Yoani Sánchez denounces internal deportations of Cubans from Havana; Otaola slams regime’s ICE double standard

Yoani Sánchez has denounced internal deportations of Cubans from Havana after her own arrest. Most of the prisoners she saw in the police cell where she was held, she said, were “illegal” in the capital: people from other provinces with no Havana address on their ID cards, whom police forcibly send back to their place of origin.

The director of the independent digital newspaper 14ymedio was arrested on November 5 as she left her home in Nuevo Vedado, a detention Cubanos por el Mundo reported that same day. Three plainclothes men who, she said, never identified themselves put her in a patrol car and took her to the Fourth Station of the Revolutionary National Police (PNR) on Infanta Street, in Havana’s Cerro municipality. She was released almost nine hours later and the next day described in a video what she had seen inside.

Cubanos por el Mundo host Alex Otaola took up her account on Friday on his show Hola! Ota-Ola and set it against the Cuban regime’s propaganda about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Illegals” and “deportation,” the words in the cell

Sánchez said “most of the detainees at that police station were there for being illegal in Havana.” The mechanism, as she described it, is simple: an officer stops someone on the street, asks for their ID card and, if the address is not in the capital, arrests them and sends them back to their province.

She said the words she heard most in the cell were “illegals” and “deportation.” She spoke of a crackdown reaching every neighborhood in the city, with young people and people of all ages held for hours before being forcibly removed, and called it “discrimination based on provincial origin.”

Among the detainees, she said, were parents who had left their children in someone else’s care and people whose belongings were all in a house in Havana. She also described arrests of people who were simply in a different Havana municipality from the one listed on their ID card.

Police who freeze in front of State Security

The journalist devoted part of her account to the relationship between the PNR and the political police. All it took, she said, was for a plainclothes man to show his State Security credentials for the uniformed officers to freeze. “State Security is the real power in this country,” she said.

Sánchez said she demanded to file a kidnapping complaint against the men who detained her without identifying themselves. The response, according to her account, was to lock her in a cell.

On Friday, she reported on X that political police had set up an operation outside her building to keep her from leaving. A day earlier, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had demanded her release and framed the arrest as part of a broader campaign against the independent press, in a week when journalists Adelth Bonne Gamboa and Camila Acosta were also held for hours. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) documented 387 acts of repression in October.

A 1997 decree that makes Cubans “illegal” in their own country

The internal deportations Sánchez described rest on a rule nearly three decades old. Decree 217, signed in April 1997, set out “internal migration regulations for the City of Havana”: anyone arriving from another province needs authorization to register a residence in the capital, and those without it face fines and removal to their place of origin. A 2011 amendment created exceptions, but the controls remain in place.

Human Rights Watch has documented that the Cuban government uses the decree to restrict freedom of movement on the island and even to harass dissidents traveling to the capital.

State media acknowledged the practice days before Sánchez’s arrest. On November 1, the newspaper Tribuna de La Habana reported an Interior Ministry operation in every people’s council of San Miguel del Padrón that ended with 71 people taken to the municipality’s PNR unit. Alongside drug, prostitution and unpaid-fine cases, the official list included “undocumented persons and illegals in the capital with improper conduct.” The report did not say how many detainees fell into each category.

Otaola: “illegals in their own country”

For Otaola, the account portrays a regime that treats its own citizens as outsiders. “Illegals in their own country,” he said after playing the journalist’s video.

The host compared that with the situation of immigrants arrested in the United States. There, he argued, a family can search ICE’s database and find out whether a relative is still detained, has been deported, was released or is out on bond. In Cuba, he said, a prisoner’s relatives can spend months without knowing which prison holds them, until the authorities decide to tell them. ICE does run a public online detainee locator that families and lawyers can use to find people in its custody.

Otaola also addressed Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla. On July 7, at a UN General Assembly session on the U.S. embargo, the minister replied to U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz by showing photographs of ICE operations, including one of a five-year-old boy, and said no similar image of violent repression against protesters would be found in Cuba, according to the text of his remarks published by Cuban state media.

In the United States, the host noted, nobody deports a citizen of Ohio for living in Florida.

The deportee soap opera

Otaola also aired a scene he presented as part of a Cuban state television drama. In it, a man sent back from the United States is told he is not the only one: an acquaintance was returned with his whole family after they had sold everything, and his own relatives lament having done the same so he could leave.

According to Otaola, that is the new message of Cuban TV dramas: a cruel United States that expels people who risked everything. In his view, nobody asked those people to sell what they owned; many make those decisions on their own and, if things go wrong, blame the country that did not take them in. He accused the regime of having “the nerve to make this kind of content” while it deports Cubans within the island.

He closed with a point about the police who held Sánchez and the detainees she saw: they protect no one, whether critics of the regime or loyalists. “The Cuban police are not there to protect the Cuban people,” he said.

What we know about internal deportations from Havana

• Yoani Sánchez was detained on Thursday, November 5, in Havana and spent almost nine hours at the PNR’s Fourth Station in Cerro.
• On Friday, November 6, she denounced internal deportations from Havana: people from other provinces detained for not having an address in the capital and sent back to their place of origin.
• That same day she reported a police operation outside her building to keep her from leaving.
• Decree 217 of 1997 requires people arriving from other provinces to obtain authorization to live in Havana.
• On November 1, state media acknowledged arrests of “illegals in the capital” in an operation that ended with 71 people detained in San Miguel del Padrón.
• There are no official figures on how many people have been sent back to their provinces in this crackdown.

Have you or a family member been detained or sent back to your province for not having a Havana address? You can tell the Cubanos por el Mundo newsroom about your case through our tip form.