By Belly of the Beast – Drop Site News
Story by Reed Lindsay. Published in collaboration with Belly of the Beast and Miami New Times
HAVANA, Cuba—Last November, 33-year-old truck driver José Manuel Rodríguez Castelló was scrolling TikTok when he came across a live video posted by Raúl Quevedo, a Cuban living in the United States.
It had been nearly a decade since Rodríguez immigrated to the United States from Cuba via a fiancé visa. He later became a permanent resident and was living with his girlfriend and her daughter in Nashville, Tennessee. Still, he harbored deep resentment toward what he saw as a dictatorial government repressing the Cuban people, and he was glad to see Quevedo calling it out.
Quevedo’s account, La Nueva Cuba (The New Cuba), is largely populated with images depicting armed resistance and an imagined post-communist Cuba, many of them AI-generated. Rodríguez messaged Quevedo. Quevedo messaged him back. The two hit it off, and Rodríguez said that Quevedo invited him to Florida to meet a group of like-minded exiles.
“They were looking for people who had the courage to join an armed uprising in Cuba,” Rodríguez said.
Half a year later, Rodríguez would be in Havana, explaining to a reporter how he wound up in Cuban custody—but unbowed in his determination to overthrow the government.
On the evening of February 24, Rodríguez joined nine other men on a fishing boat full of weapons bound for Cuba from the Florida Keys. They planned to seize a police station, ignite an uprising, and prompt U.S. intervention.
“The action plan was simple: Get the Cuban people to rise up in arms, control a province for 72 hours, and ask for a military intervention from the U.S. government,” Rodríguez said in an interview.
Rodríguez and the nine other men encountered the Cuban Border Guard before reaching Cuban soil. A firefight broke out, leaving four of the men—Ledián Padrón Guevara, Pavel Alling Peña, Michel Ortega Casanova, and Héctor Duani Cruz Correa—dead. A fifth, Roberto Álvarez Ávila, would later die from his wounds. The Border Guard suffered no fatal casualties, although the commanding officer of the patrol boat was shot.
Cuban authorities detained the five survivors. The incident made major headlines, but the details—what group the men represented, who funded them, and what their ultimate goal was—remained hazy. Drop Site and Belly of the Beast reached out to Cuban authorities to request interviews with the men and officials investigating the incident. In June, Cuban authorities said they had granted the requests and that four of the five survivors agreed to talk.
José Manuel Rodríguez Castelló, Christian Ernesto Acosta Guevara, Leordán Enrique Cruz Gómez, and Conrado Galindo Sariol all spoke from custody in July while they awaited trial on terrorism-related charges that could carry sentences up to 30 years in prison. The fifth survivor, Amijail Sánchez González, is also awaiting trial and either declined to be interviewed or was not permitted to speak to journalists.
These interviews offer the first public account of the failed operation from its participants, but, as with any interview conducted with a person in detention, the conditions were less than ideal. Still, even as the men remained at the mercy of Cuban authorities, some were willing to speak in blunt terms about their hostility to the Cuban government and to complain of mistreatment. Where possible, their accounts have been checked against forensic evidence, property records, and interviews with family members and allies in the United States.
The Interviews
The four men were interviewed one at a time in a conference room at a large house in a residential neighborhood of Havana belonging to the Interior Ministry’s International Relations Department (MININT). Each was brought to the house in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs, which an officer from MININT’s Special Tactical Unit removed for the interview. Each interview lasted between 30 and 55 minutes. Follow-up interviews were not possible.
The interviews were conducted in the presence of Edward Robert Campbell, the case’s prosecutor, and Col. Francisco Estrada Portales, who heads the Interior Ministry’s investigations into crimes against national security. All four detainees said they were not pressured into speaking to a journalist or promised anything in return, though that could not be independently verified.
They also said they voluntarily agreed to be interviewed without the presence of legal representation. Their access to lawyers has been uneven. Rodríguez said he had not yet found a lawyer willing to take his case. Cruz said he had not asked for a lawyer yet. Acosta said he had met with his attorney several times. According to his wife, Ana Seguí, Galindo has been represented by a lawyer since March.
The four men answered questions about how they became involved, the voyage, the clash with the Cuban Border Guard, and their time in custody. None showed outward signs of duress, but their accounts of their involvement and their attitudes toward the operation varied. Galindo said he had been forced to go; Acosta expressed regret; Cruz remained committed to “freedom” for Cuba but questioned whether armed struggle was the right path; Rodríguez was openly defiant and committed to fighting to overthrow the Cuban government.
Their accounts broadly corroborated one another on the operation’s objective and what happened once they encountered the Border Guard. But they diverged over who funded and planned the operation and how involved Cuban exile organizations were. Those unresolved questions center largely on Maritza Lugo Fernández, a longtime Cuban activist living in Miami who knew most of the ten men on the boat and whom the four men interviewed said provided a small farm in Florida as their training ground.
Cuban authorities also granted interviews with a senior Border Guard official, the MININT’s lead investigator, a ballistics expert, a forensic pathologist, the top MININT doctor, and the prosecutor.
Recruited on TikTok
Like José Manuel Rodríguez Castelló, Christian Ernesto Acosta Guevara found out about the group last year through TikTok. At the time, he was working as a driver for a moving company in Austin, Texas. A permanent resident, Acosta had been in the U.S. for about ten years and planned to apply for citizenship this year.
