Even as the Trump administration has hammered Cuba with an oil blockade and a raft of unprecedented sanctions, the Cuban government continues to receive hundreds of deportees from the United States, honoring longstanding bilateral migration accords.
But not all deported Cubans are being sent back to the island.
This week, we speak with Yasmany Moreno, a Cuban man who lived in Miami for nearly a decade before the U.S. deported him to the Central African Republic.
Also:
Cuba’s Black Hairstylists Embrace Their Roots
Salazar Reverses Course on Trump Deportations
Rubio Sanctions Cuban Nickel — Again
Cuban Diplomat Urges Trump to End Economic War
45 Organizations Demand House Vote on Cuba Resolution
U.S. Aid Reaches Cuba — In a Trickle
90 Miles from Cuba. Deported to Africa.
After immigrating to the United States from Cuba in 2016, Yasmany Moreno lived for nearly a decade in Florida, where he ran a small trucking business.
Then, in May 2025, he was detained by ICE. Two months later, a judge ordered that he be deported back to Cuba.
Instead, the Trump administration sent him across the Atlantic Ocean to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.
With limited ability to communicate from detention, Moreno sent a series of videos via WhatsApp to Belly of the Beast journalist Yohan Rodríguez.
Moreno says on July 31 he and other detainees were taken by bus from a Louisiana detention center to Alexandria International Airport. Their hands and feet were shackled while masked officers escorted them.
None of the detainees knew where they were being taken. Immigration officials told them the trip was a “transfer,” according to Moreno.
He was not allowed to communicate with his attorney or his family.
"All I wanted was to talk to my parents, to tell them where I was,” he said.
Moreno says he spent the entire journey in shackles. His muscles cramped. The turbulence made him dizzy.
He says they were not given food and could only use the bathroom while handcuffed and in the presence of an immigration official.
“I felt like I was dead,” he said. “I just wanted that plane to land so I could get out of that nightmare.”
Moreno says he wasn’t told he was being sent to Africa until five hours into the flight.
He made it through the journey only to end up imprisoned in a country that the State Department warns U.S. citizens not to visit due to unrest, crime, kidnapping, mines, health risks and terrorism. Stranded Without Legal Status
Moreno and the other deportees are housed in a detention center in Bangui, but he doesn’t know who operates it.
He says staff from the International Organization for Migration — a UN group that assists migrants, displaced persons and refugees — provide them with food, healthcare and legal advice.
Moreno says the deportees are occasionally allowed to leave the detention center, but they risk being arrested because they did not enter the country through a border checkpoint and have no documents proving their legal status.
“We don’t have passports, visas or work permits,” he said. “We can’t walk around on our own without an officer beside us or nearby.”
Moreno speaks Spanish and some English, but the official language of the Central African Republic is French, so he has to rely on translation apps to communicate.
He says he continues to challenge his deportation in U.S. courts and hopes to return to his family soon.
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Cuban artist Susana Pilar created Lo Llevamos Rizo, or "We Wear Our Hair Curly," in 2015 as a pageant celebrating Black hair and challenging beauty standards that treat Afro-textured and curly hair as something to fix or hide.
Entrepreneuer Annia Liz de Armas preserved the contest while expanding its work into a business. In 2019, the event included workshops on caring for Black hair in Havana's neighborhoods and schools. By 2021, the business began offering hairdressing services and developing its own haircare products.
This month, the fourth edition of the event brought Havana's stylists and their clients together once more to celebrate Black beauty.
“It’s not easy,” said De Armas, the organization's CEO, “because we’re changing a mindset we’ve learned for years — that Black and mixed-race hair and bodies aren’t beautiful, professional or presentable.”
Cuba’s Black hairstylists face obstacles beyond long-held prejudices. Naiby Pardo says power and water shortages caused by the Trump administration’s oil blockade have made it difficult to keep her salon open. Meanwhile, U.S. sanctions have complicated access to the products she needs. In recent months, international shipping companies have been unwilling to deliver to Cuba for fear of “secondary sanctions” under Trump’s May 1 executive order.
