Dozens of Cuban collaborators who were part of the Cuban Medical Mission in Venezuela are reporting the alleged looting of their personal belongings during the transport from various Venezuelan states to Cuba, a process that was under the responsibility of entities linked to the mission and the state company TRANSCARGO.
The report was shared by the citizen platform NiO Reporting a Crime on Facebook and garnered over 367,000 views, becoming a scandal that reveals a new facet of the chaotic retreat of the mission following the capture of Nicolás Maduro by American forces on January 3, 2026.
According to the testimonies received by the platform, in February, the Medical Mission Directorate ordered the collection of the luggage of collaborators who had traveled to Cuba for vacation and did not return from various Venezuelan states.
The belongings were gathered in warehouses at Fuerte Tiuna in Caracas, where they stayed for months before being placed in containers for their maritime transport to Cuba.
The cargo first arrived at the Port of Mariel, where it reportedly stayed for more than six months, before being finally sent to Santiago de Cuba.
When they arrived to collect their belongings, those affected encountered a situation that the complainants described as scandalous: a large portion of the luggage coming from Barinas, Amazonas, and Apure was simply missing.
From some groups, only two bags appeared, opened and presumably looted, while numerous pieces of luggage were not located at all.
The most serious aspect of the complaint is that several boxes arrived empty or filled with sticks, stones, blocks, and foam instead of the belongings they originally contained.
The images shared alongside the complaint show the interior of shipping containers filled with bundles wrapped in black plastic with shipping labels, presented by those affected as evidence of the conditions in which they received the cargo.
The material loss is compounded by the economic cost of the process: some collaborators claim to have spent over 300,000 Cuban pesos on repeated trips to Santiago de Cuba to try to recover their belongings, amidst an already precarious financial situation.
The institutional response, according to testimonies, was as brief as it was unacceptable: if the belongings did not arrive, they should forget about them.
"It is not appropriate to accuse a specific person without evidence. However, the assets of numerous collaborators cannot simply disappear after being held under institutional custody for months, expecting those affected to just forget about them," stated the reporting platform.
"Cuban collaborators report feeling abandoned and trampled by the very government structures that were supposed to ensure the protection and return of their belongings," concluded the platform, which announced that it will continue to receive photographs, shipping receipts, and documentation to reconstruct the route of the missing possessions.
The affected parties demand a complete audit of the entire chain of custody—Venezuela, Fuerte Tiuna, the Port of Mariel, and the Port of Santiago de Cuba—and request that both the Medical Mission and TRANSCARGO provide the relevant traceability and documentation: how many parcels were collected, who received them, who safeguarded the containers, which seals were used, and in what condition they arrived.
The withdrawal of the mission, which until the end of 2025 had approximately 13,000 Cuban professionals in Venezuela, was described by independent media as a gradual evacuation, although the regime portrayed it as a routine return.
Cuban medical missions in Venezuela have accumulated years of complaints regarding coercive working conditions, passport retention, and minimum or withheld salaries, making this new episode yet another example of the systemic neglect to which the regime subjects those it sends abroad.
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