Deaths on a boat off Cuba spotlight Florida anti-government groups

MIAMI (AP) — A stolen boat, with 10 people aboard, loaded with weapons, departs the Florida Keys but gunfire erupts before reaching Cuba. The explanation, according to the Cuban government, is the men aboard were terrorists who wanted to infiltrate the country.

The fatal shooting broke out Wednesday amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and Cuba. The ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has led the Trump administration to take a more aggressive stance toward the country’s longstanding ideological nemesis in Latin America. It shines fresh attention on the deep-rooted freedom movement among Cuban exiles in south Florida, including some fringe elements who have long sought a violent overthrow of the island’s communist leadership.

Armed raids, provocative publicity stunts and protests blurring the lines of legality stretch back decades in the Florida straits. Many of them are led by hardliner exiles, some who fought in Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army that took power in 1959 before breaking ranks when the popular leader converted Cuba into a Soviet satellite.

But such confrontational tactics have faded since the Cold War, leaving many in Miami to speculate the armed incursion was a fabrication of Cuba’s intelligence agencies.

“Cuban Americans today are, whether on the left or on the right, really focused on trying to influence U.S. policy rather than thinking that somehow paramilitary action by small groups are gonna overthrow the Cuban government,” said William LeoGrande, an American University government professor who specializes in Cuba.

The shooting left four dead and many questions. Cuba’s government said most of the people on the boat were violent criminals. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who rose to prominence surrounded by the Cuban exile politics of Miami, was quick to cast doubt on the Cuban account, saying that the U.S. would investigate what he described as a “highly unusual” sea shootout.

Anti-Cuban government groups ebb and flow

The counter-revolutionary groups — with names like Alpha 66 and Omega 7 — were always small in number but were at their strongest in the 1970s and ’80s. Their influence receded as the Reagan administration arrested their leaders for violent attacks on U.S. soil, like an assassination plot targeting Castro during his 1979 visit to the United Nations and the shooting death a year later of a Cuban diplomat in New York.

Antonio Tang joined Alpha 66 shortly after fleeing Cuba and going into exile in Canada in 1981.

He trained in weapons and guerrilla tactics with the volunteer group at a camp in the Everglades called Rumbo Sur — Direction South. Many of its actions were over before they started, he said.

“We were kind of amateurs — and no match for the Cuban military and interior ministry,” said Tang. “They always knew in advance what we were doing. Many folks ended up in jail.”

Ernesto Díaz, deputy secretary general of Alpha 66, described the 10 men as martyrs.

“It is an act of compassion for a Cuban people who are suffering,” Diaz, 86, said. “It was a sacrifice that has demonstrated the nobility and sensitivity towards freedom in Cuba.”

Cuban attempts to co-opt groups

Former Cuban intelligence officer Enrique Garcia said a well-funded Cuban intelligence department — called Q-2 — spent decades co-opting armed resistance groups. In some cases, Cuban agents would fund weapon purchases and drive unsuspecting exiles into plots.

Agents infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, which lost four members in 1996 when Cuban fighter jets shot down their airplanes in the Florida straits.

“This strategy —seemingly still in place— sought to portray the Cuban exile community as extremist and link the U.S. government and agencies to such activities,” said Garcia, who defected to the U.S. in 1989. “The U.S. intelligence community is aware and must have documented in its archives that this was a permanent modus operandi of the Cuban intelligence service.”

Garcia said he can’t remember any covert act of the sort Cuba has denounced in at least three decades.

He also finds the timing of the attack suspicious. The Trump administration has asserted almost unprecedented pressure on Havana to open its economy and relinquish almost seven decades of single-party rule.

Families give an incomplete picture

Marina Luz Padron, whose ex-husband, Hector Cruz Correa, was among those reported killed, appealed for privacy as the family mourns. She described her ex-husband as an excellent father to their 4-year-old child, who still hasn’t been told about his fate.

“If he went to Cuba it was because he wanted freedom for his country,” Padron told The Associated Press in a brief interview.

Other family members spoke to Spanish language influencers in Miami describing their loved ones as peaceful and far removed from what Cuban officials denounced as a “terrorist” incursion.

Ibrahim Bosch, president of the Republican Party of Cuba, another exile group, said that Michel Ortega Casanova, one of those killed, was the leader of his party in Tampa for a while until he requested to be replaced so he could spend more time to with his family.

“He was an excellent person, very hardworking, very dedicated to his family,” Bosch said. “He always had the hope of freedom for Cuba.”

But Florida resident Misael Ortega Casanova said his brother — an American citizen who has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years and still agonizes over the suffering that Cubans endure — was on an “obsessive and diabolical” quest for Cuba’s freedom.

“They became so obsessed that they didn’t think about the consequences nor their own lives,” Misael told The Associated Press.

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Catalini reported from Morrisville, Pennsylvania.