A Telegram channel allegedly linked to the Ukrainian military published a video of a man claiming to be a Cuban national scammed into fighting for Russia after accepting what he thought was a masonry job in exchange for the promise of Russian citizenship, multiple Spanish-language outlets reported on Monday.
The video is allegedly of a man caught fighting on the front lines against the Ukrainian military in Marinka, in the disputed Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The man identified himself in the video as Frank Darío Jarrosay Manfugás of Guantánamo and insisted that “at no time did we know that we were going to go to war” when he and his compatriots accepted jobs in Russia.
Jarrosay — sporting a heavy Cuban accent — tells his captors through an interpreter that “Cubans who were here [in Russia]” recruited him through Facebook to work in the country.
“It was not directly to the war. I didn’t come to the war. The page said that you come here to work in plumbing, masonry, carpentry,” he continued. “That is to say, the cities that Russia conquered, we came to rebuild them. That was the contract, but not to shoot bullets.”
The man identifying himself as Jarrosay said he was offered 250,000 rubles — about $2,725.24 — a month for “masonry” work, and he was paid his monthly salary in February and another 100,000 rubles — about $1,090.10 — for completing his first month on the job. He said he was part of a group of 35 Cubans sent to fight in Ukraine.
Jarrosay continued:
At no time did we know that we had to go to the war, do you understand me? We came to do carpentry, masonry. They made the contract up in Russian; we didn’t know what the contract said in Russian. They make you sign believing that it is for the labor you think you are signing up for. Before you know it, you’re in a trench shooting.
“The Cubans coming here do not have military training; they do not come with military training because they don’t come here for the war,” the man insisted. “I was never a police officer; I never shot bullets in Cuba. I don’t have military training.”
He recounted how the Ukrainian military captured him. During a mission to transport a portable solar panel grid, bombs started falling, and he lost track of his team.
“I found myself alone and started walking and I followed a Ukrainian thinking he was a Russian — see how I don’t have military training?” Jarrosay explained.
The outlet Ciber Cuba reported that it had found what it believed to be the social media profile of Jarrosay on Sunday, as the video began circulating, which matched his physical appearance and the birthdate the man in the video offered to his captors. The profile identified Jarrosay as an industrial engineer, consistent with his claim that he traveled to Eastern Europe to work in masonry.
The allegations in the video are consistent with growing reports of foreigners accepting international work abroad in what they believe to be manual labor jobs only to find that they have been shipped to the Ukrainian warfront. In January, the government of Nepal complained that it had documented cases of its young men swindled into fighting with the Russians. The Indian Foreign Ministry has lodged a formal complaint with Moscow on cases of its citizens being “duped to work with the Russian army.”
“We have strongly taken up the matter with the Russian government for early discharge of such internationals. A case of human trafficking has been registered against several agents,” said Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal.
The largest number of these cases so far reported, however, involved Cubans. In August, Cuban-American YouTube personality Alaín Paparazzi Cubano published a video of two Cuban teens who alleged that they were trapped in Ukraine after accepting a similar deal on Facebook to travel to Russia and work in civil jobs. The two claimed they were in a healthcare facility after being injured during rudimentary training and managed to sneak the video out to the world. The boys were later identified as Alex Vegas Díaz of central Santa Clara and Andorf Velázquez García of Havana.
The Cuban Communist Party, a close ally of the Russian regime, has dismissed multiple reports of recruitment of Cuban men as young as teenagers to fight for Russia, claiming that they are human trafficking scams independent of the Cuban government. The Communist Party also branded Alaín Paparazzi Cubano as a “terrorist” along with 60 other Cubans and Cuban-Americans, many of them human rights activists and journalists, in December.
In September, a Ukrainian hacker collective published documents allegedly proving that nearly 200 Cubans had been recruited to fight in Ukraine. Some estimates suggest that Cuba may have already sent as many as 14,000 of its young men to fight for Russia in Ukraine.
The communist Castro regime has a long history of sending its young to serve as cannon fodder in foreign wars with no clear relation to the Cuban people. Its most prominent foreign misadventure was its invasion of Angola, in which an estimated 10,000 Cubans died between 1976 and 1987.
The Ukrainian government, under Volodymyr Zelensky, supported Cuban anti-communist dissidents during the July 2021 protests, signing a letter in support of the movement. Zelensky maintains diplomatic relations with Cuba, however, which continues to operate its embassy in Kyiv freely despite mounting reports of sending fighters to support Russia.
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