He connected with Pavel Alling Peña, a 45-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen living in Florida who created a TikTok account in late May 2025 called the Cardumen Movement (cardumen means a school of fish).
“I wrote a comment that I wished Cuba could prosper, be more liberal. That’s when he contacted me,” Acosta said. “He asked if I wanted a free Cuba. I said yes, I hoped it would happen one day.”
Alling invited him to join the Cardumen Movement, Acosta recalled, telling him it was a group dedicated to publishing videos, posters and other material in favor of Cuba’s freedom. Later that year, Alling told Acosta about a group of people training for a “military intervention” in Cuba.
“He asked if I was willing to join them and I said no problem, just tell me where,” Acosta said. “He said, ‘Come to my house, and I’ll take you with me.”
In November, they went to a finca, or small farm, near Fort Myers, Florida, to begin training. Amid the peppers, sugarcane, and farm animals, there was a rustic shooting range.
Acosta and the other three detainees interviewed said they were told the finca belonged to Maritza Lugo Fernández, a Cuban-born political activist who runs an anti-communist organization called the Partido 30 de Noviembre (November 30 Party). Lugo denied any knowledge of the operation but confirmed she gave one of the men—Amijail Sánchez—access to the property.
The party traces its roots to the Movimiento Revolucionario 30 de Noviembre “Frank País,” an underground anti-Castro group that was founded in Cuba in 1960 and later reorganized in Florida after several of its leaders went into exile. In 1991, the exile movement helped establish the 30 de Noviembre Party inside Cuba. Lugo was among its founding members and later assumed its leadership after her husband, Rafael Ibarra Roque, was imprisoned in 1994. She moved to South Florida in 2002 and continued the party’s work from exile.
While Acosta and Rodríguez each made multiple trips to the finca to train for the mission, they both insisted they knew few details about what the group’s leaders were planning. They identified the leaders as Roberto Álvarez Ávila, who died a week after being shot during the clash with the Cuban Border Guard, and Leordán Enrique Cruz Gómez. Acosta said Amijail Sánchez González, co-founder of a militant organization called the Auto Defensa del Pueblo (ADP), was also a leader.
“[The leaders] kept the plans hidden for security reasons, to avoid leaks,” Rodríguez said.
In January, the group’s leaders asked Acosta, Rodríguez, and several others who had been training to remain at the finca while they readied a boat for the trip to Cuba.
According to Rodríguez’s girlfriend, Yeni Rodríguez, he left their house in Nashville on Friday, January 23, telling her he was going to a camp in Florida with some friends. She said he collected magazines about guns and owned two or three firearms, which he took with him. She said he had a full-time job driving a dump truck, hauling dirt and stone to construction sites, and she expected him to return soon.
The operation was a “complete surprise” to her. “Who throws his life away like that?” she said.
Ultimately, Raúl Quevedo—a 40-year-old carpenter who runs a home renovation company incorporated in Bradenton, Florida in addition to La Nueva Cuba Corp, registered in the state as a nonprofit organization—did not join the other men on the boat. Reached by phone, Quevedo said he was in touch with most of the men through TikTok, but declined to answer questions about his relationship to them and whether he was involved in the operation.
“I have nothing to say about that,” he said. “The more you talk, the more your enemy knows about you.”
Quevedo said overthrowing the Cuban government is “doable” with enough money, but he was critical of the operation. “It wasn’t the right timing. It wasn’t the right organization. It wasn’t organized,” he said. “For something like that, you have to have a plan, structure, a Plan B and Plan C, and an escape plan. If you don’t have that, being only 10 people, you’re lost. And it’s a shame because they were good guys.”
Trying to Light a Spark, Maybe
Before the operation, Leordán Cruz Gómez said he lived in Tampa and worked as an industrial painter for a Missouri-based company called Thomas Industrial Coating. He had left Cuba in 2014 aboard a makeshift boat and landed in the Marquesas Keys, later obtaining permanent residency and ultimately U.S. citizenship.
Cruz said someone he met on a WhatsApp group invited him to the finca. He said that initially the training there had no specific operation in mind, but the worsening crisis in Cuba—and the relentless stream of desperate images from the island circulating on social media—inspired them to make concrete plans for armed action.
“It had become almost unbearable,” said Cruz, who left behind his wife and nine-year-old son. “There was the constant bombardment on social media. Everything we were seeing: mothers with children searching the garbage for food, buildings collapsing, all those crises. That perhaps made it feel more serious.”
Since President Donald Trump’s first term, the U.S. government has hammered Cuba with “maximum pressure” sanctions that have ravaged the country’s economy, fueling unprecedented migration and a growing humanitarian crisis that the UN high commissioner for human rights says is “endangering lives.”
However, many Cubans on and off the island blame the Cuban government for the economic crisis. This view has been amplified by social media feeds inundated with content minimizing the role of sanctions—some of it produced by U.S. government-funded media outlets and other organizations, and some coming directly from U.S. officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Cruz said he initially began training militarily with an armed group called La Nueva Nación Cubana en Armas (The New Cuban Nation in Arms)—an organization Cuban authorities allege was behind a 2023 terrorist plot that also aimed to provoke an armed uprising.
