President Barack Obama on Thursday ended the possibility of automatic legal residency for any Cuban who touches U.S. soil. Those people who were in the middle of trips to get to the United States could be the biggest losers, some Cubans said.
"There are people who have sold houses, renounced everything, and today they are in limbo," said Leonardo Serrano, a 47-year-old who works for a firm that operates with private and government investment. "They won't be able to get there, and when they return they won't have anything."
Average Cubans and opponents of the island's communist leaders said they expected pressure for reform on the island to increase with the elimination of a mechanism that siphoned off the island's most dissatisfied citizens and turned them into sources of remittances supporting relatives who remained on the island.
The repeal of the "wet foot, dry foot" policy went into effect immediately after a Thursday afternoon announcement. It followed months of negotiations focused in part on getting Cuba to agree to take back people who had arrived in the U.S.
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