Havana/Although the arrival of migrants in Spain fell by 42.6% last year, the Canary Islands have established themselves as a key refuge for Cubans. Of the 63,800 established nationals of the Island, some 15,000 have obtained a Spanish passport as they are descendants of Canary Islands, according to official data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) portal.
This is the case of Griselle Lavandero, a 58-year-old Havana woman who arrived in Tenerife in 2004. The woman emigrated to her mother and her husband, tired of the blackouts, the lack of medicines, and the scarcity of fuel. “The situation in Cuba is desperate. We want this to end now, for this system to end,” he told the local newspaper. The Province. And he lamented: “The power, concentrated in the Castros, does not seem to have the slightest intention of making progress towards a democratic opening.”
The same media reported the feelings of Daly Rivas, a 48-year-old Cuban with ancestors from Granadilla de Abona and Los Realejos, now residing in the Canary Islands. The regime “is good at spying on the population and making those who have critical discourse disappear,” but they seem ineffective in the face of “a very serious problem: the spread of a series of viruses that is taking away many Cubans. There are no treatments, there are no medicines.”
“The migratory reality in the Canary Islands has a clearly marked view towards Latin America,” declared Arancha Méndez, from the Department of Fraternal Cooperation and Human Mobility of Cáritas Tenerife, to the newspaper Huffington Post. The specialist was referring to the fact that a good part of the population in the Spanish archipelago, in addition to people born in Cuba, are from Venezuela (88,600 people) and Colombia (54,300). “We emigrated a lot to the Island or Caracas at the time, and since then we have a very great connection,” he added.
The Italian news agency ANSA highlighted that the Cuban population in the Canary Islands “is mainly adults, people between 50 and 64 years old.”
The multiplication of the volume of Colombians in the Canary archipelago in recent years is striking. Between 2021 and 2025, they went from 16,308 registered to 32,381, that is, it doubled, and from then to now, they have increased by more than 20,000. Of the 54,300 current residents, 57.22% are women, mostly dedicated to the care and home sectors.
The Italian news agency ANSA highlighted that the Cuban population in the Canary Islands “is mainly adults, people between 50 and 64 years old, linked to citizenship recovery processes, and young people between 25 and 39 years old who are more recent arrivals.”
In addition, nearly 50,000 people in the Canary Islands could benefit from the extraordinary regularization process for migrants recently approved by the Government of Pedro Sánchez, which will grant “papers” to more than half a million people throughout the country.
According to data from the INE, a total of 14,390 Cubans obtained Spanish citizenship during the past year, a figure that places Cuba as the sixth most common nationality of origin among new Spaniards, only surpassed by Morocco, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras and Peru. At least 8,100 people from the Island arrived in Spain during the first four months of this year, bringing the total to 295,590 Cubans as of April.
