Shooting off Cuba spotlights South Florida exile politics
A shooting broke out on Wednesday after a stolen boat carrying 10 people and loaded with weapons departed the Florida Keys en route to Cuba, leaving four dead, according to the Cuban government and U.S. officials. Cuba’s government said the men aboard were “terrorists” who wanted to infiltrate the country, while the U.S. said it would investigate what it described as a “highly unusual” sea shootout.
The incident has heightened attention on Cuban-exile politics in South Florida as the Trump administration has taken a more aggressive stance toward the island after the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Associated Press reporting. In Miami, that push for pressure on Havana has also brought renewed focus to freedom-movement groups tied to Cuban exiles, including some hard-liners who have historically sought a violent overthrow of the communist leadership.
The Associated Press reported that armed raids and provocative publicity stunts involving anti-Cuban exile groups stretch back decades in the Florida straits. It also said many such efforts were led by hard-liner exiles, including some who fought in Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army that took power in 1959 before breaking ranks when Castro aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union.
But the report said confrontational tactics have faded since the Cold War, leading some in Miami to question whether the armed incursion reflected what either side said happened—or whether Cuba’s intelligence agencies staged the event. In that context, William LeoGrande, a government professor at American University who specializes in Cuba, said Cuban Americans “are, whether on the left or on the right, really focused on trying to influence U.S. policy rather than thinking that somehow paramilitary action by small groups are gonna overthrow the Cuban government.”
Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior later described what it said the boat carried. Late Friday, the ministry’s top officials unveiled items they said were aboard the boat, including a dozen high-powered weapons and more than 12,800 pieces of ammunition, according to the Associated Press.
The reporting also revisited the history of counter-revolutionary exile groups such as Alpha 66 and Omega 7, which it said were small in number but were at their strongest in the 1970s and ’80s. The report said their influence receded when the Reagan administration arrested their leaders for violent attacks on U.S. soil, including an assassination plot targeting Castro during his 1979 visit to the United Nations and the shooting death of a Cuban diplomat in New York a year later.
Antonio Tang, who joined Alpha 66 after fleeing Cuba and going into exile in Canada in 1981, described the group’s capabilities at the time. He said, “We were kind of amateurs — and no match for the Cuban military and interior ministry,” adding that “They always knew in advance what we were doing. Many folks ended up in jail.”
Ernesto Díaz, deputy secretary general of Alpha 66, characterized the 10 men as martyrs. Diaz said it was “an act of compassion for a Cuban people who are suffering,” and that it was “a sacrifice that has demonstrated the nobility and sensitivity towards freedom in Cuba.”
Another perspective came from former Cuban intelligence officer Enrique Garcia, who told the Associated Press he believed a Cuban intelligence department known as Q-2 spent decades co-opting armed resistance groups. Garcia said agents sometimes funded weapon purchases and drove unsuspecting exiles into plots, and he cited infiltration of Brothers to the Rescue, which lost four members in 1996 when Cuban fighter jets shot down their airplanes in the Florida straits. “This strategy —seemingly still in place— sought to portray the Cuban exile community as extremist and link the U.S. government and agencies to such activities,” Garcia said. He said the U.S. intelligence community must have “documented in its archives” that approach as “a permanent modus operandi of the Cuban intelligence service.”
Garcia also said he could not recall a covert act of the sort Cuba has denounced in at least three decades. He told the Associated Press that he found the timing suspicious, saying the Trump administration has asserted almost unprecedented pressure on Havana to open its economy and relinquish nearly seven decades of single-party rule.
Families of the dead described people they knew as focused on freedom and portrayed them as distant from any violent “incursion” described by Cuban officials. Marina Luz Padron, whose ex-husband, Hector Cruz Correa, was among those reported killed, appealed for privacy as the family mourns. She told the Associated Press that if he went to Cuba it was because he wanted freedom for his country.
Other family members spoke to Spanish-language influencers in Miami describing the loved ones as peaceful. Ibrahim Bosch, president of the Republican Party of Cuba, said Michel Ortega Casanova was once a leader of his party in Tampa before requesting a replacement to spend more time with his family, describing him as “an excellent person, very hardworking, very dedicated to his family,” and saying he “always had the hope of freedom for Cuba.”
But Florida resident Misael Ortega Casanova said his brother—an American citizen who has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years—was on an “obsessive and diabolical” quest for Cuba’s freedom. “They became so obsessed that they didn’t think about the consequences nor their own lives,” Misael told the Associated Press.
Catalini reported from Morrisville, Pennsylvania.