Yoe Suarez
The United States opened its arms to Cuban exiles since 1959, but the current crisis on the southern border and the lack of control over legal migration processes, such as the recent humanitarian parole program, attract allies of the communist tyranny and human rights violators at the same time to the country where their victims found refuge.
Oscar Casanella did not believe it. The repressor who in Cuba expelled him from his job as a biochemist due to his disagreements with the communist tyranny, was in Miami. The capital of exile, where Oscar and his family found refuge in 2022, gave Erasmo Pablo Gómez the possibility of walking through Miami streets.
Casanella worked at the National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology (INOR) until his views against the regime earned him harassment from the authorities, of which Gómez, also a collaborator of the military, was a part. “The political police kidnapped me at the INOR to interrogate me, threaten me and beat me,” Casanella said during a break at the warehouse where he found work in Miami.
In July 2016, a hearing was held on his “expulsion” before the labor court of the scientific center. But Gómez, along with several soldiers, physically blocked the entrance of Casanella’s witnesses and relatives to the INOR room where the trial was held.
Gómez not only assaulted co-workers, but also patients. The audiovisual producer Víctor Alfonso Cedeño, a critic of Castroism and a patient at INOR, was also a victim of the official, from whom in October 2020 he requested a letter confirming what he had already informed him orally: that there were no therapeutic options for him in Cuba. The letter was decisive for Alfonso Cedeño to receive cancer treatment abroad. Gómez refused to draft and sign the document.
In 2007, 2011 and 2015 Gómez “lost” the clinical history of another patient: Professor Omara Ruíz Urquiola. “The clinical history is required to activate Resolution 232 of the Ministry of Public Health, which allows the importation of medicines for cancer treatment, when they do not exist in Cuba,” Casanella explained.
Due to his services to Castroism, Gómez, born in 1954, “traveled to Europe and other countries with an official Cuban passport; In 2013 he received a Geely car for being part of the group that served the dictator Hugo Chávez.” In Cuba, travel and cars are luxuries that few can afford.
In mid-2022 Casanella, his youngest son and his pregnant wife, flew to Nicaragua in order to seek political asylum in US territory. But on the stopover in Colombia, the airline informed them that the Sandinista dictatorship prohibited them from landing in Managua. From Colombia, Casanella and his family made a pilgrimage through a valley of shadows, from border to border, sleeping on the floor of airports, until they reached the border between Mexico and the United States. There they turned themselves to the authorities.
Now, months later, he found out from a friend that his former repressor would end up in the same place as him. He is not sure if Gómez would do it with an official passport, for scientific exchange, or as a beneficiary of the” humanitarian parole” program, thanks to one of the children living in Florida.
“My feelings were mixed,” Casanella confesses. “First, astonishment, at how this man had the shamelessness to come to the United States, after so much complicity with Castroism. I felt indignant at how a repressor was able to get to the United States with a visa, while so many activists in Cuba, who have suffered persecution and are facing the dictatorship, were never able to obtain one.”
During his last year in Cuba, Casanella applied for humanitarian visas for himself and his family. Serious threats of imprisonment by the communist regime weighed on them. He never had an answer.
In 2017, the Cuban scientist denounced Gómez for the first time. He filled out a form from the “Cuban Repressors” project, of the Miami Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FDHC), a kind of index of those who participate in violent attacks against the freedoms of their fellow citizens.
In 2023, he thought that if he had not been silent in Cuba, he would not be silent either in lands of freedom. And he wrote on his social networks: “This March 12, 2023, the vice director of INOR Medical Assistance, Erasmo Pablo Gómez, will arrive in the city of Miami, the host country for thousands of victims of the Cuban dictatorship.”
Days later, he participated in a program on the MegaTV channel, and repeated the complaint before the cameras. In addition, he filled out a petition for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) that prevents human rights violators from entering the country. “But so far I have not received any feedback on the petition,” he said.
During 2022, the crisis at the southern border has allowed more and more henchmen and victims of Castroism to meet again on US soil.
