Cuban authorities released images Friday night of the boat they say was used in an attempted terrorist attack on the island by Cubans living in Florida
Canal Caribe
Exactly what unfolded when 10 men got into an open-water firefight with Cuba’s military on the island’s northern coast Wednesday morning remains unclear — but the Trump administration’s muted response points to the potential implications in the high-stakes relationship between Washington and Havana.
The timing of the shootout raises questions, falling on a pivotal day for U.S.-Cuba relations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s team was holding secret talks Wednesday with Raúl Castro’s grandson and right-hand man, Col. Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, about gradually easing crippling U.S. sanctions in exchange for Cuban leaders enacting changes on the island.
The deadly confrontation erupted amid rolling blackouts in the country and a collapsing healthcare system after the U.S. cut off Cuba’s supply of Venezuelan oil following its military raid and arrest of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.
And it fell almost 30 years to the day the Cuban government shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes — an attack for which Miami’s members of Congress are now demanding Raúl Castro’s prosecution.
But in response to the oddly timed shootout: 72 hours of near silence from the White House and State Department. The only public accounting of what happened that day has come from the Cuban government, which U.S. officials say is untrustworthy.
Rubio promised a U.S. investigation on Wednesday and said they would be asking Cuba for access to the detained men. “Then we’ll be prepared to respond accordingly. I am not going to speculate.” He said that independent investigation would “quickly” produce “many more facts about this incident.”
By Saturday, those details hadn’t emerged — despite ongoing skepticism about Cuba’s narrative.
Michael Bustamante, a history professor and the Emilio Bacardí Moreau chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, said there are “questions about whether this was sort of a trap set for this group through the infiltration of Cuban intelligence or something like that, and there’s precedent for that kind of thing.”
“How quickly upon arrival on Cuban shores were they met by the Cuban coast guard? Who shot first? Is the Cuban version correct?” he added.
Trump’s White House — which often responds to events quickly on social media — has yet to provide comment on any of these questions.
For Frank Mora, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States under Joe Biden, the silence points to the administration’s desire to minimize the occurrence as much as possible.
“They also don’t want this to be a constant story. This is not a good thing to happen,” Mora said. “This is not something that Marco Rubio, obviously, wants to promote or to push or to call attention to while he’s in the middle of a conversation or negotiation with the Cuban government. It’s unhelpful.”
What Cuba says
As Cuba tells it, a group of Cubans living in Florida set out on a 90-mile sea voyage early Wednesday morning in an “attempted infiltration for terrorist purposes.”
Among those on board: a poet who had become single-minded about Cuban liberation in recent months, according to his Facebook posts, and two Tampa-area men who were adamant during their monthly anti-communist Cuba meetings that “you had to fight with weapons,” according to the group’s vice president.
According to the Cuban government’s account of the pivotal day: two boats departed from Marathon Key in the early morning hours armed with guns, ammunition, rudimentary explosives, night vision goggles and bulletproof vests. Along the way, one of the boats had technical difficulties and all 10 men boarded a single boat.
Just after 7 a.m. the Cuban military saw people swimming “within territorial waters.” The men turned back to their Florida-registered boat and then fired at the Cuban military vessel from 600 feet away, injuring a commander, according to the Cuban government. The government initially said it killed four people aboard in response and detained the rest.
News reports confirmed many of the basic details of the story. That includes family members acknowledging their relatives’ disappearances, a local police report claiming the boat Cuba said the men were aboard as being stolen and an online trail of increasingly militant posts from the men Cuba named.
But there are also blatant inconsistencies. Cuba said Thursday it had mistakenly released the wrong name for one of the detained, and on Friday the government changed the number of dead from four to three without explanation. And the speedboat Cuba said carried the men was closer to a fishing boat that would likely have struggled to move quickly with the number of people, weapons and ammunition the government said were aboard.
Rubio’s team knew about the shooting when it met with Rodriguez Castro, Raúl Castro’s grandson known as El Cangrejo, in a St. Kitts hotel around noon Wednesday.
“The authorities in Cuba, the Border Guard, has constant contact with the Coast Guard, so they alerted them this morning. I was made aware of it at that time,” Rubio later told reporters.
The Trump administration kept quiet, allowing the Cuban government to announce the incident later that afternoon. The pattern has repeated itself, with Cuba releasing new information daily and the Trump administration saying little. Trump, asked about the incident on Friday, said, “They’re talking with us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
The U.S. silence on the shootout could “suggest that they’re also worried a little bit about an escalation,” Bustamante said. “Another, perhaps more generous interpretation is that they’re taking their time to gather their own facts here.”
For the Cuban government, pushing the story could be advantageous, he said.