But after becoming disillusioned with the group’s lack of a political vision for a post-Communist Cuba, he gravitated toward Lugo’s 30 de Noviembre Party and the Republican Party of Cuba, a conservative exile group based in Florida.
Cruz said he and the other men began planning the incursion approximately a year in advance. Although he had no formal military training, he attempted to prepare himself by reading books and watching videos of Navy SEALs and Delta Force soldiers. “I often led the military training sessions and taught people how to shoot,” he said.
Cruz insisted there were no leaders and decisions were made collectively, although he said Álvarez was more involved in planning the operation.
Although one of the Republican Party of Cuba’s members, Michel Ortega Casanova, joined the operation, the group’s president, Ibrahim Bosch, denied any links to the armed incursion and said he did not know Cruz.
In a phone interview, Bosch said he knew Ortega, who had led the party in Tampa but had stepped down for work-related reasons.
Bosch said he had heard of training and shooting practice happening at “Maritza’s finca,” but was unaware of any plans to stage an incursion and of Ortega’s involvement.
“It’s possible that some of our people went at the same time as [the men training for the incursion], but they didn’t go as Republican Party members to train and shoot, but as individuals,” Bosch said.
The plan, according to Cruz, was to seize control of a police station in Cárdenas, Matanzas, a city about 90 miles east of Havana, and to then incite people to take the streets. Another member of the group already in Cuba planned to meet the boat on the coast to organize transportation inland, Cruz said. Cuban authorities later arrested Duniel Hernández Santos, who they allege was the group’s ground contact.
(The account Cuban officials obtained through interrogations was slightly different. According to Col. Estrada, the plan was to seize the police station in Santa Marta, about eight miles away from Cárdenas, and the nearby Varadero Border Guard Unit. Cruz said he understood only the broad outlines of the operation and that Álvarez had worked out the details.)
“It’s illogical to think that 10 men can declare war on a country. That would be absurd,” Cruz said. “But we were aware of the social discontent. We knew people wanted something to happen. A spark, maybe.”
The men never made it to shore.
A Plot in Plain Sight
As the men honed their shooting skills at the farm and plotted to spark a rebellion in Cuba, they made no secret of their intentions.
On May 29, 2025, two days after creating the Movimiento Cardumen TikTok account, Pavel Alling Peña posted an image of two semi-automatic rifles with a text that read: “Collecting funds for Cuba’s freedom.” In the comments, he wrote: “More information will be provided soon. This didn’t just begin. We’ve been planning this for 2 years. But as you’ll understand, there is a lot at stake.”
In the following months, Alling’s posts offered glimpses of the preparations underway.
Last September, he posted a photo of a camouflaged waterproof backpack with the text: “My new acquisition.” In a selfie video posted a month later, Alling announced: “We are very close. And soon the first steps will be taken.”
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Sometime before their trip, Acosta and Ledián Padrón Guevara, one of the five men killed by the Cuban Border Guard, appeared in a video at what appears to be a gun store showing off semi-automatic rifles. Univision journalist Javier Díaz subsequently published the video.
Meanwhile, the political organizations associated with the men were publicly advocating for the use of force against the Cuban government.
“The only way to remove the murderous communist dictatorship clinging to power is to confront it physically. And we are willing to do so,” Javier Berovides, a Cuban activist living in Florida, said in August 2025 at the first annual Anti-Communist Summit of the Cuban Right in Miami. Berovides claimed to be speaking in the name of Lugo’s 30 de Noviembre Party, Sánchez’s ADP, and his own organization, Movimiento Escudo Cubano (Cuban Shield Movement).
On its 2025 federal tax return, Movimiento Escudo Cubano identified itself as a church, although its website says it’s a movement defending human and civil rights in Cuba. Maritza Lugo is Movimiento Escudo Cubano’s vice-president, while Berovides is a member of 30 de Noviembre. Berovides declined to comment.
On January 1, Conrado Galindo posted an AI-generated photo on Facebook of himself holding a semi-automatic weapon in fatigues and a bulletproof vest. The caption reads: “Everything for freedom.”
Later that month, Raúl Quevedo posted a video on TikTok in which he appears dressed in fatigues holding a rifle with a Cuban flag in the background. “From the New Cuba, I send this message to all the Cubans on the island,” he says. “The time is very near to achieve our freedom. And work is underway on all fronts to make that happen. And now, one very important moment is that the American government, under the leadership and presidency of Donald Trump, is finally doing things. And we Cubans living in exile are willing to give everything for our freedom. And we are also ready to join the American government’s fight.”
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Quevedo insisted the video had nothing to do with the operation and was instead inspired by the U.S. military action in Venezuela that led to the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. He said he hoped to encourage the Trump administration to take similar action in Cuba.
“The uniform and gun was to show to the American government in case they wanted Cuban men in the United States to join,” he said.
On January 30, Alling posted on Facebook: “The time has come for those dictators who stole our country. Thanks to all those committed to this struggle and for their efforts and desire. Cuba will be free and we will rebuild it as God commands.”
The next day, Sánchez posted a press release from ADP, the 30 de Noviembre Party, Movimiento Escudo Cubano, and Alling’s Movimiento Cardumen, declaring: “There is no space for negotiation [with the Cuban government]. Our objective: A free, just and sovereign Cuba.”
