Madrid/The ten occupants of the speedboat coming from the United States and intercepted in Cuban waters this Wednesday “had intentions of carrying out an infiltration for terrorist purposes,” says the Ministry of the Interior, which publishes the identities of those detained in the operation, all of them Cubans residing in Florida.
These are Amijail Sánchez González, Leordan Enrique Cruz Gómez, Conrado Galindo Sariol, José Manuel Rodríguez Castelló, Cristian Ernesto Acosta Guevara and Roberto Azcorra Consuegra. The first two are part of the list of people whom the regime considers terrorists, published in July 2025.
The first of them had been wanted since 2023, after the arrest of another Cuban resident in the United States who brought “firearms, ammunition and other equipment through Matanzas with the purpose of carrying out terrorist acts.” The second was being investigated as part of a file for “sabotage activities” in Villa Clara in which another citizen of the Island was arrested and prosecuted.
Among the deceased, three of them have not yet been identified, say the authorities, who report only the name of one: Michel Ortega Casanova
Among the deceased, three of them have not yet been identified, say the authorities, who report only the name of one: Michel Ortega Casanova. A member of the Republican Party of Cuba, which is also one of the organizations considered terrorist by the Cuban regime, he had been president of the local Tampa section of the party, and now replaced by Wilfredo Beyra, who yesterday made a live broadcast on Facebook to vindicate the action of those “patriots.” “They did not go to Cuba to carry out a terrorist act, they went to do what very few have had the courage to do. They went to try to make an extreme sacrifice to awaken a people for the freedom of Cuba,” he argued.
The claim for the attack has been massive. The Casa Cuba of Tampa, linked to Ortega Casanova and Leordan Enrique Cruz Gómez, has decreed three days of official mourning with flags at half-mast for the “anti-Castro fighters who fell in the fulfillment of their sacred duty to the Homeland.” René Montes De Oca, vice president of the group, has referred to the deceased as a “brother of ideas and friend.”
“God keep you in His Holy Love, our condolences to family and friends. Today exile dresses in mourning and Cuba dresses in Glory with the redeeming blood of its best children,” he added.
Not all the exiles have seen it with the same eyes. The debates have been arduous all night on social networks, and many voices have considered this action a mistake. “Now it turns out that the dictatorship has its first victory, against an American invasion, which it defeated with resounding success. The speech that they had already been making,” lamented a Cuban from Florida.
Meanwhile, an independent investigation involving the FBI is underway in Florida. Bureau agents went to a home in Miami Lakes linked to the incident, since the address appeared in the property records of the vessel involved in the incident, a “speed boat” with Florida registration FL7726SH.
The White House, for its part, said it was monitoring the attack, according to US Vice President JD Vance.
“Marco told me about it about 15 minutes ago, but we don’t know many details. It is a situation that we are monitoring. Hopefully it is not as bad as we fear it could be,” he declared.
The Secretary of State, who was at the summit of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) in Saint Kitts and Nevis, where he spoke at length about Cuba, said. “I’m not going to speculate or give an opinion; I want to know what happened. We are going to find out exactly what happened and we will respond accordingly,” he said.
“I’m not going to speculate or give an opinion; I want to know what happened. We are going to find out exactly what happened and we will respond accordingly,” he said.
The head of US diplomacy stressed that, for now, all the information comes from the Cuban authorities and that the Donald Trump Administration wants to contrast it with “independent information”, although the express recognition made from Florida suggests the result.
The incident occurred this Wednesday morning, when a boat approached one nautical mile northeast of Canalizo El Pino, on the Villa Clara key of Falcones. “When a surface unit of the Border Guard Troops of the Ministry of the Interior approached, with five combatants, for identification,” the ministry itself indicated in a first note, “from the offending boat, fire was opened on the Cuban troops, which caused the commander of the Cuban boat to be injured.”
In the operation, the Border Guard Troops seized “assault rifles, short weapons, homemade explosive devices (Molotov cocktails), bulletproof vests, telescopic sights and camouflage uniforms.”
The Government also announced that there is a Cuban resident on the Island detained, Duniel Hernández Santos, “sent from the United States to guarantee the reception of the armed infiltration, who is currently confessing to his actions.” According to some versions, he had been deported from the United States in 2024.
Russia is the only third country that has so far spoken out on the matter. The spokesman for the Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, during his daily telephone press conference, supported the action of the Island’s agents.
“The Cuban border guards did what they had to do in a situation like this,” he declared, adding that “regarding the security situation around the Island, it is very important that all parties maintain containment and not allow any type of provocation.”
Peskov tried to remove weight from the matter and separate it from the deteriorated relations between Cuba and the United States, pointing out that “there is nothing to comment, Havana reported that the detained Cuban citizens who tried to enter national territory with weapons recognized that their purpose was to perpetrate terrorist attacks.”
Earlier, and less restrained, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, had shown herself: “This is an aggressive provocation by the United States, whose objective is to escalate the situation and spark a conflict,” she told the TASS agency.
