Francisco García paid nearly $13,000 to a trafficker to take him to Greece, where he is living on the street
14ymedio, Havana, 6 June 2025 — It was made clear to Francisco García that he would “return to Cuba in a coffin or as a hero”. The 37-year-old understood that the attractive online advertisement shown to him by a friend months earlier, offering 204,000 roubles ($2,594) a month and a Russian passport for repairing buildings damaged by Ukrainian shelling, was a lie. He had been recruited as a mercenary. “My life is over,” he told the British newspaper Daily Mail.
García witnessed the death of dozens of Cubans in combat, “Russians who committed suicide” because they could not bear the war. However, mercenaries are not “allowed to show fear”, they cannot feel pain or compassion. “We were asked to be like robots on the battlefield.”
Garcia, who escaped last October and is in Greece surviving on the streets, is one of more than 20,000 Cubans recruited by Russia since the war began in February 2022. A man who “has fought in a war” that has nothing to do with him. Ukrainian intelligence data shows that there are about 7,000 Cubans currently on the battlefield with little or no training.
From the moment he stepped off the plane that took him from Havana to Sheremetyevo International Airport, the presence of a Cuban man in military uniform and backed by Russian soldiers who forced them into army trucks made him fearful. “They didn’t give us food or water. After a long journey, we arrived at an abandoned sports school, guarded by armed police,” he told the same newspaper.
García corroborated the same modus operandi that other Cubans have gone through. Once in Moscow, they are given contracts in Russian and, amid shouts and threats, they are forced to enlist as mercenaries.
He was given an assault rifle. “It was the first time I held a gun in my hand,” said the man who lives haunted by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s words: “traitors will never be forgotten”. The Cuban insists that he has not killed anyone, but admits: “I don’t know if I wounded anyone because I fired in panic, but that is always in my mind.”
After 30 days with other Cubans and people from Asia and Africa, he was pushed to the front lines of the war without warning because “Russia was losing many soldiers every day”. Garcia was forced to carry heavy weaponry, including an assault rifle, a portable rocket launcher and four grenades.
He quickly realised that war was “not a game” and that his mission from then on was to survive. “There were 90 Cubans like me at the beginning, but more than half of them died in combat,” he said.
In combat, he witnessed the destructive capacity of kamikaze drones, which “we Cubans didn’t even know what they were” and which “caused a lot of damage, much more than hand-to-hand combat”.
The mercenaries, Garcia said, are abandoned by the Russians when they are wounded on the front lines.
On one occasion while on the front line he was hit by bullets and left a scar on his right bicep. “I rushed to protect myself, but I was hit. It felt like I was hit with a giant hammer, but I didn’t feel much pain because of the adrenaline and trying to save my life.” Garcia was shocked and was quickly put in a tourniquet and injected with morphine to overcome the pain.
The second injury occurred when “a bomb hit a building near me. I can still hear the bang. Some metal fragments from the explosion hit my left arm and both legs, and a toxic smell came out.”
After a year in the Russian artillery brigade in Rostov, Donetsk and Soledar, the Cuban was awarded a medal and a certificate in honour of his service. In addition, he was given two months off in October 2024. That was the time he took the opportunity to escape. He contacted a people smuggler who, for 1,000,000 roubles ($12,715), guaranteed to take him “safe and sound to Greece”.
Garcia was counting on the money he had been paid for his services because he was not allowed to send it to the island. His journey took place in airports between flights through six countries, from Belarus to Azerbaijan, then to the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, before finally arriving in Athens, he told the Daily Mail.
He explains, “I have gone through many difficulties and no one helps me. I sleep on the streets and struggle to survive. I wish I could go back to the simple life I had before in Cuba, but I can’t.”
Translated by GH
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