At the pageant, stylists showcased their work and participants celebrated their natural hair.
“Give spaces like this a chance,” de Armas said. “Embrace your Blackness, your natural hair, your African roots. It’s our history, our legacy to the world.”
Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL), a Cuban American from Miami, has voted to expand funding for ICE even though many of her constituents are immigrants. In a sign her re-election campaign may be in trouble, the former Spanish-language television host broke with Trump on his immigration policy, saying some of his deportation efforts have “gone too far.”
In a video campaign ad released Thursday, Salazar pleaded directly with Trump to reconsider his immigration enforcement policies. She said that half of the 50,000 people detained by ICE in July had no criminal record.
“The same Hispanics who helped get you to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” she said.
A year ago, Salazar defended spending $70 billion on immigration detention and deportation as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“You give money to ICE to look for the illegals who are criminals,” she said.
Salazar has been one of Congress’s most vocal advocates of the U.S. economic war on Cuba, even though she has acknowledged that the policies she supports cause suffering on the island.
In a February interview with Univision, she framed the hardship in Cuba as temporary, comparing it to childbirth before “the great freedom of the Cuban people.”
Cuba's economic crisis, caused in large part by the policies Salazar has endorsed, has fueled unprecedented migration from the island to the United States — including to her district in Miami.
The new ad comes as Salazar faces a competitive race for re-election against Democrat Eliott Rodriguez, a fellow Cuban American who, like her, built a career in South Florida television news before entering politics.
Salazar won her seat by more than 20 points two years ago. But an internal Democrat poll this week suggests that the race is a tie.
Rubio Sanctions Cuban Nickel — Again
In what has become an almost weekly routine, the Trump administration on Thursday imposed new sanctions on Cuba, targeting the island’s nickel industry for the fourth time this year.
It had already sanctioned the Ernesto Che Guevara nickel processing facility and Moa Nickel, a 50/50 joint mining venture between Canada’s Sherritt International and Cuba’s state-run nickel company. Several other companies that provide technical services and import machinery and supplies for Cuba’s nickel industry had also been sanctioned.
The latest measures take aim at three military officials and eight entities. Four of those entities are involved in Cuba’s nickel industry, including a research center, a geological surveyor and a technology company.
The State Department’s ever-expanding blacklist of Cuban officials and entities is meant to cut them off from raw materials, equipment, technology and financing by driving away foreign companies fearful of being subjected to “secondary sanctions” under Trump’s May 1 executive order.
These sanctions aimed at companies in third countries have created openings for U.S. investors positioning themselves to exploit Cuba’s mineral wealth.
Two competing bids for Sherritt’s stake in its Cuban nickel and cobalt venture involve Ray Washburne, vice-chair of Trump’s 2016 Victory Committee, and Texas oil billionaire Albert Huddleston. Meanwhile, Australia’s Antilles Gold has received the Trump administration’s permission to negotiate transferring its stake in a Cuban copper-gold mine to the New York investment fund Global Emerging Markets.
Sherritt and Antilles Gold are part of a broader scramble by politically-connected investors to acquire Cuban mineral assets as sanctions force foreign companies off the island, Lee Schlenker and Ed Augustin reportin The Guardian.
Continental Strategy, a lobbying firm whose executives include former Rubio chief of staff Alberto Martinez and former Trump ambassador to the Organization of American States Carlos Trujillo, received nearly $40,000 from food company Vima World.
Vima World is a "major player" in Cuba’s food industry that partners with GAESA, the military conglomerate that has become a central target of the Trump administration’s sanctions this year.
The Guardian article also describes a newly formed consulting group that includes the husband of senior Rubio aid Viviana Bovo, who is advising the State Department on an economic development plan for a future post-communist Cuba, including energy development and compensation for owners of expropriated property.
