Disclaimer: This is a statement on behalf of myself and no other individual(s) or organization(s).
After spending a month in revolutionary Cuba, I was welcomed back to the Great Satan by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) detaining me, interrogating me, and seizing my phone in Miami International Airport on 19 May 2025. Every step of the way both to and from Cuba, I experienced endless harassment, secondary screenings, and physical groping by Transportation Security Administration (TSA). All of this indicates to me that I am on some sort of domestic terrorism watch list, as a result of my anti-imperialist political activity and my criminal record for taking direct action to resist the amerikan-zionist genocide against Palestine. For context, I am 20 years old.
For every flight I boarded, the airline would not print out my boarding pass, or allow me to board the flight at the gate, without special permission from TSA and additional screening. Several airline staff told me they had never seen this type of flagging before. In JFK and Miami airports, over and over again TSA physically groped me, searched all my belongings, and swabbed me for explosives; during both of my Miami layovers, TSA made me exit and go through security multiple times although I had never left the airport, forcing me to miss my return connecting flight; just to make the connection from Miami to New York, I was searched 5 different times. Multiple TSA officers indicated to me that these orders were coming from way above their paygrade in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) leadership.
When I entered customs upon landing in Miami from Havana, I answered CBP’s legally required questions — where I traveled, how long I was there, what license my trip was under (“Support for the Cuban People”). CBP pulled me into secondary questioning when I refused to answer an additional question of how I paid for the trip. They put me in a waiting room where I was the only white person, because state repression is already the daily reality for Africans and migrants from the Global South, regardless of their political activity. I watched migrant families with little kids leave questioning clearly traumatized. CBP searched all my belongings and asked for my phone passcode, the specifics of what I did in Cuba, and with whom I traveled. It was clear I was not saying a word, and they quickly gave up on the interrogation, seized my phone, and released me. As panic and counterinsurgent legal advice proliferates from liberal influencers, activists, and attorneys alike, my experience adds further proof that the best response to detainment/interrogation is to stay calm, shut the fuck up, and give out no information. Why on earth would we dialogue with the Gestapo of the Fourth Reich? DHS, CBP, ICE, the U.S. police, the U.S. military, every arm of the U.S. empire, domestically and internationally, has always existed to wage war and genocide against colonized people and all those who resist imperialism.
Last month comrade Musa Springer was also detained for hours, intensively questioned, groped, and had their devices seized when they returned from Cuba, specifically for their support for Palestine and the student intifada. CBP regularly detains U.S. citizens traveling from Cuba, often at random, but these are new, targeted escalations. All this intimidation serves to break our bonds of international solidarity and discourage us from learning from one of the greatest human achievements in history, the Cuban Revolution, which the U.S. blockade, regime change programs, and counterinsurgency warfare are attempting to strangle to death. In recent months the U.S. Empire has intensified its war against Cuba, attacking Cuban international medical brigades and international travel to Cuba, two major lifelines for the Cuban economy, which the U.S. has besieged for over 60 years with genocidal, unilateral, extraterritorial sanctions. U.S. diplomats in Cuba appear to be provoking a complete rupture of diplomatic relations. On 13 May 2025, the State Department re-listed Cuba (along with Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and the DPRK) as a country not fully cooperating with the U.S. on terrorism because Cuba has given asylum to U.S. citizens fighting for national liberation from the U.S. Empire like revolutionaries from the Black Liberation Army and the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña.
My trip to Cuba was completely licensed and legal, but it is futile for revolutionaries to base our politics, especially our defense of people facing repression, in the empire’s framework of legality. Revolution will always be illegal. Like the zionist genocide against Palestine, the U.S. blockade against Cuba is also illegal under international law, however, the empire continues to function on a basis of complete impunity for its ongoing and rampant violations of international law and fundamental human rights. With the direction things are going, soon travel to Cuba could be heavily restricted if not banned outright like it was for decades before. Elders I have met on Cuba solidarity brigades would fly as youth from the U.S. to France to Czechoslovakia to get to Cuba or arrive in freight ships from Canada, subverting the travel bans, while other groups would organize completely unlicensed protest trips to Cuba. The Cuban people’s resiliency shows us we can withstand any repression, any siege, any attack, even by a much greater power, if we are organized, disciplined, and unified around principles of militant anti-imperialist resistance.
It is not lost on me that upon my return from Cuba, falsely characterized by imperialist propaganda as a brutal, repressive police state, I was immediately surrounded, detained, and harassed by dozens of armed state agents multiple different times. I would have been surprised if this didn’t happen — it was the only welcome back I could imagine receiving in the U.S. where our daily lives are characterized by violent state repression, and I have become unavoidably numb to body pat downs, strip searches, chains and shackles, and the deprivation of my “rights” through my own experience of incarceration. Looking back, it would have been smarter to leave the phone behind in Cuba and travel completely deviceless. This incident was the second time my phone has been seized by federal authorities since the Al-Aqsa Flood, first in November 2023 by the FBI after my arrest for attacking an Elbit Systems factory in New Hampshire with Palestine Action U.S.. Enabling my personal phone to get seized is one of the greatest tactical errors I have ever made; it exposed and endangered not only me but every single contact I had on that phone. This time, I traveled with a phone I bought and used only for this trip, and I factory reset the device before leaving Cuba, wiping all its data, leaving only a sticker on the back quoting the great martyr Jonathan Jackson: HELL WILL BE THEIR REWARD. My advice to fellow organizers is to never fly or cross borders with your personal devices, to use strong alphanumeric passcodes and encrypted messaging platforms, and for riskier activities, to use burner phones, secure operating systems like Graphene OS, or no devices at all. Develop an understanding of digital security and threat modeling, and research these tools, rather than implementing them for the sake of implementing them. More importantly than specific tools or tactics, we must put politics in command and develop our political framework for as to why greater levels of security are necessary: because fascism has been here since this empire’s very inception, we are in a state of war, and one day all our work, even legal aboveground work, will be targeted, and is too risky to be kept in a glasshouse.
This trip to Cuba was my first time traveling outside of the U.S. since the State of New Hampshire banned me from leaving the country and deemed me a flight risk (using my past three trips to Cuba as a justification) while I was facing 37 years in prison in 2023/2024. I am not a “perfect victim” and you cannot defend me based on my innocence. I am guilty of wanting to destroy imperialism by any means necessary. I have a criminal record, I have been under federal investigation for years, and I morally and politically support the Axis of Resistance and all liberation movements falsely labeled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, Specially Designated Nationals, and State Sponsors of Terrorism. No intimidation enacted by amerikan, gusano, or zionist thugs could possibly force me to back down from these beliefs — that we must lift all U.S. sanctions and abolish the terror lists and designations, that we must respond to fascist repression by building unity in resistance, and that we must uphold armed struggle against imperialism, abroad and here, such as the alleged actions of political prisoner Elias Rodriguez, who brought the war home.
History will absolve us, and hell will be their reward.