I met Casanella in 2021, at the clandestine premiere in Havana of the film “Plantados,” which narrates the meeting in Miami between a former Cuban political prisoner and a military man who tortured him in and shot him while in jail watching the film. Casanella did not think that he would survive like the protagonist of the film.
Hunting repressors
In April 2021, President Joe Biden called the massive crossing of migrants across the Rio Grande a “crisis.” Shortly thereafter, the White House dismissed the use of the term, but increase compared to early years confirms that the word describes reality well. In February 2021, there were some 100,000 migrants at the border, 24,000 more than in February 2019 -during the last migration crisis-, and in March the number increased to more than 172,000, according to a CNN report.
The troubled river at the U.S. southern border has produced a profit for Castroism. Each Cuban who flees from repression and misery will soon become an issuer of remittances to his loved ones on the Island, and that flow of dollars provides support to Cuba’s parasitic, centralized economy. In addition, it releases pressure from the boiler allowing opponents to leave the island.
But among the 300,000 Cubans who in just one year fled to the US and the thousands more that have fled on rafts, there are also allies of the regime entering the U.S. Not simple employees, but officials of state institutions or participants in the repressive-propaganda machinery of the regime have arrived in the U.S. Wolves among sheep.
Castroism has been, since 1959, the spearhead of anti-American rhetoric in the Western Hemisphere, and responsible for fueling Marxist guerrillas, narco-terrorist groups, and inspiring and sustainingfranchises of “21st century Socialism,” such as Sandinismo and Chavismo.
For this reason, researcher Rolando Cartaya, from the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FDHC), understands the danger of Castro’s agents being part of the 2022 exodus, which represented 3 percent of the Cuban population. Cartaya, a reporter on the island until he was publicly ousted from Havana in the 1990s, focused on Cuban agents together with a team that identified 20 henchmen who had arrived in the United States. Now, from the FDHC he is a kind of Efraim Zuroff, the hunter of National Socialist repressors. Cartaya hunts communist repressors.
His work has focused on the complaints of the victims, on knowing the persecuted of Castroism and their struggles. But in 2017 Cartaya changed the game: he wanted to put a face and a name on the perpetrators, “identify, investigate and expose” violent repressors, such as police officers, border guards, etc., and white-collar ones, such as judges and prosecutors who sentence political prisoners.
In a press conference where he presented 20 files of Cuban henchmen in the United States, he alludedto the “repressors in white coats,” that is, the coordinators of the Cuban medical missions who “see that the workers pay up to 80 percent of what they earn in taxes, that they cannot be accompanied by their relatives or leave the shelters at certain hours.” He believes that the restrictions on medical personnel abroad are “consistent with International Labor Organization indicators of forced labor.”
Adrián Rodríguez Santana and Yoel Vázquez Ortiz, for example, held high positions with the “Cuban medical mission” in Venezuela. The exiled doctor Alexander Jesús Figueredo denounced the repressive actions of both against health professionals. Presumably, both are in the United States. In December, Rodríguez Santana “deserted” towards the southern US border via Central America, a route traveled by thousands of Cubans, especially since in 2021 the dictator Daniel Ortega announced a free visa for those born in Cuba.
The move is not new. Castroism has always sought to alleviate the social pressure in the island generated by its mismanagement through the escape valve of mass migration. This was the case during the Rafters Crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union. The current exodus is a consequence of the uprisings of July 11 and 12, 2021 (popularly known as 11J) against the communist State in more than 60 locations on the island.
The repressive wave after 7/11 included shooting, arresting children, torturing and sentencing of up to 25 years for filming the events. It involved militants and supporters of Castroism, such as prosecutor Yerandy Martín González, who imprisoned protesters from Guanajay and is also listed by the FDHC.
On 11J, Raudel Moreno Bergolla and his wife, Susel Álvarez Tasses, also collaborated with the political police in the violent repression, specifically in the town of San José de las Lajas, according to the FDHC. In Cruces, a municipality in Cienfuegos, Yaíma Camba Rodríguez was part of the so-called Rapid Response Brigades, civilian mobs that support the military to silence critical citizens. Yaíma Salomón Torres did the same, but in San Antonio de los Baños, in Artemisa where the flame of rebellion flourished. They all live now in the United States while their victims rot in Cuban jails.
