A Dangerous Mission to “Liberate Cuba”
MIAMI — A day before Amijail Sánchez González entered Cuban waters on a Florida-registered speedboat, his family says, he called his elderly parents on the island to tell them he was heading their way. In the hour-long phone call, they urged their son not to make the trip, his brother told The Washington Post on Thursday.
Sánchez González, a 47-year-old tree trimmer in Miami who has been critical of Cuba’s communist government on social media, was wanted by Havana on accusations of promoting terrorism. In late 2024, his brother said, authorities detained their parents, both of whom are fighting cancer, and held them for months to pressure him to return to the island and turn himself in. But he had become obsessed with his mission to “liberate Cuba,” Edisbel Sánchez González said. He wanted to show the world “an act of courage.”
Amijail Sánchez González is now under arrest in Cuba, where authorities say he and nine other Cuban nationals tried to infiltrate the country Wednesday on a speedboat “for terrorist purposes.” According to Cuba’s Interior Ministry, the men opened fire on a patrol vessel off the island’s northern shore early Wednesday, wounding its commander, and the Cuban vessel returned fire, killing four men and wounding six.
At least one of the dead crew members and one of the survivors were U.S. citizens, a U.S. official said Thursday. The men were not sophisticated mercenaries, relatives said, but poorly trained activists who wanted to send a message. Some of the men’s families identified them as members of Autodefensa del Pueblo (People’s Self-Defense), a loosely coordinated organization known for asking people in Cuba to put up anti-government signs on walls there and send photos to be posted on social media.
Kiki Naranjo said he founded ADP with Sánchez González about five years ago with “clandestine” support from like-minded individuals on the island. The group has no financial backing or association with any government, Naranjo said. Naranjo, who lives in Ohio, said he hadn’t heard from his friend in about a year and was unaware of any plans for a trip to Cuba, but he understood why the men would want to make the journey. “We all had that desire,” he said, “to see our country free.”
The crew appears to have left Florida late Tuesday or early Wednesday. A woman on Big Pine Key told the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office that she watched a man pull up in a white truck at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, exit the vehicle and board a boat. The owner of that vessel, Angel Montera, told sheriff’s deputies he noticed that his 24-foot speedboat was missing Wednesday morning. The truck was registered to Hector Cruz Correa, 42, whom Montera had hired to do tile work. Montera imagined that Cruz Correa had taken his boat out fishing and tried calling him throughout the day.
It was reporters who told Montera that Cuba’s Interior Ministry had identified his speedboat as the one piloted by the Cuban nationals. Montera told investigators that Cruz Correa had two young daughters in Cuba and had recently been trying to repair two boats. Cruz Correa was killed in the confrontation, Cuban authorities said Thursday. They said they had seized weapons and equipment including assault and sniper rifles, molotov cocktails, night vision devices, bulletproof vests, combat rations, communication equipment, and “a large number of insignia from counterrevolutionary terrorist organizations.”
The Cuban coast guard informed the U.S. Coast Guard of the incident Wednesday morning. U.S. officials say they’re investigating. The State Department did not respond to a request to name the two U.S. citizens. Another crew member held a K-1 visa, which allows a foreign national engaged to marry a U.S. citizen to enter the country, the U.S. official said. Others might be legal permanent residents, the official said.
Tensions between Washington and Havana have been escalating for weeks. President Donald Trump has increased economic sanctions and vowed to bring “change” to the island. In September, the U.S. military began blowing up boats in the Caribbean that it alleged were smuggling drugs from Venezuela to the United States. During the military raid last month to capture Cuban ally Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s socialist president, U.S. forces killed 32 Cuban personnel who provided security for him in exchange for Venezuelan oil.
Trump then declared the Cuban communist regime’s “policies, practices and actions” an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. He ordered an effective naval blockade on shipments of oil to the island and threatened to impose tariffs on countries that violated it, worsening Cuba’s years-long economic crisis.
Members of Florida’s large Cuban exile community have been demanding change on the island for decades. Some advocate a U.S.-led intervention, akin to the raid on Caracas. Others back continued economic pressure. Trump has long courted more radical elements in the community.
The Interior Ministry released the names of the 10 men Thursday. Family members of several said they were surprised to see their relatives on the list. Maria de Jesus Galindo, the 22-year-old daughter of alleged crew member Conrado Galindo Sariol, said she thought her father was working his usual job delivering Amazon packages to communities outside Miami. De Jesus Galindo said she last saw her father three days earlier and hadn’t been in touch with him Wednesday. She said he had been living in the U.S. for 10 years and had not been back to Cuba since.
“It was a total surprise,” she said. “I’m in shock. I never would have expected this.”
Michel Ortega Casanova, the U.S. citizen who was killed, had lived in the United States for two decades, La Casa Cuba de Tampa President Angela Chaviano said. He was an active member of the group, which advocates for democratic freedoms on the island, and founded the Tampa chapter of a separate organization that pushes for an end to Cuba’s one-party system and free elections, she said. Ortega Casanova, a truck driver, “spoke a lot about it being necessary to free Cuba,” Chaviano said, but he never advocated violence. “He was a hardworking family member,” she said. “What they’re saying about him being a terrorist is completely untrue.”
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canal said Thursday that his country “does not attack, nor threaten,” but will “defend itself with determination and firmness against any terrorist and mercenary aggression that seeks to affect its sovereignty and national stability.”
Sánchez González, who has lived in the United States since 2015, appears to have been on the Cuban government’s radar for years. Havana included him on a list sent to the U.N. Security Council in 2023 of people it accused of the “promotion, planning, organization, financing, support or commission of terrorist acts in Cuba or in other countries.” He pleaded guilty in Miami-Dade County in 2021 to aggravated battery against a law enforcement officer. But his brother said he was not trained to shoot and had never before taken part in an operation such as the speedboat trip. His group, he said, had “never harmed anyone.”
Sánchez González posted a video to his 94 Instagram followers two weeks ago before the trip featuring a man speaking of a need to “fight for Cuba.” “The time has come to do what has to be done,” the man says. “I want to die the way real men die. To all of the men who are willing to die, I want to know … I want them to play their part when the time comes.”
Edisbel Sánchez González said his brother hadn’t wanted to involve him in his activism, “probably so that I wouldn’t worry.” But he knew that his group was “rustic.” “They didn’t have anything to be able to take on an army,” he said. “My brother is not a highly educated person. He doesn’t have money.” Now he fears how his brother might be treated in a Cuban prison.
“From the moment he left Cuba, he’s been obsessed with the idea of Cuba being free,” he said. “I had told him, ‘You’re not going to topple the government.’ But when a person has an idea, no one can change it.”