None of those organizations are widely known in Cuba, but their public postings of an impending attack seemed to draw the attention of Cuban authorities. On February 5, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned of “plans for terrorist acts that are being supported, financed and prepared from the United States to attack Cuba.”
Ten Men, 25 Guns
After sunset on February 24, the men set out in two boats from Marathon in the Florida Keys.
Cuban authorities said the boats contained weapons and other equipment: 25 firearms—14 long arms and 11 handguns—along with some 13,000 rounds of ammunition, more than 100 magazines, homemade pipe bombs packed with fragments of nuts and bolts and black powder, Molotov cocktails, bulletproof vests, camouflage uniforms and helmets, knives, night-vision equipment, a drone, a Starlink satellite-internet terminal, and medical supplies.
They had purchased one boat for the operation, and they had been told the other was borrowed. About halfway to Cuba, the motor on the purchased boat stopped working, Acosta said. The men transferred their weapons and gear to the other boat—El Tornado—and all ten continued.
El Tornado was a 24-foot Pro-Line fishing boat built in 1981, bearing the Florida registration number FL7726SH. One of the men on board, Héctor Duani Cruz Correa, who had been doing tile work as a contractor for its owner, took the fishing boat.
According to Acosta, Cruz Correa told the group that he had permission to take the boat fishing. The boat’s owner, Angel Walter Montera, later reported the boat stolen and told the Monroe County police that he wished to press charges.
The men had planned to arrive under cover of darkness, but the breakdown delayed them, according to Cruz Gómez. “We knew that if daylight caught up with us, there was a chance they’d see us,” he said.
At approximately 7 a.m., a lookout at a Cuban Border Guard post on Cayo Bahía de Cádiz, a cay off Cuba’s northern coast, spotted the boat less than four nautical miles to the northwest. A radar operator confirmed the sighting and began tracking its course and speed, according to First Col. Ybey Carballo Pérez, the Border Guard’s chief of staff.
Cruz Gómez said they steered the boat toward a small cay near shore, hoping to hide until nightfall. But the tide was out, and El Tornado ran aground in shallow water.
“Almost everyone got out of the boat to try to dislodge it and keep going, and to add more fuel because we were almost out,” Acosta said. “That’s when we saw a boat coming toward us. We didn’t know it was the Border Guard, but we assumed it was. We got the boat free, and everyone got on board.”
But El Tornado, at a maximum speed of 24 knots, could not outrun the Border Guard vessel.
“By the time we took off, the Coast Guard boat was almost on top of us,” Acosta said. “That’s when Leordán Cruz Gómez shouted: ‘Get ready. They’re going to shoot. Look for the magazines.’”
Most of the weapons aboard El Tornado were wrapped in moving blankets and packed inside bags. “The magazines and the guns were in different bags,” Acosta said. The group had expected to slip ashore undetected, Cruz and Rodríguez said—not fight its way onto the island.
Cuban authorities say someone aboard El Tornado fired first, striking the Border Guard captain in the abdomen. All four men confirmed that the first shot came from their own boat.
“One of us fired the first shot. I have to admit that,” said Rodríguez, who was the most critical of Cuban authorities. Rodríguez, Cruz and Galindo said they did not know who fired first.
Acosta said Amijail Sánchez took the first shot. “Amijail grabbed a magazine for the Chinese-made AK-47 he had and opened fire on the Coast Guard. That’s when a shootout began. I don’t know exactly what happened because at that point I got scared and threw myself onto the floor of the boat so I wouldn’t get hit by the gunfire,” he said.
The five-man Border Guard crew carried just five weapons: the captain’s handgun, three AKM assault rifles (a modernized version of an AK-47) and an RPK light machine gun, a longer-barreled relative of the AKM. According to Estrada, none of the five Border Guard officers had combat experience.
Lt. Col. Avelino Guilarte Paumier, the forensics ballistics expert assigned to the case, said that after the shooting, investigators found five rifles and three pistols outside the bags. Spent casings recovered from the boat were matched to just three weapons: a Glock 19 pistol and two Ruger Precision rifles.
Guilarte said the number of recovered shell casings did not necessarily reflect the number of shots fired because the clash occurred on the water and evidence had fallen into the sea. Divers searched the area but found no additional casings, he said.
Nine of the ten men were shot, while on the Cuban side, only the Border Guard captain was wounded. All four men interviewed said they did not fire a shot.
“It was only when I managed to pull out a rifle that a bullet hit me,” said Cruz, adding that the all-night voyage had left the men physically depleted and slow to react.
“We had been vomiting [from sea sickness],” he said. “We were wet, cold and exhausted. It kept us from thinking. It paralyzed us.”
“At that moment, all I could think to do was put the weapon beside me and lie down in the boat,” Acosta said. “I got scared,” he added. “I always said back at the farm that shooting at a target, a bullseye, is not the same as facing people in real life who are shooting back at you.”
The exchange lasted minutes, according to the survivors and Cuban authorities. Cruz eventually raised an arm to signal surrender. Galindo said one of the Border Guards continued firing until the wounded captain ordered him to stop.
“The captain shouted at him—shouted strongly,” Galindo said. “If the captain had let him continue, he would have killed us all.”
