Daniel Llorente Miranda, the Cuban political activist who in 2017 challenged the regime by running with an American flag in front of Raúl Castro at the Plaza de la Revolución, has returned to Cuba as an ordinary tourist.
Llorente himself announced his return in a video posted on TikTok this week, where he was seen on a street next to a car he rented at the airport.
"With my little cart, with two Cuban flags. No American flag, no provocations," he says at the beginning of the video.
The twist is difficult to process: the same man who was exiled from the Island, who crossed the Darién with his son and slept in his car in Tampa, now appears in Havana, proclaiming that he is not here to provoke anyone.
Llorente recounted that he entered the country without any issues: "I came, no one called me, no one said anything to me. Everyone told me that they weren't going to let me in... well, I tell them no. I left like any Cuban returning to his country, just for a visit."
He has his own interpretation of the silence from the authorities. According to him, the regime calculated that acting against him would be counterproductive: "They said: if we call Daniel, we can't tell him he can't enter because he's Cuban, we can't say that to him. And if we say anything, it will be a scandal; people will find out."
The most startling change is not just his physical return, but the discourse that accompanies it. Llorente now defines himself as a prophet and Christian messenger. "I did not come as a man of the flag; I came in the condition of Moses," he states in the video. His declared mission is to bring the Cubans "the message of salvation" under the slogan "Jesus Christ, Cuba is your home."
Where there used to be a United States flag and a challenging race before the dome of Cuban power, today there are two Cuban flags and a discourse centered on Jesus Christ.
The contrast with its history is significant.
It should be remembered that on May 1, 2017, Llorente ran into the area where Raúl Castro and other high-ranking officials were during the official International Workers' Day parade. The images spread around the world. He was immediately subdued by security agents and later committed to the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana, where he remained for months. The UN documented that since 2014 he had accumulated more than 30 arrests.
In May 2019, Cuban authorities forced him to board a flight with Aruba Airlines to leave the country without his family, which he and opposition organizations described as an exile. He departed for Guyana.
From there, Llorente and his son Eliezer embarked on a journey through ten countries, including two days in the Darién jungle, until they crossed the border in Laredo, Texas, on June 30 of that year.
He settled in Tampa, Florida, where months later the Tampa Bay Times and the Chicago Tribune found him sleeping in his car, unable to afford housing and working for minimum wage.
It was then that a Vietnam War veteran offered him his home in Tampa, moved by his story. Years later, Llorente went from being the one taken in to helping that same veteran.
As of the time the video was published, Llorente had not reported any reprisals or actions from the Cuban authorities against him, although his presence on the Island raises inevitable questions about how long he will be able to stay there and how the regime will react to his new statements.
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