Cuba blocked his deportation. Now, he’s off to prison in Miami murder caught on video

Five years ago, a reputed Miami gang member named David Paneque finished a decade-long prison sentence for stabbing a man during a robbery. He was ordered deported to his native Cuba, but the island wouldn’t accept him, so he was released in Miami on probation.

Now Paneque, 32, is headed back to prison for life — after he was arrested and accused of coldly shooting a friend, a murder captured on stunningly clear surveillance video.

A judge late last week sentenced Paneque to life in prison for violating probation for the 2007 stabbing of man outside a West Kendall restaurant.

Circuit Judge Thomas Rebull on Friday ruled he violated his probation by getting arrested in the March 24, 2019, murder of Leandro Lopez atop a West Miami-Dade strip mall. Paneque is still awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges, and faces the possibility of the death penalty if convicted.

Paneque’s case, first reported on by the Miami Herald in 2019, highlighted the thorny — and politically sensitive — issue of deportations to Cuba.

In recent years, Cuba had started accepting more deportees, although it was still a trickle. But over the past year, Cuba has stopped accepting flights of deportees, even as a record number of Cubans — fleeing oppression and economic ruin on the island worsened by the pandemic — have crossed into the United States through Mexico.

READ MORE: Cuba has stopped accepting deportations of its nationals from the U.S., ICE says

Deportations overall have dropped significantly under President Joe Biden, although there’s been a record number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and seeking asylum. The wave of migrants had become a rallying point for Republicans, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration transporting a group of mostly Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in what critics have decried as a crass political stunt.

Stretching back decades, there are over 40,000 Cubans in the United States facing orders of removal for convictions of crimes or immigration violations. But with Cuba declining to accept most deportees, most of those are living freely under orders of supervision, which require them to check in at least once a year.

That included Paneque, who even joked about it with Miami-Dade homicide detectives before his 2019 arrest on a murder charge.

“Where are they going to send me? Cuba doesn’t want me,” Paneque told Detective Juan Segovia. “They don’t want me here. They don’t want me there.”

According to police, Paneque robbed a man at knifepoint outside a West Kendall restaurant in November 2007. During the “violent struggle,” the man was stabbed multiple times and airlifted to a hospital trauma center, according to an arrest report.

Paneque — whose street name at the time was “Psycho,” according to arrest records — was later caught trying to cash the man’s checks. At the time, he was also on probation on a conviction for carrying a concealed weapon.

Though a teenager at the time, he was charged as an adult, and sentenced to 10 years in prison for attempted murder and armed robbery. Soon after, Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) issued a press release announcing that Paneque was one of more than 300 violent street gang members who had been arrested as part of a national crackdown on gangs.

ICE described him as a “Cuban national” who was “amenable for removal based on a criminal convictions.”

But that didn’t happen. Instead, he was released from Florida prison in 2017 and placed on state probation and immigration supervision.

Lopez was gunned down in March 2019 atop a parking garage in West Miami-Dade; surveillance footage showed that Lopez begged for his life before Paneque gunned him down, took something off of his body and drove off in a truck, prosecutors say. A grand jury later indicted Paneque for first-degree murder, armed robbery and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

This story was originally published October 3, 2022 at 2:10 PM.