The Iranian regime collaborator Zeptiem Suárez participated in acts of repudiation ―verbal attacks that involve violence― against opponents in Colón, Matanzas, and arrived in the United States in 2022. Suárez, according to the FDHC, “slapped and hit during an act of repudiation on April 30, 2012” Caridad María Burunate, a member of the Ladies in White, a women’s movement for the freedom of political prisoners. Today he calmly posts photos of himself next to a pool or a van in Tampa, Florida.
Another who enjoys posting images in the U.S. is Bruce Iam González, a member of the Young Communist League, who crossed the border and settled in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2022. “A new life begins,” he typed on his social network. He seems to want to bury his past, to the point of posting tweets like this: “Don’t be scared, but the heart is to the left and the blood is red, as Che Guevara said in his speech before the UN.” That message was written by him from the island when he was studying Sociology at the “Marta Abreu” Central University in Las Villas. In September 2022, he supported the new Family Code promoted by Castroism and acted on his social networks as a troll at the service of the regime.
Another cyber-combatant who arrived in the United States was Raúl Omar Rodríguez, founder of the pro-Castro page La Ciberclaria, which articles on human rights activists. From his position in the official University Student Federation (FEU) of the Villa Clara University of Medical Sciences, he threatened other students for their political positions.
Orlando Nápoles Sánchez and Manuel Santos Rodríguez, two “informers” who monitored opponents, arrived, or were preparing to arrive in the United States, according to the FDHC. Celaida Gil Villarreal, who monitored and denounced the activities of opposition member Iris Tamara Pérez in Villa Clara, now lives in Naples, Florida, after entering the country in March 2022.
Militaries also leave Cuba. Daniel Alejandro Gutiérrez, former Sector Chief of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) in Corralillo, was chasing those who tried to flee the island by boat along the beaches of Villa Clara. In attacks, mostly at night, he used dogs. That earned him the nickname “El Perrero.” Gutiérrez Cruz arrived in the United States in a boat last January.
Another Sector chief, Reiner Dueñas Noda, beat up children and adults during July11 in Colón, Matanzas. In the United States, where he now lives, he obtained a work permit in September 2022, something that is difficult for many who flee Castroism.
Yosbel Nieves Regalado, from San Nicolás de Bari, was a witness against two peaceful protesters, whose families now suffers from this imprisonment while former Cuban policeman work and walk around Miami. María Antonia Guerrero, a member of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) in Santiago de Cuba, who the FDHC believes was part of the Rapid Response Brigades, walks the same streets of Florida.
Spokesmen and jurists for Castroism, or white-collar repressors, also crossed the southern border in 2022. Lyomaris Vara Fuentes, a prosecutor in Pinar del Río, prosecuted economist María Caridad Gálvez in 2017 for her ties to the independent think tank “Coexistence”, which resulted in the confiscation of his home and three years in jail. Vara Fuentes resides in San Antonio, Texas.
As a professor at the Universidad de Oriente, Lester Amaury Martínez was key in the expulsion of another colleague from the faculty on accusations of “mercenarism” in 2016. His wife left for the United States in mid-2022, and he left after her.
Another white-collar repressor in Miami is Maray Suárez, a spokeswoman for Cuban Television that carried out reputational assassinations against dissidents such as musician Gorki Águila. She reinvented herself as an “emotional coach.” She offers talks in which, conveniently, “politics, ideologies, religions are not discussed.”
Repressors yesterday, agents of influence tomorrow
The married couple Ivette Bermello and Edgerton Ivor Levy crossed with her son the shark-infested waters of the Florida straits in a boat. They arrived in the southern keys in 1993, pretending to seek political refuge. They were actually part of the Wasp Network, a Cuban group of spies that monitored military installations and contributed to the murder of four Americans members of Brothers to the Rescue who were helping rafters from the island.
As soon as Levy arrived in the United States, he turned himself in to the FBI and operated as a double agent. During the arrest and trial of the Wasp Network, at the end of 1990, the couple were key witnesses in the trial that sentenced five of the agents to long prison terms. President Barack Obama, in his second term, freed them.
