Tag: cuba

Report: ICE Deports Repressive Cuban Judge Formerly on Biden’s ‘Humanitarian Parole’

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Thursday deported Melody González Pedraza, a Cuban communist judge who entered the U.S. through the Biden administration’s “humanitarian parole” program, Martí Noticias reported.

González Pedraza reportedly traveled from Havana to Tampa, Florida, in late May 2024 after the administration of former President Joe Biden provided her with a U.S. flight authorization as part of the now-extinct “Humanitarian Parole” program. The initiative, launched by former President Joe Biden in January 2023, allowed up to 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to legally stay and work in the United States for a period of “up to two years.”

Airport authorities in Tampa reportedly refused to grant her entry due to her extensive past as a communist regime official. In response, González Pedraza requested U.S. political asylum. Martí Noticias detailed that González Pedraza lost her U.S. asylum case on May 21, 2025, and chose not to appeal the ruling issued by an immigration judge in Pompano Beach, Florida. Unnamed sources told the outlet that complaints presented by Cuban exiles against González Pedraza were key to the prosecution and subsequent deportation of the communist judge.

The Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FHRC), a non-government organization, included González Pedraza on its list of known Castro regime representatives. The communist judge is known for having issued excessive prison sentences to peaceful Cuban protesters and dissidents.

Days before traveling to Florida, she reportedly sentenced a group of four young Cuban men — all below the age of 30 — to four years in prison on dubious “assault” charges against local state security officials in the municipality of Encrucijada, Villa Clara. Families of the four men denounced at the time that their relatives were unjustly convicted in a sham trial in which the Castro regime did not present neither evidence nor witnesses that could corroborate the accusations.

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Cuba’s Shadow Army in Ukraine: Havana’s Silent Alliance with Moscow

In Miami, we recently spoke with a Ukrainian citizen who was blunt: “A significant number of Cubans are fighting on behalf of Russia.” His certainty echoes what is now surfacing through intelligence leaks, investigative journalism, and testimonies.

This is not hearsay alone. It fits a wider pattern: a regime under economic collapse, an ally in need of soldiers, and a recruitment network that stretches from Havana to Tula.

For the first time since Angola in the 1970s, large numbers of Cubans are again fighting in a foreign war—not under their flag, but under Russia’s.

Evidence of Cuban Fighters in Ukraine

  • Initial reports (2023): In May 2023, Russian outlets in Ryazan reported Cubans signing contracts with the Russian Army in exchange for citizenship. By summer, videos surfaced of young Cubans claiming they had been deceived into combat.
  • Recruitment networks: In September 2023, Cuba’s government announced it had uncovered a trafficking ring and arrested 17 individuals.Yet evidence of continued flows emerged soon after, raising doubts about Havana’s sincerity.
  • OSINT confirmation: RFE/RL’s investigative unit Schemes documented Cuban recruits training at Russia’s 106th Guards Airborne Division in Tula, using social media geolocation and satellite imagery.
  • Ukrainian estimates: A Ukrainian diplomat told The Wall Street Journal in February 2024 that around 400 Cubans were on the front. Another MP cited 1,500–3,000. By June 2025, El País, citing Ukraine’s GUR intelligence, reported a cumulative 20,000 recruits since 2022, with 6,000–7,000 active at any given time. These figures remain unverified by Western intelligence but indicate the scale of concern.

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Cuba’s Power Grid Collapses for the Fifth Time in a Year

Cuba’s barely functional power grid completely collapsed for the fifth time in less than a year on Wednesday, leaving the entire country without power throughout the day.

According to Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, the power grid has not been fully restored as of Thursday morning, as five provinces remain without power. In contrast, the Spanish news Agency EFE reported on Thursday that much more of Cuba is still without power.

The blackout started on Wednesday at 09:14 a.m. (local time) after the Antonio Guiteras thermal power plant in the province of Matanzas suddenly went offline. The independent outlet Cibercuba pointed out that the plant is the same one that caused prior mass blackouts in the country. Iván Hernández, general secretary of the Independent Trade Union Association of Cuba, further explained to Infobae that the thermal power plant is Cuba’s biggest.

“You can imagine the heat, food going bad, young children, the elderly, and bedridden people going through this… The discomfort is immense. People have nothing to eat and now even less to cook with, because most Cuban families prepare food using electrical appliances,” Hernández told Infobae.

Wednesday’s still unresolved nationwide blackout marks the fifth time in less than a year that Cuba’s derelict power grid has completely collapsed, and comes days after another massive power grid failure left Eastern Cuba without power over the weekend. Cuban figurehead “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel — who returned to the country this week following a tour of Vietnam, China, and Laos — said on a Thursday morning social media post that the power grid is generating “more than 1,000 MW” of power and that “most provinces are already connected.”

