The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba issued a statement this Wednesday in which it refers to the accusations of officials of the United States government labeling them as "slander" against the Cuban regime, which has been indicated as potentially responsible for widespread fraud in the Medicare program in South Florida.
The Cuban Foreign Ministry published the text on its social media in direct response to statements made by senior officials of the Trump administration in recent days.
The statement claims that "recent remarks from officials of the United States Government speculate, without any evidence, that the Government of Cuba could be involved in frauds related to the U.S. Medicare health program in South Florida," and describes them as "yet another slander promoted by anti-Cuban sectors in that country."
The regime goes further and claims that "the officials of the United States government mentioned in this slander are consciously telling lies."
The accusations that led to the statement come from two senior officials of the Trump administration.
Last Saturday, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., stated that there is a criminal network run by the Cuban government that sells substandard medical equipment through shell companies that bill Medicaid without delivering anything.
Kennedy also revealed the discovery of a hotel with 129 rooms, each registered under the name of a different company for durable medical equipment with no actual inventory.
Last Friday, Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, warned on Fox News that in South Florida there are twice as many durable medical equipment providers as there are McDonald's restaurants, and pointed out that we believe that the Cuban government could be involved in this.
In its defense, MINREX acknowledges that Cuba has prosecuted individuals in national territory linked to Medicare fraud and claims to have shared information with Washington through bilateral mechanisms regarding individuals associated with financial crimes.
However, the statement criticizes that "as a rule, there has not been reciprocal behavior on the part of the U.S. authorities" regarding cooperation.
Decades of documented fraud
The history of Medicare fraud in South Florida involving individuals of Cuban descent has decades of federal documentation. In 2009, authorities dismantled a network of 85 fraudulent medical equipment companies linked to Cuban exiles.
In 2013, the FBI identified 54 fugitives for Medicare fraud, 26 of whom were in Cuba.
Recent cases include the sentencing of Fernando Espinosa León to nearly six years in prison in March 2025 for a fraud exceeding 7.6 million dollars, and the arrest of Edelberto Borges Morales, a businessman from Hialeah, that same month while he attempted to flee to Varadero after laundering two million dollars from a 41 million dollar fraud.
The Trump administration has responded to the escalation with a six-month national moratorium on the approval of new durable medical equipment providers and the CRUSH initiative, which employs artificial intelligence to detect fraud in real time, in the face of estimated losses of 300 billion dollars annually in Medicare and Medicaid.
The Cuban regime concluded its statement by reiterating "its willingness to jointly tackle the transnational crimes originating in the U.S. through timely information exchange," a formula that shifts the source of the problem to U.S. territory.
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