Walls, Borders and Flight

Walls, exit permits, internal passports and shoot-to-kill borders: how communist states kept citizens from leaving, and what became of those who fled.

• Leaving Cuba: How Castro's State Controlled Who Could Go

  For decades Cubans needed the state's permission to leave their own country. The exit permit ended in 2013 — but passport denials and travel bans did not.

• Cuba's Exodus: Six Decades of Refugee Waves

  From the first exiles of 1959 to Mariel, the 1994 rafters and the record exodus of 2022–23: how and why millions of Cubans have fled Castro's revolution.

• China's Hukou System: How the Party Tied Peasants to the Land

  Since 1958 China's household registration system has bound people to their birthplace, splitting citizens into urban and rural castes.

• The Berlin Wall and East Germany's Deadly Border

  Why East Germany walled in its own people: the flight of 2.7 million, the Berlin Wall, mines and a shoot-to-kill order — and the hundreds who died.

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