According to Granma, the Castro regime deployed a series of “microsystems” to provide power to crucial infrastructure such as hospitals and aqueducts as a temporary workaround to the non-functional power grid. Cibercuba reported on Thursday noon that one such system deployed in the Province of Granma collapsed twice. The ongoing nationwide blackout also forced hospitals to suspend surgeries and other medical procedures.

The independent outlet 14 y Medio reported that Cubans had to come up with “emergency solutions” to provide some form of comfort to children amid the blackout. One unidentified Cuban citizen explained that he had to “use my electric tricycle to charge the child’s fans.” Other citizens, the outlet detailed, have resorted to homemade wind turbines while one unidentified citizen said that wind turbines have become a “competitive” alternative to solar panels.

Cuba has a barely functional power grid after the communist Castro regime pushed it to the brink of complete ruin with decades of mismanagement and lack of due maintenance. As a result, the derelict power plants still working in the country are unable to generate enough electricity to power all of Cuba at once, forcing Cubans to endure daily blackouts.

The already years-long dramatic situation drastically worsened in October 2024, when the power grid experienced the first of so far five complete collapses that left Cuba without power for almost a week. Although the Castro regime managed to bring the power grid back online, it continued to function at an even more diminished capacity, leading to further collapses in the following months that continued throughout 2025.

The ruling communists, short of resolving the power crisis, have instead urged citizens to enact desperate “power saving” measures such as temporarily suspending all education and work activities in mid-February and requesting people bring their own power generators to banks and other state offices to provide them the requested services.

The subject of Cuba’s electricity collapse is one of the main issues on which the regime has sought increased assistance from China — which, throughout 2025, has become Cuba’s main benefactor, replacing Russia.

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A US Bank Closed Our Accounts Because I’d Visited Cuba Six Months Ago

For years, World BEYOND War and other peace groups from around the world had been attending peace conferences in Cuba. When I visited Cuba this past January it was with a visa for that purpose. I published here the remarks I made at the conference. We shouted as loudly as we could about January’s conference in websites, social media, emails, and media interviews. The notion that there could be anything wrong with it — or that some institution could punish us for it — never entered our minds.

Legally, you’re allowed to go to a peace conference in Cuba. Nobody has so much as hinted that I’ve done anything illegal. But on Thursday June 5th I got a bunch of letters in the mail telling me that on Monday June 9th the U.S. bank accounts of World BEYOND War and the private accounts of all of my family members would be closed without explanation. This was the action of a particular bank called First Citizens, with no indication of any involvement by any government. (The explanation, it would be made clear, was my visit to Cuba.)

Morally, it seems a useful thing to do — attending peace conferences in Cuba. As at similar conferences in many other countries, one can meet diplomats, authors, activists, and politicians from all over the world to discuss peace education, disarmament, negotiations, and cross-cultural understanding. Videos of the entire conferences in Cuba, like most others around the world, are posted online for all to see.

World BEYOND War works to abolish all war, and opposes all sides of all wars — an unusual position even at peace conferences. We are constantly working to persuade some people not to support the Russian side of a war and other people not to support the Ukrainian side. We oppose any and all war-making by the U.S., Cuba, or anyone else, without equating disparate sides or blaming victims in any actual wars. Some groups try to shut down weapons programs because the weapons don’t work well; we start with opposing those that kill the most. When Trump sends troops into Los Angeles, we don’t join the Governor of California in asking that soldiers and Marines do their work abroad; we ask people to think about whether such armed forces should invade anyone else’s city either. The nice thing about peace conferences is that we can advance these views nonviolently, disagreeing amicably.

The problem, apparently, for a U.S. bank, with Cuban peace conferences is that, as with many things in Cuba, the Cuban government is involved. The president of the country wanders into the panel sessions. While that has the potential to cause censorship, it also has the potential to educate decision makers. I’d like to see presidents wandering in at peace conferences in Washington and other capitals.

Of course, the U.S. government has been sanctioning and blockading Cuba for generations, for the stated illegal purpose of overthrowing the government but — as usual — with the result of strengthening it instead, and the actual illegal impact of impoverishing the Cuban people — whose impoverishment is then blamed on the Cuban government and used as an excuse to overthrow it. This cruelty from the North provides a handy excuse for all sorts of repression and awful governance by the Cuban government, just as with the Iranian government and several others.

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Carlos Lehder reveals: Fidel and Raúl Castro facilitated Medellín Cartel drug trafficking from Cuba in the 1980s.

