News · Society
Police announce 71 arrests in San Miguel del Padrón, among them people with no permit to live in Havana
Pro-government accounts publicized the operation across every People's Council of the Havana municipality; among those detained are, according to the authorities themselves, people 'undocumented and illegal in the capital', a category grounded in Decree-Law 217, according to 14ymedio and CiberCuba.
Police detained 71 people in an operation deployed across every People's Council of the Havana municipality of San Miguel del Padrón, according to pro-government accounts reported by 14ymedio and CiberCuba. Those detained were taken to the 11th Municipal Unit of the National Revolutionary Police.
The Facebook page Héroes de Azul said those detained include 'undocumented people, illegal in the capital, with disorderly conduct, drug possession, prostitution, possession of a bladed weapon, perpetrators of pending crimes, illicit economic activity and unpaid fines', according to 14ymedio, which noted the posts gave no further detail.
CiberCuba reported, citing the official newspaper Tribuna de La Habana, that the operation was carried out by the Interior Ministry, and noted that the police post on Facebook was deleted shortly after it appeared. The outlet stressed that the category 'undocumented and illegal in the capital' refers to Cuban citizens living in Havana without the administrative residence permit required by Decree-Law 217.
That decree, approved in April 1997, requires any Cuban from another province to seek prior authorization to settle in Havana; those without it can be fined and forcibly returned to their home province, according to CiberCuba. The outlet recalled that Human Rights Watch documented, according to a Cuban official, some 20,000 forcible expulsions of people from Havana under the rule, and some 2,000 returns in its first weeks in force.
Decree 217 was partially amended in 2011 by Decree 293, which eased some family reunification provisions without altering its essential restrictions. In April 2026, a report submitted to the UN CEDAW Committee documented that internal migrant women from eastern Cuba still face police harassment, forced evictions and exclusion from basic services in the capital, according to the same outlet.
The two accounts differ on the date: CiberCuba places the operation on Sunday, while 14ymedio reports, based on residents' comments, that it took place the previous Wednesday and that the official post was published on October 30. The official message, which 14ymedio calls propagandistic, closed this way: 'The street speaks, the complaint arrives and the response does not wait: public calm is built every day, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood'.
Sources: 14ymedio · CiberCuba
Data updated: 2026-11-02T19:00:00.000Z