is Little Havana. In Guyana, there could be a series of mini-Cubas. The numbers are present. They numbers will keep swelling.

Good for a homeowner. Better for a storeowner. Still better for a contractor looking for cheap labour. Skilled and unskilled. No is not part of a migrant vocabulary. Take it from me. Profit for some, pain for the many, the weary and unwary. Hope has a spring in the human breast that never runs dry. See a migrant on the move, and there’s all the proof that’s needed.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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