In a room far behind the front lines in central Ukraine, a Cuban man wearing Russian military fatigues smiles widely as he taps out a rhythm on a table. But his mood soon turns somber.
Frank Dario Jarrosay Manfuga, 36, joined Russia's army in January 2024.
By March he had been captured by Ukrainian forces, and he is now hoping for a way out of a desperate situation.
"I never intended to kill anyone. I never wanted to participate in a war. I have a family," said Manfuga, who claimed he was tricked into boarding a Russia-bound plane with the promise of a job in construction.
"Maybe some organization could save me," he said, adding he has no desire to return to Russia or Cuba.
Manfuga's claim that he was duped could not be verified.
A former geography teacher who later became a professional musician to increase his income, he is now a captured mercenary.
His interview with Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, was arranged through contacts in the Ukrainian military, which is keen to demonstrate just how widely Russia has cast its net in a search for foreign manpower to bolster the invasion and offset an unpopular conscription drive at home.
In Manfuga's case, that distance is more than 9,500 kilometers from Moscow.
And he is not alone.
"Based on passports obtained by Ukrainian hackers, our own information from Cuba, numerous videos we've seen, and reports of some Cubans killed in combat, we can estimate that around 5,000 Cuban soldiers are fighting for Russia," Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, co-founder of the Cuban Democratic Directorate, a U.S.-based NGO advocating for democratic change in communist Cuba, told Schemes. "This network could not function without the Cuban regime's approval."
If that figure is accurate, it would amount to under half the number of soldiers from North Korea reportedly participating in Russia's war with their government's open backing -- most notably in the effort to counter Ukraine's shock offensive in Russia's Kursk region.
But unlike North Koreans, Cuban fighters in Russia have left a significant social media footprint, with many openly embracing the Kremlin's militarism and ideology, a Schemes investigation found.
Those posts helped Schemes identify hundreds of mercenaries, find previously unreported training facilities with the aid of satellite imagery, and discover the location and the nature of some of the Cubans' military activities in Russia and on Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.
They also raise questions about how hard Cuba's pro-Russian government is "working to neutralize and dismantle a human trafficking network," as its Foreign Ministry claimed in September 2023, when evidence of Cubans fighting in the war was beginning to emerge.
Dead In The Battle For Bakhmut
Important indications of the scale of Cubans' involvement in the war came just days after the Cuban Foreign Ministry's statement, when a document hack unearthed nearly 200 Cubans serving in the Russian military, initially posted to the Tula region south of Moscow.
That trove was first discovered by the Ukraine-focused investigative group InformNapalm, with the documents proving the Cubans' service coming from the e-mail account of a Russian major hacked by Cyber Resistance, a Ukrainian hacker group.
Since then, RFE/RL journalists have found new evidence of hundreds of other apparent Cuban mercenaries on the Russian social network VKontakte.
In many cases, their accounts were created in 2024 -- seemingly the year they arrived in Russia for pre-deployment training.
The Schemes investigation tied many of the Cuban mercenaries with an online presence to the 106th Airborne Division.
In one example, a photo posted in July 2023 by a man named Aliesky Anache included the geotag Promyshlenny Proyezd, an area of the city of Tula known to host the 106th Airborne Division and its 51st Parachute Regiment.
Journalists were subsequently able to geolocate the blue-walled military building where that photo was taken.
Satellite imagery of the region suggests there is no other military unit stationed anywhere in the surrounding area.
Units of the 106th Airborne Division participated in the battle for Bakhmut. Known grimly as "the meat grinder," the monthslong battle concluded with the Russian occupation of the city in May 2023 and was the one of the bloodiest chapters of the war to date.
And at least one Cuban, a 41-year-old fighter with the call sign Chiki, appears to have died there before being buried in Moscow, according to a post on VKontakte found by RFE/RL journalists.
Another Cuban with the same call sign became a minor celebrity in Russia after appearing on the military TV channel Zvezda.
In a segment of a Zvezda program on August 2, 2024, the fighter, whose real name is Rafael, was seen scrawling "Hasta la vista, baby" ("Goodbye, baby" in Spanish) on military projectiles and informed the interviewer that he had "fallen in love with buckwheat," a Russian staple, during his military service.
Rafael's VKontakte profile features photos of him wearing patches associated with Russia's Wagner Group.
From August on, Rafael posted several images from combat positions in Ukraine's Kherson region. But many of his social media posts before then featured photos with other Cubans during training exercises and outings to bars in Tula.
The bar photos and the fighters that featured in them helped RFE/RL journalists geolocate a second military facility used by the Cubans of the 106th.
This previously unpublicized facility in the Tula region is the paratrooper training ground, unofficially called Krym (Crimea) in VKontakte geotags.
Rush For Rubles, Assist For Russia
Grueling poverty in Cuba helps explain the appeal of Russian military service to Cubans. Historically friendly ties with Moscow dating back to Soviet times mean that citizens of the island nation can enter the country as tourists without a visa.
A typical monthly salary for a foreigner enlisting in the Russian army on a yearlong contract is the equivalent of $2,000.
That was seemingly enough for Odin Rivas, who featured in one of Rafael's posts from Tula, to swap running a small business in Cuba for active military duty.
Rivas has been posting frequently from military positions, promoting Russian and Soviet propaganda symbols.
Back in 2022, he was being celebrated as a hero in the Cuban press after he volunteered as a firefighter to help extinguish a giant fire at the Matanzas oil terminal.
Matanzas is at the heart of Moscow's patronly ties to Cuba, since it receives large oil deliveries from Russian tankers.
Using the ship-tracking service Marine Traffic and satellite images from Planet Labs, RFE/RL journalists found satellite images showing that Russian oil tankers had docked in Cuban ports in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
According to data obtained by Schemes from the KSE Institute and Kpler, in 2024, tankers transported more than 1.8 million barrels of Russian oil products to Cuba. From the beginning of 2025, they carried more than 700,000 barrels to the Caribbean island.
One of those deliveries came at a vital time as Cuba witnessed its worst protests in several years in March 2024 amid energy and food shortages.
Havana has never formally endorsed Russia's invasion.
But on March 1, a day when Russia targeted civilian infrastructure and killed hundreds of civilians in cities across Ukraine, its Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta, criticized the West for "assuming that Russia would remain defenseless in the face of direct threats to its national security."
And in May 2024, Russian state media reported Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel had wished Russian President Vladimir Putin success in "the special military operation," as the Kremlin calls the war, during talks in Moscow that coincided with Russia's May 9 military parade commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.
In comments to Schemes, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry said Cuba "has clearly chosen Russia's side in the full-scale war because of its anti-American stance."
In addition to extensive open-source research, Schemes journalists obtained copies of Russian military documents from Ukrainian military sources concerning other Cubans who are serving in Russian military units.
One of the documents was a questionnaire belonging to Julio Pelaez, a 38-year-old man who last September appealed in Russian on VKontakte for help getting a plane ticket to Moscow in order to report to "any recruitment center."
In the questionnaire, Pelaez, who said he had never been abroad before, appeared to lean into a Kremlin propaganda trope concerning Ukraine when stating his motivation to join the war.
"I consider it the duty of every free person who hates Nazis," Pelaez wrote.
By the end of October, according to his profile page, Pelaez was in Russia, and had posted a photo of his military gear complete with the pro-war "Z" symbol, a patch featuring the Cuban flag, and a document resembling a Russian passport
