President Donald Trump’s proclamation imposing U.S. travel restrictions on Cuban and Venezuelan nationals comes after years of repeated abuse of the American immigration system and visa overstays by individuals linked to the two nations’ respective authoritarian regimes.
President Trump signed a proclamation on Wednesday evening imposing travel restrictions on immigrants and nonimmigrant nationals from 12 listed countries. The proclamation also imposes specific U.S. visa restrictions on Cubans, Venezuelans, and nationals of five other countries, suspending entry to U.S. territory to individuals from the listed countries on B-1, B‑2, B-1/B-2, F, M, and J visas.
For years prior to this order, a growing list of individuals linked to Cuba’s communist Castro regime and Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime availed themselves of U.S. nonimmigrant visas, overstaying in U.S. territory and then abusing America’s immigration system to live and work in the country. In some cases, known repressors have set up businesses in the U.S.
The situation poses a clear threat to legitimate political refugees who fled those regimes to the United States, seeking a better life away from socialism.
These abuses were significantly worsened by the lax open borders policies and “legal” immigration programs enacted by the administration of the former U.S. President Joe Biden, such as the now-defunct “humanitarian parole” program.
In the case of Cuba, President Trump detailed in the proclamation that Cuba had a B-1/B-2 visitor visa overstay rate of 7.69 percent and an F, M, and J visa overstay rate of 18.75 percent, according to the Overstay Report.
Cuba is a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism (SST) due to the communist Castro regime’s extensive ties to and support of international terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Colombia’s Marxist FARC and ELN. President Trump highlighted in the proclamation that the Castro regime “does not cooperate or share sufficient law enforcement information with the United States” and that “Cuba has historically refused to accept back its removable nationals.”
In August, the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FHRC), a nongovernmental organization, warned that more than 115 members of Cuba’s communist regime had moved to the United States since February 2023. Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL) forwarded the list to (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem in March, urging DHS to investigate and deport the communist repressors.
The extensive list of known repressors includes judges, state security, military, and other communist officials. Among those named were individuals such as Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez, a Cuban pilot linked to the killing of four Americans in international waters in 1996, and Tomas Emilio Hernandez Cruz, a former Castro regime intelligence agent arrested in March for fraudulently obtaining a U.S. green card and hiding his links to the Cuban regime.
Some newer cases of Cuban repressors in the U.S. are not featured in Rep. Giménez’s March list, such as Héctor Alejandro Hernández Morales, a former bodyguard and “trusted man” of both late communist dictator Fidel Castro and his brother and successor Raúl Castro. Hernández Morales reportedly entered the United States using a visitor’s visa and is now living in Florida hoping to attain U.S. resident status through the 1996 Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA), which was intended to benefit Cubans fleeing from the communist regime and not its officials.
Similarly, Narciso Amador Fernández Ramírez, a known propagandist of Cuba’s communist Castro regime, reportedly resides in Florida since 2024.
Most recently, Martí Noticias reported that Yuniel Báez Pedrera, former head of the Communist Youth in Havana, reappeared as a “businessman” in Gainesville, Florida, where he resides after claiming U.S. asylum in 2022. According to the report, Báez Pedrera founded “Pa’La Familia LLC” in 2024, a company allegedly dedicated to “international package forwarding, airline ticket sales, and document processing” but which promotes the sale of food in U.S. dollars for Cubans on social media, including “combos and family shipments.”
In the case of Venezuela, ruled by the authoritarian socialist Maduro regime, President Trump detailed in the proclamation that the country had a B‑1/B-2 visa overstay rate of 9.83 percent, according to the Overstay Report. In March, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Rafael Jose Quero Silva, a former official with the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) accused by several of his victims of repressing and torturing students protesting against socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro in the past.
Several relatives of dictator Nicolás Maduro, his predecessor Hugo Chávez, and other regime top brass members are widely reported to have established companies in the United States, amassed fortunes in offshore accounts and purchased luxury properties in the U.S., Spain, and other countries.
In 2022, a joint investigative report conducted by The Miami Herald and the Venezuelan outlet Armando Info found that the names of over 724 mid or high-ranking Venezuelan regime officials appeared listed as officers or directors in Florida businesses, with at least 232 members of the Venezuelan military or its Defense Ministry having opened companies just in Florida. The outlets found the information after cross-referencing public the names of over 128,000 Venezuelan officials featured in public Venezuelan records from the Florida Division of Corporations.
One of the individuals listed in the joint report was retired Navy Admiral Carlos Aniasi Turchio, who reportedly boasted in 2009 that Venezuela’s Armed Forces were revolutionary and born out of the “will of the people to break free from the chains of ‘The [United States] Empire’” and that “the answer given by the noble Venezuelan people is the socialist revolution.”
The report revealed that the regime admiral set up several companies, including a store in South Florida and one holding $1.5 million in commercial property. Aniasi Turchio reportedly settled down in a “spacious $620,000 Kissimmee home, not far from that temple of capitalism Disney World.”
One of the most renowned cases of a Maduro regime military official living a “life of luxury” in the United States was that of Alejandro Andrade Cedeño, who was once late dictator Hugo Chávez’s friend and bodyguard. Andrade Cedeño was sentenced to ten years in prison in 2018 on money laundering charges and released in 2023 as part of a plea bargain deal.
The former bodyguard is believed to have maintained close ties to Raúl Gorrín, a fugitive Venezuelan businessman charged in 2024 for his involvement in a $1.2 billion money laundering scheme. Gorrín has been widely accused of playing a major role in the finances of the Maduro regime and, in 2013, he purchased an 80-percent majority stake of Globovision, Venezuela’s only private news channel. The channel has since then changed its critical stance of the regime and replaced it with a “centrist” stance.
Reports published in 2017 indicated that the Maduro regime sold Venezuelan passports to members of the jihadist terrorist group Hezbollah at a time when Tareck El Aissami — a man long believed to have deep ties with the Shiite terrorists — served as Maduro’s interior minister. El Aissami was purged from the socialist regime in 2023 and charged with treason and money laundering as part of a purported “anti-corruption” probe.
In 2018, U.S. authorities froze approximately $800 million worth of assets linked to current Venezuelan Interior Minister — and wanted drug lord — Diosdado Cabello. Some of the seized assets reportedly include 12 properties in the U.S., including a luxury apartment in front of New York’s Central Park. At the time, Cabello’s daughter Daniela was reportedly deported from the United States after she tried to enter the country.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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