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Yoani Sánchez denounces forced deportations of Cubans inside Havana

After nine hours in detention, the director of 14ymedio said that in the holding cell she saw people held for not having a Havana address on their identity card and then moved by force back to their home provinces.

Journalist Yoani Sánchez, director of 14ymedio, published a video and a text this Friday, November 6, denouncing that every day dozens or even hundreds of people are detained in Havana for not having a Havana address on their identity card. «The two words I heard most in that holding cell were illegals and deportation», she said.

Sánchez made the accusation a day after spending nine hours in State Security custody. According to her own account and reports by Infobae and Periódico Cubano, three men in plain clothes forced her into a patrol car without identifying themselves and took her to the Fourth Police Station on Infanta street.

According to her testimony, officers checked detainees' identity documents and then ordered them moved back to their home province. She described cases of people who had left children in the care of others and were moved anyway, and arrests of people found in a Havana municipality other than the one on their identity card. She called it discrimination by province of origin.

The legal framework is Decree-Law 217, in force since 1997, which requires prior administrative permission to settle in Havana: those without it can be fined and sent back by force to their province, Infobae recalled. That same report cites Human Rights Watch, which has documented some 20,000 forced expulsions of people from Havana under the rule.

Her account is not an isolated one. Days earlier, an Interior Ministry operation in the municipality of San Miguel del Padrón ended with 71 people detained, several of them described by the authorities themselves as «undocumented and illegal in the capital with maladjusted conduct», as the official daily Tribuna de La Habana reported and Infobae picked up.

The journalist also denounced what she called «the absolute submission» of the National Revolutionary Police to State Security: she said it was enough for a plain-clothes agent to show his badge for uniformed officers to freeze, and that she asked without success to file a kidnapping complaint against the men who detained her.

Sánchez said she was charged with propaganda against the constitutional order, an accusation she linked to her journalism, in particular the podcast Cafecito Informativo, 14ymedio and the street videos she signs as Andarina Sánchez, according to her account as reported by Infobae and Periódico Cubano. «They want me to shut up, they want me to leave, they want me silenced», she said.

Sources: 14ymedio · Infobae · Periódico Cubano

Data updated: 2026-11-06T16:15:00.000Z

Yoani Sánchez denounces forced deportations of Cubans inside Havana | Yamacoa Observatory