Ledián Padrón Guevara, Héctor Duani Cruz Correa, and Pavel Alling Peña died aboard El Tornado. Michel Ortega Casanova died while being evacuated. Roberto Álvarez Ávila died a week later, on March 4, from complications associated with his wounds.
Investigators counted 14 bullet impacts on the Border Guard vessel and 23 on El Tornado. The boats were moving throughout the firefight, making it difficult to reconstruct events and impossible to establish a precise firing distance, according to Cuban ballistics expert Guilarte.
“We can’t know if it was 20, 25, or 30 meters,” he said. “What we can show scientifically is that it wasn’t at close range.” Álvarez was the only one who died from a gunshot wound above the neck—a bullet entered through his shoulder blade and struck him in the jaw—but investigators determined he was not shot at close range.
“Perhaps the idea was somewhat naive because we hadn’t prepared for every possible situation,” said Cruz. “We weren’t prepared to face the Border Guard.”
“We had no training to confront the Cuban Border Guard,” Rodríguez said.
A Long History of Violence—and Impunity
In the years before the attempted incursion, Cuba had already placed two of its participants—Amijail Sánchez González in 2023 and Leordán Enrique Cruz Gómez in 2025—on its national list of terrorism suspects for financing acts of violence on Cuban soil. Cuba also submitted the list to the United Nations as part of its reporting under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373.
Sánchez’s Facebook page is littered with videos of burning sugar cane fields in Cuba and graffiti featuring the name of the organization he co-founded, the Auto Defensa del Pueblo, or ADP. The page of ADP’s co-founder, Michel “Kiki” Naranjo Riverón, features a post offering to pay $1,000 to anyone who kills a Cuban police officer.
“Burning a building, cutting fiber optic cables in Camagüey, lighting fire to a hospital, burning an electrical generator,” Col. Estrada said. “In a year and a half, one person [in Cuba] committed 18 acts of terrorism that were financed by Amijail and his organization, the Auto Defensa del Pueblo, designated as a terrorist organization and which is based and acts openly in the United States.”
The U.S. has not designated this organization as a terrorist group. Nor is there any indication that U.S. authorities took any action to dissuade Sánchez, who in 2021 was convicted in Florida of aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer for striking a moving police car with a vehicle he was driving in Miami, and the other men despite their open preparations for armed action in Cuba.
Since the Cuban revolution, the U.S. has frequently tolerated acts of violence and terrorism aimed at overthrowing the communist government.
In March 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA plan to topple the Cuban government by forming exile groups, launching a radio station to broadcast U.S. propaganda on the island, creating “a covert intelligence and action organization” inside Cuba, and training paramilitary forces outside the island. This culminated in the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Shortly after, the CIA launched Operation Mongoose to coordinate acts of sabotage and terrorism aimed at civilian targets in Cuba.
After direct CIA support was phased out, exile paramilitary groups continued staging attacks from Florida. In 1971, when the Coast Guard sought to rein in Alpha 66, a U.S.-based Cuban-American terrorist organization, President Richard Nixon wrote: “We should not inhibit Cuban exile activity against their homeland.”
Five years later, two bombs killed 73 people aboard Cubana Flight 455 in the deadliest act of airline terrorism in the Western Hemisphere at the time. The suspected masterminds were paramilitary leaders Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Both men lived in Florida until their deaths and were never prosecuted in the United States for the bombing.
Militants based in Florida and New Jersey also staged attacks on U.S. soil, including bombings of businesses that dealt with Cuba and the assassinations of a Cuban diplomat and a Cuban-American advocate for dialogue with Havana. The FBI considered one of the armed groups, Omega 7, to be the most dangerous terrorist organization in the United States.
The acts of terrorism continued into the 1990s, as militants in speedboats sprayed beachside resorts with machine gun fire and a bombing campaign targeted hotels in Havana, killing an Italian tourist and injuring several others.
In 1998, Cuban officials handed the FBI extensive documentation detailing dozens of U.S.-based terrorist plots. The FBI responded by arresting undercover Cuban agents in Florida who had infiltrated the terrorist networks.
As recently as December 2023, Cuban authorities said they foiled an attempt by people linked to La Nueva Nación Cubana en Armas to foment an armed rebellion. They captured a Florida man who had traveled to Cuba with handguns and ammunition on a jet ski and then tried to recruit people to commit acts of violence and arson.
“We’ve been attacked for 67 years and while it may seem that these things are something of the past, it’s not the past,” said Col. Estrada, the Interior Ministry investigator. “For those of us working to combat terrorism, we’ve seen how this type of activity is constantly happening in the United States.”
Maritza Lugo
Cuban authorities say the operation involved multiple leaders, but they allege that Maritza Lugo, head of the 30 de Noviembre Party, was its mastermind.
“She was the one who organized, financed and oversaw the logistics of everything,” Estrada alleged. “[The finca] is where everything was prepared. It’s where they trained, prepared, and tested the explosives. Even the [purchased] boat was there. They left from there for the coast, for Marathon Key.”
Lugo denies any involvement in the operation. “The Castro regime has accused me endlessly—of being a terrorist, of paying for things,” she said. “What could I possibly pay for? I live on [Social Security]. I receive $700 a month, which isn’t enough for anything. I try to save. I do odd jobs. My family helps me if I need something extra. But I don’t have the money to finance absolutely anything.”
