Two interviews released this week reveal unprecedented details about Fernando Armando Valdés Pérez, the Cuban-Guatemalan who was deported by ICE on August 7 after being identified as an operative of Cuban regime intelligence infiltrated for nearly three decades in Miami's anti-Castro exile community.
The interviews —one from Univision with the exile Santiago Álvarez and another by journalist Mario Pentón with Orlando González, director of the Legal Rescue Foundation— depict how Valdés Pérez, at the age of 61 and a resident of Kendall, operated for years under the scrutiny of those who suspected him without anyone taking timely action.
Santiago Álvarez: "Luis was blind, blind, blind."
Santiago Álvarez, a historical figure of the Cuban exile, knew Valdés Pérez closely and asserts that he never let his guard down around him.
“I have always had the idea that it was indeed from State Security,” he stated in the interview with journalist Daniel Benítez.
Álvarez noted that he was not the only one to raise the alarm: “Orlando González and Ernesto Obregón, from the very beginning, both told me: ‘This man is from State Security.’”
Although Valdés Pérez attempted to get closer to his inner circle—Álvarez displayed a box of cigars that he had dedicated as a symbol of those attempts—he insists that he never succeeded.
With whom he did succeed was Luis Posada Carriles, whom he visited repeatedly in Panama while he was detained between 2000 and 2004.
“Luis was blind, blind, blind,” Álvarez stated about the trust that Posada Carriles placed in the alleged spy.
Regarding the absence of criminal charges, Álvarez offered his hypothesis: “He did not work against the United States; he worked against us, the exiles, the Cubans.”
José Cohen, a former agent of Cuban intelligence, noted that the information that allowed ICE to identify Valdés Pérez may have come from within the island.
"There are many people providing information in Cuba, sharing files and pushing forward with malanga and the vegetable stand," he asserted.
Orlando González: Twenty years warning the FBI
González —known in exile as "Landy"— assured, in a conversation with Mario Pentón, that he alerted the FBI about his suspicions approximately 20 years ago, after a trip to Guatemala around 2005 or 2006.
“It seemed too perfect to me,” she recalled while describing the initial signs that raised her doubts.
It recounts that during that trip, he stayed at the home of Valdés Pérez and discovered that the house was just two blocks away from the Cuban consulate.
When he questioned how that was possible, he replied, "You have to keep your enemies close."
He says that one early morning he saw Valdés Pérez running back from the street, and when he asked him what he was doing, he gave him an excuse.
"When I arrived at the airport, I said to him: 'Now I can confirm that you are a Cuban government official,'" the exile would have told the alleged spy
González recounts that upon returning from Guatemala to the United States, the FBI interrogated him for approximately four hours.
“The FBI stops me and starts a thorough interrogation about which Cuban government official I had met with,” the exile recounted, stating that he responded that he had only met with Valdés Pérez and that, in truth, based on some things he had discovered, he did not rule out that the meeting could have been with an official of the regime.
Orlando González regrets that, despite the warning, everything ended there.
The episode of the Río Dulce and the Guatemalan military
One of the most unsettling anecdotes occurred when Valdés Pérez transported González by boat along the Río Dulce to Puerto Barrios.
Upon arriving at the dock, Guatemalan military personnel awaited them, believing that González was "Santiago's right hand," and offered to smuggle weapons into Cuba.
“How many weapons do you want, and we will place them anywhere in Cuba for you?”, they said, according to González, who declined the offer.
Money for congress members and Posada's last birthday
González described how Valdés Pérez navigated easily among influential figures in American politics.
“He provided money for the political campaigns of different congress members,” he stated, not identifying the legislators.
Contributed $2,500 for himself and an additional $2,500 for each companion.
González also confirmed that Valdés Pérez organized Posada Carriles' 90th birthday, the last one before his death in May 2018.
"Nobody paid me any attention here."
Despite all these signals, González stated that his warnings were ignored for years.
“No one paid attention to me here. No one paid attention to me,” he lamented.
After learning about the deportation, he felt a bitter satisfaction: "I'm glad that after so many years my friends said, 'Hey, Landy was right.' He's no longer causing harm."
“They have long hands and continue to use our nobility and good heart to keep harming this exile,” warned González.
"We need to keep our eyes open", he concluded.
The case adds to other recent arrests of Cubans linked to the regime's intelligence apparatus, in a context where the State Department labeled Cuba, last July, as "the empire of espionage."
ICE has not disclosed what information Valdés Pérez collected or whether there are other individuals under investigation. The question many continue to ask is why the U.S. government chose to deport him to Guatemala without initiating a spy case against him.
La deportación de Valdés Pérez por parte de ICE es solo uno de los casos que marcan el panorama migratorio actual. Sigue todos los desarrollos en nuestra sección de
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