U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Wednesday that it has deported Fernando Armando Valdés Pérez, a 61-year-old man who held dual Cuban and Guatemalan citizenship and had lived in Kendall, Florida, after federal investigators determined he had spent decades working as an intelligence asset for the Cuban government.
According to ICE, Valdés Pérez obtained a U.S. Green Card while concealing his ties to the Castro regime. Investigators said he had been tasked with infiltrating and monitoring Cuban exile and dissident communities in Latin America and the United States, with espionage activity dating back to at least the mid-1990s.
He was arrested on July 10 at Miami International Airport during an administrative immigration enforcement operation carried out jointly by ICE, the FBI’s Miami field office, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He was removed from the country on August 7. ICE has not said whether he was sent back to Cuba or to a third country.
“Individuals who conceal ties to foreign intelligence services and exploit our immigration system pose a serious threat to the integrity of that system and to our national security,” said Matthew Elliston, Enforcement and Removal Operations Miami Field Office Director. “ICE will continue working with our federal partners to identify, arrest, and remove those who obtain immigration benefits through fraud.”
A trusted figure in exile circles
ICE said Valdés Pérez had gained the confidence of the late Cuban anti-communist activist Luis Posada Carriles, who died of cancer in 2018 at age 90, and remained close to other prominent Cuban and Cuban-American figures in South Florida up until his arrest.
The Miami Herald has reported that Valdés Pérez was close enough to Posada Carriles’s circle to be mentioned in the activist’s Herald obituary, and that he had organized Posada Carriles’s final birthday party. A Herald records search reportedly turned up a Kendall address for Valdés Pérez, along with a hunting and fishing license and a cigar company registered to that same address.
Court records in Lee County reviewed by Martà Noticias reportedly confirm Valdés Pérez maintained his Kendall residence and had moved elsewhere in Florida only four months before his detention. A past traffic citation for failing to obey a signal further verified his identity and address in Kendall, according to Martà Noticias.
Suspicions dating back to Panama
Cuban dissident Orlando González told Martà Noticias on Wednesday that he first encountered Valdés Pérez in 2000, when Posada Carriles and other Cuban dissidents were being detained in Panama and González was making frequent visits to see them. González said Valdés Pérez presented himself as someone close to the detained group, and that González grew suspicious of how easily the man seemed able to secure authorizations and access to Panamanian security officials.
“This man appears out of nowhere, comes every week, spends a fortune, and arranges a visit with the police chief. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?'” González recalled asking the detainees at the time.
Luis DomÃnguez, a Cuban researcher with the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, told Martà Noticias that others close to Posada Carriles gave similar accounts of Valdés Pérez’s presence in Panama and his later ties to the Miami exile community. DomÃnguez said sources described Valdés Pérez as someone who frequently drove Posada Carriles around and organized gatherings at his home, including the 2018 birthday celebration.
“From Panama, he was very close to Posada Carriles and involved in visits to the prison. Other people had told me the same thing Orlando is saying,” DomÃnguez told Martà Noticias.
DomÃnguez said many in the exile community distrusted Valdés Pérez and would leave gatherings when he arrived, and that some had directly warned others about him, even as he built what DomÃnguez described as a relationship of trust and affection with people in that community.
The deportation comes a week after ICE announced the removal of Rafael José Quero Silva, a Venezuelan military colonel accused of torturing dissidents opposed to Nicolás Maduro’s government in the early 2010s.
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