Foot traffic was slow outside the Bay of Pigs Museum on Calle Ocho in Miami’s Little Havana neighbourhood. A few tourists in T-shirts and shorts bypassed the gallery dedicated to one of the most fateful days in Cuba’s history and headed instead to nearby Máximo Gómez Park to take photographs of Cuban exiles playing dominoes.
This is the street at the heart of the Cuban expat community of more than 1 million people where tens of thousands partied through the night in November 2016 to celebrate the death of Fidel Castro, and where they gathered in sorrow almost exactly 30 years ago to mourn four Cuban-Americans shot down by the communist country’s air force as they conducted a mission for the humanitarian exile group Brothers to the Rescue.
This week, however, the air was more of curiosity and bewilderment at news of a shootout on Wednesday at Cayo Falcones, barely a mile off Cuba’s north coast, between the Cuban coastguard and 10 heavily armed men onboard a speedboat stolen in Florida.
Cuba’s government said border agents shot back when somebody on the speedboat started firing on them, killing four and wounding six. It said the men were dressed in camouflage and armed with assault rifles, handguns, homemade explosives, ballistic vests and telescopic sights, and in possession of “a significant number of containers bearing the symbols of counter-revolutionary organisations”.
“Didn’t we stop doing that years ago?” said Javi González, a second-generation Cuban-American office worker on his coffee break, referring to the ill-fated, CIA-backed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban paramilitary exiles seeking to overthrow the Castro regime, for which the museum is named.
The mystery deepened as family, friends and acquaintances began to confirm the names of those involved (a list provided by Cuban officials on Wednesday night of “terrorists and mercenaries” mistakenly identified at least one person who had been in south Florida at the time), and a vigil was held in Miami late on Thursday.
The tributes were warm, praising “patriots committed to the cause of freedom”. José Daniel Ferrer, the prominent Cuban dissident leader freed last year, posted to social media his “respect and admiration for those who died assassinated by the Castro-communist tyranny north of Villa Clara”.
But there were few clues as to how the 10, confirmed by the state department on Thursday night to include at least two US citizens, one dead, and a number of permanent residents and visa holders, had come together from various places across Florida. Or why they had embarked on such a misadventure. Or what they had been hoping to achieve.
One of the four killed was Michel Ortega Casanova, a member of the Casa Cuba de Tampa expat group and the city’s chapter of the Cuban Republican party. A truck driver, Casanova had been pulled into what his brother Misael told the Associated Press was 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,” he said.
Also unknown, so far at least, is who funded their operation. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants, has insisted the government was not involved and had no knowledge of it, and would be conducting its own inquiry “to figure out exactly what happened” instead of accepting information provided by Cuba.
Guillermo Grenier, a Havana-born professor of sociology and faculty member of the Cuban-American Institute at Miami’s Florida International University (FIU), said: “Some people are suggesting the CIA are involved, but the CIA doesn’t do this. If they want to be in there they land on an airplane, they’re not sneaking in.”
Grenier said the Cayo Falcones endeavour had parallels in the immediate post-Cuban revolution period of the 1960s, when thousands of exiles formed themselves into a commando-style group called Alpha 66 and conducted military training in the Florida Everglades in readiness to seize back their homeland.
It is also reminiscent of more recent, unrealistic “made in Miami” coup plots, including a fanciful 2019 plan to abduct Venezuela’s leader (which the Trump administration achieved last month), and a 2021 scheme to assassinate Haiti’s leader using Colombian mercenaries.
But Grenier said the post-revolution days were long gone. Two decades of FIU polling shows newer generations of Cuban-Americans are increasingly in favour of engagement with their homeland, while the older, hardline exile groups that traditionally backed a forcible overthrow of the Castro regime have struggled to maintain members and interest.
“This kind of approach is anachronistic and not serious, to tell you the truth,” Grenier said. “Once upon a time there was an ethos in the community that armed rebellions would get you where you wanted to go. But I think that there’s a sense that any kind of adventurism like this has had its day, and this is not a serious anything.”
US policy towards Cuba has seesawed through successive presidencies, with the current favoured tool to bring about change being a campaign of economic pressure. It was reported on Thursday that US officials talked with the former Cuban president Raúl Castro’s grandson on the sidelines of Caricom, the annual meeting of Caribbean leaders, in St Kitts and Nevis. Late on Friday, Trump confirmed there were conversations between the two governments and even suggested the US could even carry out a “friendly takeover” of Cuba.
In Havana, Cuba’s vice-minister of foreign affairs and point man on the US, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, told reporters that lines of communication were open with the US government, which had “shown a willingness” to cooperate in clarifying these “regrettable” events.
Grenier said: “They just want this story to go away, ultimately. If it doesn’t get any more complicated, it’s not going to hamper any negotiations, and their chill response shows me that they are really aware of that. They’re hoping it was like 10 crazy folks from Hialeah who decided to go over there and start a little revolution from the inside.”
In his statement, de Cossio also said: “Cuba has been the victim of aggression and countless terrorist acts for over 60 years, mostly organised, financed and carried out from the territory of the US.”
It is a position shared by many in Havana. “It’s the same story,” said Hugo Hernandez, an accountant who was walking past the Tribuna Antiimperialista José Martí, the square in front of the US embassy where protests against Cuba’s neighbour are often held.
“It’s been happening since the beginning. When I was young in Santa Clara I had to guard those cays. The coastguards were always worried someone might turn up in a boat and attack them.”