Carlos Lehder, co-founder of the Medellín Cartel and former ally of Pablo Escobar, has dropped a bombshell that the left and progressives don’t want to hear: the Cuban regime, led by Fidel and Raúl Castro, was a key ally in trafficking cocaine to the United States in the 1980s.

This truth, revealed exclusively by Martí Noticias, shatters the image of Cuba as a supposed revolutionary model and exposes the corruption and cynicism of a government that conservatives have always denounced.

While progressives in the U.S. and Europe were busy praising Castro, this regime was helping flood the streets with drugs, lining their pockets and betraying their own people.

Lehder is direct in pointing out the culprits. In his memoirs and interviews, he states:

I met with Raúl Castro and Colonel Antonio de la Guardia to negotiate the logistics of these operations.

He details how Cuba opened its doors to the Medellín Cartel, setting up airstrips in Cayo Largo and charging for every kilo of cocaine that passed through the island. And he leaves no doubt about who was in charge:

Fidel Castro had to know; he was the orchestra conductor.

This isn’t gossip; it’s the testimony of a drug trafficker who lived the business from the inside and now exposes the hypocrisy of the Castros.

For Republicans, this comes as no surprise. We’ve always seen the Cuban regime as a nest of opportunists who crush their people while engaging in dirty business. While the left romanticizes Fidel and Raúl, Lehder reveals the reality:

I was allowed to use facilities in Cayo Largo, where airstrips were set up and a payment was agreed upon for each kilo of cocaine transported.

That drug made its way to the streets, killing young people, all under a government that progressives defended as a «victim» of imperialism. What irony.

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Reports: Castro Regime Propagandist Living in Florida Thanks to Biden Parole Program

Narciso Amador Fernández Ramírez, a known propagandist of Cuba’s communist Castro regime, is allegedly living in the United States thanks to the Biden-era “Humanitarian Parole” program, Cuban-American journalist Mario Pentón reported on Thursday.

The outlet Cubanet described Fernández Ramírez, 65, as a former deputy director of Vanguardia, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in the central province of Villa Clara, who also served as columnist for the state propaganda outlet Cubahora. 

The communist propagandist is known in Cuba for vehemently insulting the Cuban diaspora in the United States, branding its members as “rats,” gusanos (“maggots”), and “mercenaries.”

Most notably, Fernández Ramírez appears listed as the author of two pieces published on the official website of late murderous dictator Fidel Castro. One such piece, dated 2019, in which Fernández Ramírez is listed as an author refers to the veterans of the Bay of Pigs liberation attempt as “rats.” In another piece, dated 2017, Fernández Ramírez praised late murderous communist dictator Fidel Castro and claimed that Castro is “seated, vigilant, next to [Cuban founding Father Jose] Martí, in the sacred Olympus of the heroes of the Homeland.”

Pentón reported that Fernández Ramírez has resided in Homestead, Florida, since March 2024 after he became a beneficiary of “humanitarian parole,” a now-extinct and fraud-riddled program launched in 2023 by the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden that allowed up to 30,000 Cubans, Haitiaians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans per month to request entry to the United States by means of a “sponsor,” granting them legal stay and work permits for a period of “up to two years.”

“He is waiting for a green card to apply for benefits such as Social Security and Medicare. He, who was the most unconditional communist in Villa Clara, is now enjoying his old age in the country he despised so much,” a source told Pentón on condition of anonymity.

According to Pentón, Fernández Ramírez presently lives in Homestead with his wife Elizabeth Leal and their daughter, who already resided in the United States.

“A simple Google search was enough to know that this man was a propagandist for the Communist Party of Cuba. That makes him ineligible for immigration benefits,” Florida-based immigration attorney Ismael Labrador told Pentón.

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Sweden leads the offensive in the EU to curb financial support for the Cuban Regime.

The Swedish Government’s has taken the decision to review the Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement with the Cuban regime and cut funding to Havana.

The Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement (PDCA) between the European Union (EU) and Cuba was signed in 2016 and aimed to normalize and strengthen diplomatic and economic relations between the two parties. Its main objectives were to promote dialogue on political issues, human rights, and economic development while enhancing cooperation in areas like trade, investment, sustainable development, and governance.

However, Sweden insists that it is not a good idea to have European funds diverted to support a regime that tramples on human rights.

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LA Mayor Karen Bass’ past in communist Cuba revealed… as insiders say her political career is ‘over’

She rose from being a doctor’s assistant to running one of the largest cities in America. 

But today, embattled Karen Bass, 71, is a lightning rod for anger over her handling of historic wildfires that turned huge swaths of Los Angeles into a charred hellscape.

And now her alleged missteps have imperiled her political career and further damaged her crumbling reputation with millions of Angelenos. 