“One could argue that it might strengthen their ability to present their position on the world stage as under siege and therefore in need of sympathy,” he said. “On the other hand, it seems like there’s a lot of risk for them in not only participating in an armed confrontation with U.S. — at least some U.S. citizens — but having them in custody.”
‘They lie first’
Two of Miami’s Cuban-American members of Congress immediately and passionately responded to the shootout, insisting that nothing coming from the Cuban government can be trusted.
“They lie first, they send you to the firing squad and after that they do the trial, absolute no regard or trust for anything of what the Cuban regime says,” Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar told the Miami Herald Thursday.
She defended the near silence from the Trump administration, saying it could be a strategic “calm before the storm” and that more information would come “very, very quickly.” That hadn’t panned out by Saturday.
Miami Rep. Carlos Giménez also tried to poke holes in the state’s narrative, insisting the Cuban government is not credible.
“The original story was that they were transporting, it was human smuggling and now they’re terrorists,” he told Fox News. “So again, they’re changing their story. We need to get to the bottom of it.”
Notably, Miami’s third Cuban-American in Congress, Mario Díaz-Balart — who holds the highest leadership positions in House committees and has held federal office the longest — remained silent on the matter all week, much like the rest of Trump world. Díaz-Balart’s office declined an interview with the Herald, but confirmed he had not made any public statements about it.
The disparate responses of the South Florida delegation, who’ve sought to be the voice of the Cuban diaspora in Congress, point to the tense stakes of the timing of the shootout. For Florida’s Cuban-American politicians, “There is some awkwardness about this moment,” Bustamante, the University of Miami historian said.
“This is a moment in which the United States seems to be having backchannel dialogues with some folks in the Cuban government, that’s something that the South Florida delegation has generally opposed,” he said. “They are, I think, trying to figure out how to navigate that without creating an obvious break with the administration.”
Cuban authorities displayed a cache of weapons that they said were seized from a group of men who entered Cuba’s territorial waters on Feb. 25, 2026, on a terrorist mission. Canal Caribe
‘A patriot not a terrorist’
The family, friends and social media accounts of the 10 men named by the Cuban government have provided some of the few public details about what may have motivated their journey to Cuba.
Pavel Alling Peña, identified by the Cuban government as one of the men killed in the shooting, posted at-times fantastical AI videos on his Facebook page of heavily-armed soldiers shooting police officers and arresting the island’s leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel
Two other men, Michael Ortega Casanova and Leo Enrique Cruz Gómez, were active members of Casa Cuba de Tampa, an anti-communist Cuban group, according to vice president Rene Montes de Oca.
“Both were always very firm in their convictions and believed that to bring down the Cuban government you had to fight with weapons,” Montes de Oca said. “Personally, I was one of those who warned them many times that it was dangerous and could be a suicide mission.”
Another man Cuba said it detained, Conrado Galindo Sariol, recently shared a video on Facebook of a man dressed in camo and armed with a rifle criticizing Cuban communists for destroying their country, threatening action against Díaz-Canel’s government and encouraging other Cubans to prepare.
Amijail Sánchez González — described by Cuban authorities as a leader in the attack — posted regularly on Facebook about the need to fight for a Cuba free from communism.
He worked as a tree trimmer, said Niurka Prestamo, who was in a three-year relationship with him and said they lived together in Hallandale Beach. His brother told The Washington Post that Amijail had become increasingly focused on what he described as a mission to “liberate Cuba.”
“He wanted to show the world an act of courage,” Edisbel Sánchez González told the newspaper, adding that his brother had become “obsessed” with that mission.
But Prestamo, who separated from him last year, didn’t describe him that way. She said her former partner fled the regime years ago and had no communication with his brother during the time they were together.
“The only thing he’s ever dreamed of is seeing his country free, an end to Cuban deaths, and the release of political prisoners — what all of us in exile have always said.” For Prestamo, Sánchez is “not a terrorist but a patriot.”
In the face of U.S. silence about the shootout, Prestamo is demanding a thorough and transparent investigation, but for a more personal reason.
She says that families of those reported killed should have the right to identify their loved ones’ bodies. “They deserve to confirm whether it is really them,” she said, “and to say their final goodbyes.”
Miami Herald reporters Nora Gamez Torres, Brittany Wallman, David Goodhue, Milena Malaver and Michelle Marchante contributed to this report. Tampa Bay Times reporter Juan Carlos Chavez contributed reporting from Tampa.
Claire Heddles
Miami Herald
Claire Heddles is the Miami Herald’s senior political correspondent. She previously covered national politics and Congress from Washington, D.C at NOTUS. She’s also worked as a public radio reporter covering local government and education in East Tennessee and Jacksonville, Florida.