Years later, Levy assured, in an interview, that the FBI and other US security agencies did not evaluate Castro’s capabilities.
In 1987, Ana Belén Montes, a prominent Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer, visited El Paraíso military base in El Salvador. Weeks later, the Marxist guerrilla Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) attacked the facility, leaving 69 dead, including US Sgt. Greg Fronius. Montes had passed information to the Cuban regime, for which she spied, and Havana had sent it to its FMLN allies.
In 2002, Montes was sentenced to 30 years in prison. She was released in 2023. That same year, the Biden administration extended invitations to high-ranking Castro soldiers to tour US ports, something “extraordinarily imprudent,” according to Congressman Mario Díaz-Balart.
When another member of Congress, David Rouzer, questioned the Cuban visit to the port of Wilmington, the State Department avoided speaking about security concerns, telling the media that the Biden administration had “repeatedly asked the Cuban government, in public and in private”, to release “immediately and unconditionally all political prisoners.”
For John Suárez, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, the response “does not address security concerns, nor the regime’s history of involvement in and sponsorship of terrorism, or recent high-level visits to Cuba by Russian, Chinese, and Iranians.” Suárez questions: “Does this mean that if the regime releases political prisoners it will have more access to the United States and its port security?”
For the human right activists, the son of exiles from the Cuban Marxist Revolution, Biden’s opennessis “deeply worrying.” Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst, experienced something similar decades ago. “Cubans were underestimated for more than a quarter of a century,” he wrote in his memoir.Washington thought they were dealing with amateurs until 1987 when Castro prominent agent Florentino Aspillaga Lombard defected and revealed Castro’s espionage capacity. The Cuban regime developed one of the top six foreign intelligence services in the world, according to Latell, with achievements in handling double agents and counterintelligence that “have been unparalleled.”
Suárez recalls that agents at the service of the Cuban regime “have penetrated the Pentagon, the CIA, USAID and the State Department, and have caused soldiers to die abroad. They have helped shape Washington’s foreign policy, and they have written evaluations of threats from hostile countries that underestimate the dangers they pose to the union.”
The case of Carlos Lazo, who arrived in Florida in 1991 on a raft and assumed refugee status, is one of the most iconic among agents of influence. Since 2020, he has led the Bridges of Love initiative for the ending sanctions against the Cuban regime, something that would oxygenate the dictatorship by allowing it access to international credits. Lazo, a veteran of the US Army, is applauded by the regime on the island, which received him at the Palace of the Revolution.
But the homage in the island was not well received by all. In 2021, Edmundo García, an old spokesman for Castroism on Miami radio, revealed in a bizarre broadcast his anger with Lazo, who was received by “Cuban president [Miguel Díaz-Canel] like a king.”
García also addressed his message to Raúl Castro, and to the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), Álvaro López Miera, whom he blamed for sending Lazo on “a mission” to the United States. “I have never been a traitor; I have never stopped being a revolutionary.”
Would he be annoyed by a change among the agents of influence in Havana?
Lazo’s initiative attracted a variety of anti-embargo “fauna,” such as Uberto Mario, a Miami resident and former member of the political police, who protested against US sanctions in Miami.
John Suárez advises that “Washington does not underestimate the current entry of repressors into the country.” The failure to control the southern border is opportune for Castroites to enter US territory and then mutate as agents of influence.
The Cuban Institute for Press Freedom (ICLEP) reported between 2021 and 2022 the arrival in the United States of at least 12 communicators who served as spokespersons for the dictatorship until shortly before entering thru the border. None apologized for the actions against human rights defenders that they carried out in state media or for their participation in propaganda for Castroism.
One of them was the announcer Yunior Smith Rodríguez, “famous for denigrating independent reporters and opponents of the regime on Cuban Television,” confirmed Normando Hernández, who chairs ICLEP.
The military Ernesto Alemán, head of Information Technology of the Technical Department of Investigations in Havana, also arrived in the United States.
Although the United States seems to be the most desirable destination for Castro henchmen, in other nations, such as Russia (one of the few countries that do not require a visa for Cubans), there have been reports of regime collaborators fleeing the economic disaster. Mario Alberto Céspedes Pérez, went from ratting out dissidents in Cuba to being beaten and hunted with dogs by Belarusian policemen when he tried to cross into the European Union.