Last night, in yet another on-air embarrassment, she was taken to task in front of millions by none other than President Trump. 

He admonished her for her poor handling of the fires disaster, telling her to use her power appropriately to get people the help they need.  

So far, 27 victims are known to have perished in the fires, fanned by dangerous Santa Ana winds, as authorities continue to sift through mile after mile of horrific devastation searching for human remains.

‘I don’t think she’ll ever be reelected… I think her political career is over,’ former LA County District Attorney Steve Cooley tells DailyMail.com of the city’s 43rd mayor.

‘The perception of her from residents at this point is such that she can no longer effectively lead the city of Los Angeles. She’s lost the public’s trust and importantly, their respect.’

Cooley, who served as DA from 2000 to 2012, states that there is an understandable wave of sentiment to have Bass ejected from the Mayor’s office but that such a move would be an uphill battle.

He added there was already a wave of city-wide antipathy towards Bass before the historic fires which he blames on her decision to prioritize DEI issues rather than focusing on hiring qualified candidates to key departments.

Moreover, he adds that Bass’ focus on her two signature issues – keeping LA a sanctuary city and the ceaseless homeless crisis – have bee a major detriment to the city and its residents.

‘She’s operating against the law when it comes to sanctuary cities, and the other issues of homelessness – she has not accomplished her goals, and it has been a failure,’ said Cooley.

Before becoming Madam Mayor, Bass served six terms as a Democrat in Congress and was a potential running mate in Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for president. She entered Congress in 2010 and was chair of Congressional Black Caucus.

Meanwhile, the current wildfire disaster is only the latest controversy to damage Bass.

She praised Fidel Castro and had close associations with Cuba in her youth, traveling to the country in 1973 with an organization called the Venceremos Brigade and seeing the communist leader speak.

In 2016, when Castro died, she referred to him as ‘commandante en jefe’ (commander-in-chief) saying his passing was a ‘great loss to the people of Cuba.’ She also reportedly gave a eulogy for a senior member of the Communist Party USA.

‘And now you have the fires that destroyed (the city) and there is mismanagement. People feel that she let them down. To a certain extent, some people feel the city was set up for this disaster.’

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Exit stage left: Biden’s curious Cuba move

President Joe Biden’s January 14 removal of sanctions imposed on Cuba during the first Trump administration could have been a major step toward restarting Barack Obama’s policy of engagement if Biden had done it in his first week as president instead of his last.

But done at the last minute, they are unlikely to have much impact. Two of the three will not even take effect until after Trump’s inauguration.

Senior members of Trump’s incoming foreign policy team, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Special Envoy for Latin America Maurico Claver-Carone, have criticized Biden’s actions, noting that they can be quickly and easily reversed by the incoming administration.

“No one should be under any illusion in terms of a change in Cuba policy,” Waltz said.

Nevertheless, within hours of the White House’s announcement, the Cuban government announced that, in response to appeals from the Vatican, it would gradually release 553 prisoners, many of whom were involved in the nationwide protests on July 11, 2021. The deal was the culmination of three years of Vatican shuttle diplomacy.

Biden’s package includes three measures: (1) It rescinded Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 5, of June 16, 2017, the basic framework for Trump’s policy of regime change; (2) It suspends Title III of the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which gives U.S. citizens, including naturalized Cuban Americans, whose property was nationalized by Cuba’s revolutionary government the right to sue in U.S. Federal Court anyone making beneficial use of that property; and (3) It initiated removal of Cuba from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of International Terrorism.

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Senate Intelligence Report Criticizes CIA’s Mishandling of ‘Havana Syndrome’ Cases

A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday sharply criticized the CIA for its mishandling of the mysterious illness known as “Havana syndrome.” The report highlights major failures in the agency’s care for individuals affected by the condition. 

The committee’s findings point to problems like delays in care, unclear policies, and a lack of preparation for future incidents. The report outlines 11 key recommendations aimed at fixing these issues and ensuring better care for CIA employees who report such health concerns.

What Is Havana Syndrome?

Havana syndrome first emerged in late 2016 when U.S. diplomats in Havana, Cuba, began experiencing strange symptoms that seemed similar to brain injuries, like dizziness, headaches, and trouble with memory and concentration. 

Since then, cases have been reported in other parts of the world, including Colombia, Austria, and the U.S., affecting diplomats, spies and soldiers. Last year, around 1,500 cases had been reported across 96 countries. 

While there’s been a lot of speculation that this could be the result of a targeted attack using some new weapon, U.S. intelligence has found no evidence linking it to a deliberate strike. The cause of the illness is still unclear, and researchers are still working to understand both what’s causing the symptoms and how to treat them.

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