The Diplomat
A group of Cubans who want to take advantage of Spain’s so-called “grandchildren’s law” to obtain Spanish nationality have called a peaceful protest for Wednesday in front of the Cuban Foreign Ministry’s office of attention to the population, according to the Cuban website 14y medio.
The complaint, the protesters explained to the newspaper, is because the process of legalising documents in the Cuban office, which used to take a month, is now taking up to four months.
In order to shorten the process, they propose two measures to the ministry: to create “temporary offices for the legalisation of documents in the provincial capitals”, so that “there is less volume of documents in Havana”, and to hire more staff.
Cuba is the country where most people have obtained Spanish nationality under the new Law of Democratic Memory, which gives a wide range of Spanish descendants the option of obtaining it.
As of 31 January, according to the latest figures released by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 24,729 applications had been submitted to Spain’s 179 consular offices around the world, most of them in Latin America. Cuba, Argentina and Mexico, in that order, accounted for a total of 14,610 applications received and 4,774 nationalities registered.