The writer and journalist Alberto Méndez Castelló, one of those watched by Céspedes Pérez in the town of Puerto Padre, Las Tunas, “forgives” his repressor, but it bothers him to see others like him leaving, “very well established in the United States, Canada, Spain or any country; not fighting for the freedom of Cuba, but living, without fear, the freedoms of democracy against which they themselves fought in Cuba.”
“I do not hold grudges or plan reprisals against any of my persecutors because, inside the dungeons, I was a free man,” says Méndez Castelló. “Every day that I spent on hunger strike in the cells, my stomach was sick, yes, but my heart was full of freedom, much more than my persecutors, who today are belches from the regime that used them and then spit on them.”
Inconvenient questions
On September 27, 2019, U.S. Judge Darrin P. Gayles cracked the gavel in a historic sentence: six months in prison, two years of probation, and the restitution of $12,522 for Saúl Santos Ferro, among other charges, for failing to indicate his ties to Castro’s MININT when completing his application to reside in the United States.
The Southern District of Florida also ordered that the former Cuban prison officer be deported after spending the time and paying previous sums. In Santos Ferro’s exposure before the courts, fortuitousness and constancy converged. Someone recognized the ex-soldier in a market, took a photo of him and sent it to the Cuba Repressor ID website, which has been on networks since 2011, and which files information about the followers of the Cuban regime.
The FBI’s International Human Rights Unit, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Social Security Administration’s Office of Inspector General confirmed that Santos Ferro had been a major in the political police “for decades” and had been “involved in arrest of dissidents.”
Through the Cuban Adjustment Act, one year and one day after legally entering US territory, Cubans can apply for permanent residence. The I-485 form includes problematic questions for henchmen who seek to regularize their immigration status:
“Have you been a member or associated in any way with the Communist Party? Were you ever involved in any way in activities such as genocide, torture, killing or attempting to kill someone, seriously hurting, or trying to hurt someone on purpose? Have you ever directly or indirectly persecuted anyone because of their race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion? Have you ever been a member of, served, aided, or otherwise participated in (…) military, paramilitary, police, or vigilante groups?”
Answering falsely involves a federal crime. On the other hand, although crimes against humanity do not prescribe and would be tried in a free Cuba, in the United States the repressors could only go to court for lying to the authorities.
Crescencio Marino Rivero, in Miami since 2010, made headlines in 2012 when several victims accused him of abuses committed against them when he was head of prisons in Villa Clara. Jorge Luis García “Antúnez” remembers his orders well: “He ordered the breaking of my head in 1991 when I was not going to wear common prisoner clothes. And he told me: I am racist.” On another occasion he had him locked up in a cell with pedophiles.
“He tortured me and here, in the United States, they gave him asylum,” lamented the opponent, known as “the Cuban Nelson Mandela.” Following the complaints, the federal government began to investigate Marino Rivero for hiding his MININT membership in his application forms. At the end of 2012 he fled back to Cuba.
Antúnez today is “very outraged that confessed thugs still enter the border.” He also questions the humanitarian parole program, which he considers “double standards, because it opens the door to regime collaborators.”
Juan O. Tamayo, a Miami Herald journalist, has acknowledged that “hundreds of other Cubans” with past henchmen records live in the city, “including State Security agents, informers and collaborators, judges, police officers, and members of the Security Committees,” Defense of the Revolution, the neighborhood watches.”
And apparently, henchmen of other leftist dictatorships, like the Chavista “chameleons,” are seeking similar treatment. The former mayor of Guanta, Jhonnathan Marín, who until 2018 moved 1.2 million dollars between Miami and Panama in bribes in the oil industry, was recently arrested. According to the Tampa Bay Times, most of the “chameleons” enter the country by air, legally, and once they are known to be investigated “they turn themselves in in exchange for lesser penalties.”
