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CubaBrief: Two Cubans and a Venezuelan charged in a Russian intelligence network to finance terrorism and murder. Havana’s 1966 Tricontinental is not history.

On September 15, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against five members of what prosecutors call a Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) network. They are accused of conspiring to finance terrorism and, in three cases, of conspiring to commit murder for hire—including a plot to kill a Russian dissident on U.S. soil.

The defendants named by DOJ are:

  • Yuri Khrameev, 63, of Russia, a former colonel in Russian intelligence services, also known as “Colonel Yuri.”
  • Kirill Khrameev, 27, of Russia, an FSB officer and son of Yuri Khrameev.
  • Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, 35, a Cuban national described as an influential figure in the Cuban diaspora in Russia.
  • Yaidel Delgado Suarez, 35, of Cuba, also known as “Viking,” described as a prolific recruiter.
  • Angel Eduardo Castro, 22, of Venezuela, who helped recruit people inside the United States.

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said the defendants “allegedly operated as a global assassination network that reached into the United States, attempting to recruit U.S. citizens and foreigners to carry out killings at the behest of the Kremlin.”

The indictment alleges the network has operated since at least 2024. Recruits in the United States were paid for surveillance and offered as much as $40,000 to “eliminate” or “disappear” a U.S. resident, and $25,000 for a killing in Lithuania or for sabotage such as arson against warehouses or electrical substations. Prosecutors say the targets included Russian dissidents and civilian and military infrastructure in European countries perceived as supporting Ukraine. All five defendants remain at large.

Orders to carry out sabotage such as arson targeting warehouses echoes orders given to the Castro regime’s WASP network that was dismantled by the FBI in 1998.

The DW investigation that preceded the indictment

One day before the charges were unsealed, Deutsche Welle broadcast the investigation Russia’s secret network of “disposable agents” in Europe. The report, by Julett Pineda, Mathias Bölinger, and Anna Chaika, traced a 2024 wave of arson and sabotage in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Lithuania to Russian services using cheap, deniable recruits—migrants, job-seekers, and Spanish-speaking Latin Americans—rather than formal intelligence officers.

DW identified the recruiter behind the aliases “Adrian” and “Dios” as Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, born in Camagüey, Cuba. For years he has lived in Petrozavodsk, in northern Russia, teaching salsa, bachata, and kizomba at a studio called Made in Cuba. He married a Russian citizen in 2022 and later obtained Russian citizenship. Online, according to DW and partner outlets, he posted job offers in Facebook and Telegram groups for Cubans in Russia and other Latin Americans, offering about $1,500 plus bonuses per operation and seeking people with military or logistics experience. Lithuanian prosecutors have publicly tied the Lithuania plot to Russia’s GRU and placed Romagoza on an international wanted list. At least nine alleged recruits have been arrested; some are already serving prison terms.

DW’s September 16 report on the U.S. charges notes that DOJ went further than the European sabotage cases: Romagoza is also accused of helping obtain images of a dissident’s residence in the United States, material later used for surveillance on American soil. Delgado Suarez, the second Cuban, is accused of trying to recruit people in the United States and of referring to “people in Mexico” as an option for killings. Castro, the Venezuelan, is accused of helping that U.S. recruitment.

This is not about two isolated émigrés who happened to take dirty money. It is a about a Cuban–Venezuelan recruitment node inside a Russian intelligence operation: Spanish-speaking intermediaries, Latin American “disposable agents,” European sabotage, and an alleged murder plot that reached the United States.

One must also recall the 32 Cuban military and intelligence officers killed on January 3, 2026 when Nicolas Maduro was extracted from Venezuela by U.S. forces. Cuban officials had been interrogating and torturing Venezuelan dissidents, according to reports by the Czech NGO CASLA.

Why the 1966 Tricontinental is the right historical frame

In January 1966, Havana hosted the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the Tricontinental. Out of that meeting came the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). This terrorist international (OSPAAAL) continued operating until 2019. Much of its political work migrated, over earlier decades, to the Foreign Ministry and the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP, founded in 1960). The organization that most directly claims OSPAAAL’s ideological inheritance is the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. It was launched in 2018—before the 2019 closure—by Vijay Prashad and allied movements, with institutes in Argentina, Brazil, India, and South Africa

The conference was not a seminar on “anti-imperialism,” but the moment Havana institutionalized a global apparatus for armed struggle, training, propaganda, and the coordination of violent movements aligned with Moscow and, later, with other anti-democratic regimes. Che Guevara’s message to the Tricontinental called for “two, three, many Vietnams.” Castro’s line was bullets, not ballots.

The method has changed. The purpose has not.

Then, Havana brought guerrillas, terrorists, and Soviet-bloc services into one house and sent trained cadres back to Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. Today, Russian services use Cubans in Russia and a Venezuelan recruiter to hire Latin Americans online, pay them in small sums or cryptocurrency, and send them to burn warehouses, stalk dissidents, and test whether they will kill. The “disposable agent” is the cheap successor to the old internationalist volunteer. The language of special missions and anti-Western struggle is the same cheap costume.

The Castro regime has spent over sixty years selling itself as a victim of geography and the U.S. embargo. The record is the opposite. The U.S. embargo has saved U.S. taxpayers billions, and is not the cause of Cuba’s misery. Communist central planning is. Havana built the Tricontinental architecture that joined Moscow to Latin American violence. It trained and harbored terrorists. It still sits on the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list for reasons that have nothing to do with nostalgia. Cuban mercenaries have fought for Putin in Ukraine. Cuban and Venezuelan nationals now appear, by name, in a U.S. terrorism-finance and murder-for-hire indictment as operational parts of a Russian network.

That is the continuity. A Cuban dance teacher in Petrozavodsk running a studio named Made in Cuba while allegedly tasking Latin Americans to commit arson in the European Union is not an accident of migration. It is what a sixty-year alliance looks like when it is updated for Telegram, deniable cash, and “one-use” recruits.

What this indictment makes unavoidable

First, Havana is not a bystander in Moscow’s war against Ukraine or in Russia’s campaign of transnational repression. Two of the five charged defendants are Cuban. One is Venezuelan. The recruitment pool described by both DOJ and DW is Spanish-speaking and Latin American.

Second, the threat is not confined to Europe. Prosecutors say the same network tried to hire people in the United States to surveil and kill. That is the definition of a foreign intelligence service treating American soil as an operational theater.

Third, “people-to-people” and diaspora channels are not automatically benign. Romagoza is described as influential in the Cuban community in Russia. Delgado Suarez allegedly recruited from inside the United States. Any serious Cuba policy has to treat Havana’s overseas communities, intelligence services, and allied networks in Venezuela as a single security problem, not as a cultural exchange.

Fourth, the Tricontinental anniversary events Havana staged in January 2026 were not harmless historical pageantry. They were a reminder that the regime still claims the inheritance of 1966: an international of violence justified as solidarity. The September 2026 charges show that inheritance in operational form.

The first victims of Cuban communism’s terrorism are Cubans themselves—and that the same regime exports repression, mercenaries, and criminal-intelligence partnerships to Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and beyond. The unsealed indictment and the DW investigation do not ask the public to take that argument on faith. They put Cuban names on a Russian terrorism and murder-for-hire case.

The defendants are fugitives. The network, if the charges are proven, will not retire because five men were named. The question for Washington and for Brussels is whether they will treat Havana as a full partner in this architecture, or continue to pretend that Cuban participation is incidental.

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