Yasmany Moreno says a flight that left Texas on July 30 did not become real to him until nearly five hours later, when an immigration officer told him the plane was bound for the Central African Republic. By then, he says, he had already been shackled, put through a rough overnight trip and sent into a place he had never heard named before.
That matters now because Moreno, 32, is still in Bangui a month later, without a passport, without clear legal footing and with no answer on when or where he will go next. He says the restrained trip left him ill for four straight days afterward, a detail that gives the deportation a physical force far beyond the paperwork behind it.
Moreno was one of 36 deportees on the flight to Bangui, and several of them were Cubans. The group has been staying since July 31 at Maison Confort in Bangui's Lakouanga neighborhood, roughly two miles from the city center. Local authorities have told them they may need to vacate the room within 90 days, which leaves the question of what happens after the hotel stay becomes impossible to avoid.
His case is tied to a longer arc that began in 2016, when he left Cuba on a raft and washed ashore in the Marquesas Keys. He arrived while the wet foot, dry foot policy still let Cuban migrants who reached U.S. soil stay under parole, but Washington ended that framework the following year under President Obama. Moreno later tried to regularize his status through the Cuban Adjustment Act, only to be denied because he filed after his parole had lapsed.
He later built a small trucking business hauling freight between Miami and Tampa before immigration agents took him into custody in mid-2025 and moved him through a series of facilities ahead of the July 30 flight. His account is not the only one pointing to how abrupt the transfer was. Arístides Fernández, who crossed into Arizona in 2021, said he spent seven months cycling through jails in several states before ending up on the same Bangui-bound plane, and he has said he has no rights, no grasp of the local language and must pay a guard for an escort to leave the building.
Daniel Fuentes, who entered the United States through the CBP One appointment system in 2024 and was later arrested on March 23, has described a different kind of confinement in Bangui, where he has cut his hair short and altered his voice and mannerisms to move through the city with less risk. Hotel security told him it is not safe to go outside at all. For Moreno, the problem is simpler and more immediate: he says he was sent to a country he did not know was his destination, and a month later he is still waiting to learn whether Maison Confort is only a stop on the way to somewhere else or the last place the system will leave him.
