Yoel Gallart Villalobos (June 19, 1979) has been detained since March 12 at a deportation center in Gulkévichi, in the Krasnodar region of the occupied Crimea, now Russian territory. He was turned over to the police by his mother-in-law to be sent back to Cuba after living in Russia for six years. To those considering flying from Havana to Moscow in search of a better future, he warns: "Go to another country, as they are detaining immigrants here."
Gallart does not have legal status in that country, but their three children were born there. As explained in an interview with CiberCuba from the deportation center, the children are being raised by their grandmother because their ex-partner has a severe alcohol dependency issue and barely takes care of the minors, who are two and a half, four, and five years old.
In the six years they were together as a couple, Gallart's wife did not want to formalize the situation with the father of her children, which ultimately deteriorated and broke their relationship. After the separation, he decided to continue living in the same building where he had resided with his ex-wife in order to keep seeing his children.
The neighbors, he claims, can attest to this, and they have been the ones helping him by sending money to the deportation center since, upon being detained, the Russian authorities canceled his bank card, and he currently has no documentation to prove that he is Cuban or that he has children in Russia.
All he asks for is not to be separated from his children. He wants to be with them in Cuba or in Sochi, the Russian city where his children were born and where he has lived all the time he has been illegally in Russia, working as a carpenter or at any job that came up in a tourist city, where it is impossible to regularize one's status as an immigrant. The only income that came into his mother-in-law's house was his, and he is worried about what his children might need at this moment.
Natural from Matanzas, Gallart does not recommend that other Cubans travel to Russia at this time because he asserts that there is a ongoing persecution of illegal immigrants. In fact, at the deportation center where he has been moved and where he has not received either consular assistance from Cuban authorities or legal aid from a Russian public defender, there is also a group of eight Cubans who were sent to that place after being detained in Krasnodar (Crimea).
Apart from Cubans, there are immigrants from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Arabs, and from all over the world. In his case, he would prefer not to be deported to Cuba, but if that were to happen, he is claiming custody of his children because he understands that after five years of separation imposed by his expulsion from the country, his relationship with his children could be severely damaged.
Although he has not been offered the opportunity to go to the war in Ukraine in exchange for regularizing his immigration status in Russia, he is aware of other immigrants who have received that offer. For now, he does not know what the future holds for him. The only thing he is sure of is that he wants to be with his children, either in Cuba or in Russia, but with them.
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