But Chavismo’s exiles have also organized: through the Organization of Politically Persecuted Venezuelans in Exile (VEPPEX), those who intend to live and do business in the United States are detected. In addition, the VEPPEX makes public complaints, in court or in security agencies such as the FBI. José Antonio Colina, president of the organization, pointed out that the former Chavistas now “don’t go so much to Miami, but to cities and states where they are less visible,” such as Utah, Atlanta, or Texas.
The Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH) pointed out for this report the existence of mechanisms such as the Magnitsky Law, which persecutes human rights violators globally. The institution has publicly and repeatedly called for the inclusion of Castroites in programs of individual sanctions. “But so far no one from the repressive structure has been included,” an OCDH spokesperson explained.
“The repression must have a response from the international community, the democracies; Otherwise, they would fail in their obligation to defend human rights beyond their borders and these actions would be normalizing.” The OCDH notes that effectiveness is associated with the political will of the states, “and that is where everything from national interest to ideological affinities come into play.”
In a recent public appearance, the Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States, Alejandro Mayorkas, said that meetings at ports of entry to the United States fell by 95 percent for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans due to the possibly unconstitutional humanitarian parole program -in force since January of this year- and with which, according to prosecutors from 20 states, the Department of Homeland Security abuses its authority to grant humanitarian permits. But the variant does not seem effective for filtering out Cuban repressors either.
In the United States there are at least 35 henchmen and spokesmen for the Cuban regime, according to what this investigation has been able to compile, based on personal sources, cases identified by the FDHC, ICLEP and the press. The 21 henchmen (military, violent or white-collar repressors, whistleblowers, among other collaborators) and 14 spokesmen (trolls on social networks, communicators or officials of the state media system), for the most part, entered during the current crisis on the southern border.
Are torturing your neighbor and praising the tyranny on television equivalent before the law? Beating up and lying to perpetuate Castroism? The responsibility of each individual in the repressive machinery of the island has gradations, as well as social repudiation or sentences in a future Cuba. All these positions, however, in the present day in the United States could lead henchmen and spokesmen to face legal consequences for lying about their membership in the totalitarian repressive-propaganda complex.
Luis Domínguez, an expert from the FDHC, affirms that the presence of the Castro repressors is “a potential danger for the victims of abuses in Cuba and for US national security.”
Senator Marco Rubio, for his part, believes that “the border crisis under President Biden continues to put Americans at great risk.” In statements for this report, he recalled that entering the U.S. “from convicted criminals to individuals on the FBI’s terrorist watch list, and now human rights violators from bloody regimes” such as the Cuban one.
“We are facing an immigration nightmare that is unsustainable on our southern border,” he stressed. “This Administration must be held accountable and explain to the American people why it does not uphold the laws of the United States.”
In March of this year, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, received in his office in Washington D.C. a letter from State of Florida senators in which they were alarmed by the entry into the United States of henchmen, spokesmen and collaborators of the Cuban tyranny. State Senator Ana María Rodríguez, one of the signatories, said that they would take her concern to Congress and to the Secretary of Homeland Security so that these people are not granted asylum.
The authorities seem to mean business, but how much? How far will they go in dealing with the human stream of victims and perpetrators, accomplices, and refugees on the southern border?
* This investigation wants to thank the contribution of the Cuban Studies Institute and Cultura Democrática.
Yoe Suárez, author of the non-fiction books “La otra isla” (Finalist Michael Jacobs Fellowship 2016 and Latino International Book Award 2019), “El soplo del demonio. Violencia y pandillerismo en La Habana” (2018), “Charles en el mosaico” (Casa de las Américas Mention 2017) and “Leviatán. Policía política y terror Socialista en Cuba” (Ilíada Award 2021). His books have been translated into Italian and English. Was a correspondent in Havana for CBN News. He has published in outlets such as The Hill, Newsweek, El Espectador, Univision and El Español. He did narrative and investigative journalism for independent Cuban media for eight years on the island, until his exile in August 2022. He directed documentaries such as the feature film “Cuba Crucis” (2022) and “Normadentro” (Memoria Documental Award of the Muestra Joven ICAIC 2011). He has appeared as a contributor in Deutsche Welle and Mega TV and runs the Boca de Lobo platform since 2018.