Born in 1963 on the outskirts of Havana, Lugo became politically active in the 1990s alongside her then husband, Rafael Ibarra Roque. Together they founded the 30 de Noviembre Party, but Lugo assumed its leadership when Cuban authorities arrested Ibarra in 1994 and sentenced him in February 1995 to 20 years for sabotage. Cuban authorities accused Ibarra of setting off an explosive device at a military building. Lugo maintains the charges were trumped up.
Lugo herself was arrested and imprisoned multiple times and identified by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. She says she was kept in isolation and subjected to torture.
In 2002, Lugo left Cuba for South Florida, where she has been a persistent, albeit relatively fringe, presence among Cuba’s exile opposition. She has occasionally had the spotlight, being interviewed about rights abuses in Cuba, appearing at a Capitol Hill news conference, meeting with members of Congress, and greeting President George W. Bush during a White House visit.
Recently, Lugo has also been associated with figures linked to political violence. She was featured prominently at a July 2025 event sponsored by the Hispanic Republican Club of Collier County, Florida, alongside Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol and subsequently pardoned by President Donald Trump.
In 2018, Lugo posted a photo of herself with Luis Posada Carriles, the paramilitary leader, a month before he died. Another photo of their encounter was posted earlier this year on a Facebook page called “10 Cuban Patriots,” which Lugo says she created in support of the men involved in the February incursion. The post praises Posada Carriles as “a great man and friend, a great patriot” and “the terror of the great demon Fidel Castro.”
In recent years, Lugo’s 30 de Noviembre Party forged an alliance with ADP, which has openly endorsed violence and sabotage as a means of overthrowing the Cuban government. Their relationship was both political and personal. According to Lugo, she was romantically involved with Amijail Sánchez, ADP’s co-founder, for about a year, and he was living with her before he joined the incursion.
While ADP was the military arm of the group that went to Cuba, the 30 de Noviembre Party was the political arm, according to Cruz.
“If we succeeded, 30 de Noviembre was the group that would present its political program to the people,” he said.
The fatigues and helmets that Cuban authorities say they seized bore patches featuring the insignia of both ADP and the 30 de Noviembre Party.
Since February, Lugo has been most visible as a prominent public advocate for the imprisoned men, organizing events to support them and posting frequently online about their case.
In a telephone interview from Miami, she said she knew most of the men before their ill-fated trip.
Yet, despite her romantic relationship with Sánchez and the alliance between their two organizations, she said she knew nothing about the operation and would have opposed it had she known.
“They are very good people who did something crazy,” she said. “They went far beyond the bounds of what is normal because what they did was truly madness. Who in their right mind could think that 10 men could accomplish anything against a dictatorship like that?”
“I am very much in favor, and I’ve said so publicly, of a military intervention, but a military intervention by the United States, a country that has enough power to overthrow such a cruel regime,” she continued. “Trump has all the resources, all the intelligence and all the means necessary for it to succeed and achieve its objective. But doing it the other way is a waste of courage. It’s a tragedy for any Cuban to lose their life over something like that.”
The Finca
The Hendry County Property Appraiser’s records show Lugo owned a 13-acre farm in LaBelle, Florida, a rural area an hour east of Fort Myers, from March 2020 until September 2024. She sold the property to her daughter, Rosalia Agnello, and Alexis Martínez, a Miami resident who took full possession in July 2025.
Acosta, Rodríguez, and Cruz said they trained at the farm in the months leading up to the February 2026 operation, even after it was sold to Martínez. But both Martínez and Lugo acknowledge that she continued to have access to the property.
Lugo said that the finca was used for shooting practice and hunting rabbits, doves and wild hogs. “At the finca, you can shoot safely, and it’s permitted in that area,” she said. “We hunt animals there. We shoot because we like guns.”
She said she never witnessed any military training or preparations for an incursion into Cuba. “Anyone who trained on my finca, who said they trained, that’s their problem,” she said. “Here in the United States, that is against the law. It’s a crime.”
From his home in Miami, Martínez said Lugo was formerly his romantic partner and that they remained friends. He said he demolished the shooting range shortly after taking full possession of the property, and knew nothing about any training taking place there.
However, in response to an inquiry for this story, Hendry County Sheriff’s detectives went to the property in August and observed what appeared to be “a three-sided berm designed for multidimensional shooting exercises.”
According to the detectives, the structure appeared designed “to facilitate training that incorporates multiple shooting angles and directions rather than functioning as a traditional shoot house.”
The Hendry County Sheriff’s Office has received no reports or complaints of any gunshots, explosions or any criminal activity happening at the address, according to Public Information Officer Capt. Susan Harrelle.
The sheifff’s office contacted the FBI, ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, the Florida Office of Statewide Prosecution, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, but Harrelle said they have received no information confirming that military training took place on the property.
Cruz and Rodríguez said that Lugo was often present while they met and trained, though she was not involved with planning the incursion or obtaining weapons.
“She was always at the finca, helping with the logistics, food, transportation, making sure we weren’t lacking for anything,” said Rodríguez.
Lugo gave a different account.
“I’m almost always in Miami,” she said. “I would go to the finca, spend one, two or three days there, and then return to Miami. [Sánchez] had free rein there and did whatever he wanted because I trusted him.”
