A Cuban from the eastern part of the island has been detained for six months in an immigration detention center in Russia, with no date for deportation and under constant pressure to enlist in the Russian Army and head to the front lines in the war in Ukraine.
His case was documented by journalist Claudia Padrón for Cubanet, who detailed the tragic story of Jannis del Toro Almenares, who left Cuba on February 10, 2026, from Varadero airport, convinced that he was traveling toward a job opportunity shared via Telegram.
The offer promised to pay for his ticket and initial accommodation, and he would repay the money once he started working.
Desperate to escape the misery in Santiago de Cuba, he accepted without much hesitation. After a 12-hour flight, he arrived in Moscow, where a taxi driver was waiting for him just as promised.
The journey, however, did not end in the Russian capital: for hours they traveled by road to Volgograd, a city in the southwest of the country, more than a thousand kilometers from Moscow.
The job promise was broken that very night.
According to Jannis's account to Cubanet via WhatsApp from his cell, they came at night and told him that they had not found any work for him, and that the only job available was selling drugs.
He pretended to accept in order to avoid reprisals, waited for the men to leave, and then fled to turn himself in to the police.
The authorities promised him deportation to Cuba, but that promise was not fulfilled either.
Six months without an exit and with only one offer: war
Since then, Jannis has been transferred between various detention centers: the first kept him incommunicado for about a month; the second, even more isolated, allowed him barely ten minutes of phone calls per day.
In June, she arrived at the center where she is currently staying.
“The only thing they give is macaroni, which we call coditos in Cuba, and a piece of bread. They bring both meals together, once a day. It’s always the same and everything is boiled,” he describes.
What overwhelms him the most is the systematic pressure to sign a military contract.
“The only thing they bring me are contracts to go to war. The guards offer me money and citizenship, but I don’t sign anything”, he stated. He claims that they are coercing him to become desperate and sign.
The mechanism described replicates a widely documented pattern.
According to an investigation by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty published in 2025, similar networks operate among migrants from Central Asia with ads offering high salaries and paid tickets, whose true purpose is to recruit drug couriers.
In the case of Cubans, the final destination is often the Ukrainian front.
The United Kingdom sanctioned in May 2026 the Cuban Dayana Echemendia Díaz, a resident of Ryazan, for recruiting compatriots through deception to send them to the front under coercion.
The Cuban Consulate: Silence and Indifference
Jannis has managed to communicate with the Cuban Consulate in Russia on only two occasions.
The first time, after three months in detention, when the officials informed him that his name did not appear on any list of Cubans pending deportation.
Only after that call was he added to the registry.
In May, he spoke again with consular representatives and requested help to return to the Island. The response was that there were no direct flights between Russia and Cuba and that a family member needed to buy him a ticket with a layover.
"I explained to them that I had no one to buy the ticket for me because my family is poor. They told me that, unfortunately, I would have to wait," he recalls.
Since then, their letters and calls have gone unanswered. “Everything is a lie. They don't care about us”, he laments.
A drama that repeats itself
The case of Jannis is not an isolated one. According to data from the Ukrainian project "I Want to Live," at least 93 Cubans have died fighting for Russia by January 2026, with an average survival time of only 150 days after deployment.
A report from the International Federation for Human Rights estimates that at least 20,000 Cubans have been sent to fight in Ukraine since 2023.
Due to the lack of a solution, Jannis has requested to be sent to Uzbekistan, as recently happened with another Cuban who was relocated to Tashkent believing they were returning to Cuba. He claims to have someone willing to receive him there.
Meanwhile, Jannis continues waiting in Volgograd, turning down the contracts they're bringing him and without the Cuban Consulate answering his calls.
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