Event: Stolen Boat

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.A Stolen Boat, a Deadly Gunfight and a Supposed Plot Against CubaThe Cuban government’s account of a supposed armed raid into its territory was called into question after one of the men identified as being on the boat turned up in Miami.Cuban coast guard ships docked at the Port of Havana on Thursday.Credit...Adalberto Roque/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPublished Feb. 26, 2026Updated Feb. 27, 2026, 2:54 p.m. ETThe men arrived in Cuban waters aboard a speedboat that apparently had been stolen the night before in the Florida Keys.The Cuban government said 10 Cubans left from the United States on a Florida-registered vessel armed with assault rifles, handguns, improvised explosive devices, bulletproof vests, telescopic sights and camouflage uniforms. Their goal when they arrived on Wednesday was, the government said: “to carry out an infiltration for terrorist purposes.”They opened fire on the Cuban Coast Guard, the government claimed. Four of the men died and six more were wounded in the gunfight.A day later, few details have emerged about the deadly shootout, raising questions about who the men were and how and why they sailed to Cuba’s shores. Were they freelance militants with a poorly laid out plan? Part of a carefully set trap by the Cuban government at a time of increased tensions with the United States?The episode was the latest in a decades-long often bellicose history between Cuba’s government and militant exiles determined to take it down. For years, Cuban exiles have tried to infiltrate Cuba, planted bombs in Havana and even plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro.One of the survivors was initially erroneously reported to be Roberto Azcorra Consuegra, a 31-year-old activist who fled Cuba in 2017…

Will GrantCuba correspondent in HavanaBBCA sizeable exhibit in the Museum of the Revolution in Havana is dedicated to conditions in Cuba before the revolution took power in 1959. Inside the ornate former presidential palace, photographs and oral testimony detail the grinding poverty and ingrained corruption of the dictatorship of Cuba's then-military strongman, Fulgencio Batista.The enduring image is of a woman in a dirt-floored palm-leaf hut cooking with firewood. Similar pictures appear in state museums across the island from the Bay of Pigs to Birán, the birthplace of the father of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro. The inference is clear: the revolutionaries saved Cubans from the ignorance and hardship of life under a Washington-backed de facto leader and led them to dignity, education and true independence.Yet today, Lisandra Botey identifies more with the impoverished woman in the photograph than with the revolutionaries who liberated her country from Batista."We're living like that now, we're exactly like that", says housewife Lisandra outside her home in Havana, which is cobbled together with pieces of sheet metal and wood."Every morning, we have to go down to the beach [in Havana] and look for firewood. Then we bring it home to cook breakfast with – because if we get power, it comes on during school hours."Lisandra says she identifies with the impoverished woman in the photograph from pre-revolution CubaLisandra's nine-year-old daughter set off for school that morning with nothing in her stomach, she explains, tears pricking her eyes. Her husband, Brenei Hernández – a construction worker with next to no work – says they often have no idea where the next meal is coming from."Every day is the same hunger, the same misery", he says, stirring a pot of white rice – so at the very least his daughter will come home from school to something…