Rodríguez said individual members of the group provided the weapons. “Nobody ever paid us anything,” said Rodríguez. “We were self-financed. We bought our own bullets, our own rifles, our own military equipment.”
Lugo was not involved in the planning, Acosta said, but her party was their “sponsor.” “What she did mostly was handle the political part,” said Rodríguez.
“He’s No Terrorist”
Conrado Galindo’s account diverges from the others. A 59-year-old permanent resident living in Miami, Galindo ran a small delivery business, but he had studied video production at the Miami Media School.
According to Galindo, a former classmate recommended him to Lugo, who offered $500 to film and edit the training videos. Galindo said when he arrived at the finca, Lugo told him he would be joining the other men on the incursion into Cuba.
“She told me: ‘There’s a change in plans. You’re going to Cuba,’” he said.
Galindo said he protested, but was threatened by Lugo and another member of the group, Roberto Álvarez Ávila. He said they took his phone and his green card.
Acosta said he also gave his phone and green card to Lugo and that Cruz warned him not to leave because they had “sworn an oath.”
Lugo denied both men’s accounts, and claimed the testimonies of all four men were coerced.
“Everything they are saying is a lie, and I don’t blame them,” she said. “What are they supposed to say? They want to save their lives, and they are being forced to say those things.”
Reached by phone, Galindo’s wife, Ana Seguí, said she met Lugo at events in Miami in support of the detainees, but distanced herself after speaking with his family members in Cuba who had met with him in prison. Seguí said she subsequently received a threatening WhatsApp message with photos that appeared to show her husband dead about a month after the clash with the Border Guard. She said she didn’t know who sent the messages and changed her number shortly after.
“Conrado is no terrorist, that I can guarantee,” said Seguí. “He’s a family man. I don’t know how this happened.”
In Cuba, Galindo had been a dissident and was imprisoned for seven years, according to Seguí. But he said he had given up his political activism after immigrating to the United States.
“He was always against the Cuban government, but going [to Cuba]?” said Seguí. “Conrado didn’t go anywhere unless it was for work.”
Seguí said Galindo had never used a gun before, and the AI-generated Facebook photo of him with a gun was a joke (he had posted similar images of himself and Seguí dressed as police officers while holding a gun two weeks earlier).
Reached by phone in Nashville, Rodríguez’s girlfriend, Yeni, also rejected the terrorist label.
“He was a good person, a good father and partner,” said Yeni, who lived with him for five years. “He has always helped [others].”
She said last year he joined other Nashville residents in donating food to immigrant families afraid to leave their homes amid an ICE crackdown in the city.
She said Rodríguez neither supported nor opposed Trump, despite sharing the president’s hostility toward Cuba’s government.
No Help From the U.S.
The Cuban Border Guard informed the Miami-based Coast Guard’s Southeast District and the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) liaison at the U.S. embassy in Havana within three hours of the firefight, according to First Colonel Ybey Daniel Carballo Pérez, the Border Guard’s chief of staff.
That evening, Carballo said, the USCG liaison, Luis García, was called in to the Interior Ministry’s International Relations Department house in Havana, where he was provided details on what had occurred, including El Tornado’s registration number and the identities of the people aboard.
According to Carballo, even as the Trump administration has ramped up its efforts to bring about regime change in Cuba, the two maritime services have continued to cooperate behind the scenes.
“Every time a boat approaches Cuba en route to U.S. territory, we inform them in real time,” he said. “Even with the situation Cuba is enduring, with the maximum pressure imposed by the U.S. government on our country, the Cuban Border Guard has maintained the same level of cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard.”
During Barack Obama’s opening with Cuba and to a lesser extent under Joe Biden, the two countries held bilateral meetings to coordinate responses to irregular migration, human and drug trafficking, and search-and-rescue operations. After Trump returned to office, his administration discontinued the meetings, in line with Rubio’s confrontational approach toward Cuba.
“If there isn’t more cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard and other U.S. law enforcement, it’s due to the Trump administration’s policy and everything the State Department is doing to interfere in our relationship,” said Carballo.
Operational communication never stopped, but Cuban Border Guard officials complain their efforts are not reciprocated. “For every three messages we send, we receive one in return,” said Carballo. “National security doesn’t flow in just one direction.”
Carballo expressed skepticism that the U.S. Coast Guard was not aware of the approach of El Tornado—pointing to the extensive U.S. surveillance deployed to target drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean.
“We didn’t receive a single report about that vessel coming our way, even though we all know that no recreational vessel is permitted to leave U.S. territory to come here to Cuba,” he said.
“Everything is monitored. And yet a speedboat of this kind, carrying ten people, shrapnel-filled explosives, Molotov cocktails and wartime supplies, a boat coming to sow grief here in Cuba and to kill people, was able to make the journey,” said Carballo.
On March 6, Cuba’s Interior Ministry sent the Trump administration a detailed report on the incident, along with six pages of questions about how the operation was organized and financed in the United States, according to Estrada.
More than three weeks passed, and they received no response.
Then, on March 31, Cuban Border Guard and Interior Ministry officials received an FBI delegation. Carballo said they spent two and a half days briefing the agents, who were joined by the Coast Guard liaison and the U.S. embassy’s security chief. They met at the International Relations house and traveled to Varadero to inspect El Tornado and the Coast Guard patrol boat involved in the confrontation. The agents also briefly met with the detainees and took their fingerprints and DNA samples.
