MIAMI, United States. – The Vice Minister of Labor and Social Security of Cuba, Juan Carlos Santana Novoa, requested political asylum on the southern border of the United States (specifically in the town of Nogales, state of Arizona), according to a report of this Tuesday Martí News.
On Monday the Facebook page “La Tijera” indicated that Santana Novoa had been detained on the Nogales border with Mexico, around 8:00 in the morning.
According to Martí NewsCurrently, the Cuban regime official is free in the North American country. The information was confirmed to that medium by sources from the US Government and immigrants who accompanied Santana Novoa during his journey to the southern border of the United States.
According to the report, the Cuban official joined a group of eight immigrants in Tamaulipas, Mexico, to request an appointment through the CBP One program, which allows political asylum seekers to schedule their entry to the US border.
“We had no idea who that man was until the moment we arrived at the border and they called him by name,” he assured Martí News Yureide Aldana, one of the immigrants in the group.
Santana Novoa was named Vice Minister of Labor and Social Security on January 11, 2022, according to the official website of his own entity. Presumably he still held that position at the time of his entry to the US.
Less than a month ago, on September 4, the Cuban Embassy in Mexico published on Facebook and
After that date, no other reports from the official Cuban press appear involving Santana Novoa. Nor has there been any information about his dismissal.
“We were always joking with him, telling him that he looked like a Cuban leader, but we didn’t know who he really was,” Yeima González, another member of the group, told Martí Noticias.
Santana Novoa was the only one of the group to be accepted to enter the United States, while the rest of the members were informed that their appointment did not correspond to that port of entry. The vice minister was released with a court date in 2026, although no US agency has officially commented on the case, according to publication Martí News.
In the last year, an avalanche of former officials of the island’s regime have entered the United States. Just this Monday transcended that former Cuban prosecutor Rosabel Roca Sampedro, known for her role in the conviction of protesters on July 11, 2021 in Camagüey, had entered the North American country and was residing in the state of Texas.
These are not the first cases of (former) Cuban officials arriving in the US and requesting asylum. In August 2024, the former first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in Cienfuegos, Manuel Menendez Castellanosarrived in Miami through a family reunification process. Other known cases are that of Arelys Casañola Quintanaformer president of the Municipal Assembly of People’s Power on the Isle of Youth, who requested asylum on the southern border of the United States, and that of the judge Melody González Pedrazadetained in Florida while awaiting the resolution of her asylum application.
Furthermore, in April 2024, the Cuban military pilot Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez came to the US through the parole humanitarian. González-Pardo Rodríguez was involved in the operation that shot down two civilian planes belonging to the Hermanos al Rescate organization in 1996, in which four Cuban-Americans died.