Cuban Diplomat Urges Trump to End Economic War
Speaking with PBS’s Amna Nawaz on Wednesday, Cuba's Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío confirmed that “no progress” has been made in talks with the Trump administration due to unrelenting U.S. hostility. Cuba has continued to make efforts to engage with Washington, he said, but the Trump administration has responded by imposing near weekly sanctions on the island.
“It’s not collateral damage,” he said of the civilian suffering caused by the U.S. government’s economic war on Cuba. “It is the aim of the policy.”
In a separate interview with The Atlantic this week, Cossío described Cuba’s centrally planned economic model as “exhausted” and called for a greater role for markets and private businesses.
“We’re not asking for a grant,” he said. “We’re not asking for gifts or favors. We want the U.S. to stop punishing the Cuban economy.”
In June, Cuba passed an economic reform package expanding opportunities for private business and foreign investment.
Cossío told The Atlantic that U.S. companies could participate in those changes if Washington eased sanctions.
“The U.S. could take advantage of that, become an important business partner in Cuba,” he said.
A coalition of 45 faith, foreign policy and human rights organizations have sent Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives a letter calling for a vote on a Cuba war powers resolution introduced last week by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY). Special procedures for war powers resolutions allow Democrats to seek a vote without the approval of Republican Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson.
Signees wrote that the Trump administration’s policy has created a “man-made economic and humanitarian catastrophe” in Cuba.
The resolution would prevent the Trump administration from engaging in military action in or against Cuba unless Congress approves it. The letter argues that the powers resolution would also include using the U.S. military to enforce the oil blockade.
In April, the Senate voted 51–47 to defeat a similar resolution intended to block unauthorized military action in Cuba. That measure originated in the Senate and never reached the House.
Caritas Cuba confirmed last week that a second shipment of 700 U.S.-funded aid kits has arrived in Cuba.
The kits contain food and hygiene supplies destined for families in Quemado de Güines and Rancho Veloz, two central Cuban towns with an estimated combined population of nearly 24,000 residents.
The aid delivery comes nearly two months after another 700 kits were delivered to Bejucal and Alquízar, two small cities on the outskirts of Havana.
Catholic Relief Services says its $60 million share of a $100 million U.S. aid package is intended to provide food and hygiene supplies to nearly 200,000 households. But since Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the aid package in May, only 1,400 aid kits have been delivered.
This is not the first time that U.S. aid to Cuba has been slow to arrive. The Trump administration pledged $3 million in aid after Hurricane Melissa battered eastern Cuba last October, but it did not get shipped to the island until January 14. In contrast, U.S. hurricane aid reached Jamaica and Haiti within weeks of the storm.
Even when the aid arrives, its contribution is “a joke” compared to the destructive impact of the U.S. oil blockade and sanctions, according to economist Emily Morris. Each aid kit is intended to sustain a family for ten days and reaches only a fraction of those families in need.
Meanwhile, U.S. sanctions are obstructing humanitarian aid shipments from other countries. Ed Augustin reports in The New York Times that thousands of Cuba-bound containers were stranded after major shipping companies halted deliveries over sanctions concerns from Trump’s May 1 executive order.
One charity’s container carrying more than $500,000 in medical supplies reached Cuba in June but was sent to Panama without being unloaded. Donated cancer drugs also failed to arrive after airlines suspended flights amid jet-fuel shortages due to the U.S. oil blockade.
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Boletines en Español | English Newsletters Archives A pesar de que la administración Trump ha castigado duramente a Cuba con un bloqueo petrolero y una serie de sanciones sin precedentes, el gobierno cubano continúa recibiendo a cientos de deportados de Estados Unidos, respetando así los acuerdos bilaterales de migración vigentes desde hace mucho tiempo. Pero no todos los deportados cubanos están siendo enviados de vuelta a la isla. Esta semana hablamos con Yasmany Moreno, un cubano que vivió...
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