Cuban authorities said they reiterated their questions about the operation’s organization and financing, but aside from information identifying where some of the men had purchased their weapons and the criminal history of two or three of the men, they’ve received no response.
“It’s been three months, and we haven’t received any information from them,” said Carballo in July.
The Coast Guard responded to a request for comment with a boilerplate statement about Operation Vigilant Sentry, which focuses on irregular maritime migration. It declined to comment on El Tornado, cooperation with its Cuban counterparts, or the investigation into the February 25 clash with the Cuban Border Guard, referring questions to the State Department.
The State Department, in turn, declined to comment and directed questions to the FBI. The FBI also declined to comment and referred questions to the State Department.
Ana Seguí said FBI agents questioned her at her home, while Yeni Rodríguez said people she believed were federal agents also came to question her. Maritza Lugo said the FBI has not contacted her.
The Aftermath
After the clash, Cuban Border Guard officers handcuffed the men and transferred them from El Tornado to a Border Guard boat. On shore, they received first aid and were then taken to Arnaldo Milián Castro Provincial Hospital in Santa Clara.
Two of the men—Leordán Cruz Gómez and Roberto Álvarez Ávila—underwent surgeries. Cruz’s case was the most urgent, according to Dr. Juan Antonio Ramírez Aguilera, the Interior Ministry’s head of medical services. He had been shot in the arm, and the bullet had damaged the radial nerve and caused significant bleeding. Cruz, who later underwent a second surgery at a military hospital in Havana, said the medical care was “very professional and humane.”
Despite undergoing surgery, Álvarez died a week later from complications related to his gunshot wound. The cremated remains of all five men who died were later turned over to family members, according to Dr. Annia Silva Socarrás, director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine.
After being discharged from the military hospital, the survivors were taken to a detention center known as Villa Marista, where Interior Ministry investigators questioned them.
After the interrogations, the detainees were moved to a maximum-security section of a prison called Combinado del Este. There, Galindo reported being kicked in the legs on the day they arrived. Rodríguez said he was threatened once there and that a Border Guard officer intentionally stepped on his injured leg shortly after the firefight. Apart from that, he, Acosta, and Cruz said they had not been physically harmed or tortured while incarcerated.
Lugo said Sánchez’s family members in Cuba told her that he had reported being repeatedly beaten in custody, suffering hearing loss in one ear and injuries to his arm and ribs.
Cuban authorities deny that Sánchez has been physically mistreated in custody. At Villa Marista, detainees could receive family visits once a week. At Combinado del Este, visits are allowed once every three weeks. Rodríguez’s girlfriend, Yeni, said she traveled to Cuba in July and was allowed to spend two hours with him in a private room. She said he had lost weight and was pale, but that he showed no signs of having been physically harmed.
The five surviving men and Duniel Hernández Santos, their alleged co-conspirator on the island, remain in pretrial detention on terrorism-related charges.
According to Edward Robert Campbell, the case’s prosecutor, the charges carry a sentence of up to 30 years in prison or even death, though Cuba has not executed anyone since 2003. Campbell said his office was considering whether to try Maritza Lugo in absentia.
Regret and Resolve
The operation was intended to fracture Cuba. Instead, its failure created fault lines in the exile organizations that backed it.
Kiki Naranjo, who co-founded ADP with Sánchez, publicly split with Lugo and her party in an August 27 TikTok video post. In the post, Naranjo said ADP had sought an alliance with the 30 de Noviembre Party so its members would not be considered “terrorists,” but complained that it did not receive the support he expected. He also criticized the operation and Lugo’s alleged involvement.
“I don’t understand how 10 men, well united, died the way they did,” he said. “I don’t understand how someone close to them could have known where those guys were planning to enter and yet failed to explain that it was a restricted military zone—an area they couldn’t enter. I don’t understand how those men could have been sent directly to their deaths.”
Conrado Galindo said that if he returned to the United States, he intended to sue Maritza Lugo for allegedly kidnapping and threatening him.
Acosta said he regretted joining the operation, which he described as “madness.”
“The advice I’d give other Cubans is stop consuming so much trash [on social media]. Keep your jobs and don’t come to Cuba to do anything because it’s not going to turn out well,” he said. “The Cuban people and the military are well trained to stop an intervention.”
Cruz said he still believed in their cause, but they needed more resources to carry out a successful armed struggle. He compared their failed incursion to Fidel Castro’s 1956 landing in Cuba aboard the Granma. “I’m convinced that everyone in Cuba wants change,” he said. “We still have many of the same problems we faced in the 1950s, and those problems will inevitably give rise to revolutionary movements fighting for a just cause.”
Rodríguez said he did not regret joining the operation, although he lamented watching his companions die, the suffering his detention had caused his family, and “having failed all those Cubans who want a free Cuba.” He said he remained committed to bringing about the end of what he considers a “dictatorship,” whether it be through military action or the Trump administration’s current policy of economic warfare.
“If they told me they would send an oil tanker to Cuba in exchange for freeing José Manuel,” he said, referring to himself, “I would rather rot in prison than let a single drop of oil enter this country.”
Reed Lindsay is a journalist, award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Belly of the Beast, an independent media organization covering Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations. He has reported from Cuba since 2015.