Cuban exile aspires to lead Cuba from Miami

Armando Labrador owns and operates a plastic-surgery clinic in a Miami strip mall that advertises low-cost breast implants and liposuction. He dreams of being Cuba’s next president. Labrador, 56, fled Cuba with his family as a teenager, after his father was imprisoned for almost eight years and his grandfather was executed. When he isn’t running his plastic-surgery business — Labrador is an executive, not a doctor — he leads Cuba Primero, a group of about 100 dissidents inside Cuba who organize protests and scrawl graffiti like “Down with the Dictatorship” and “Viva Trump” along Havana’s Malecon.

President Donald Trump has spoken openly of “taking Cuba.” The administration has been pressuring the island’s 67-year-old communist regime, putting in place a blockade that has choked off energy supplies and led to crippling blackouts. To exiles like Labrador, the island’s liberation has never looked more in reach. There is growing conviction in Miami’s fractured Cuban diaspora that Trump will push out President Miguel Díaz-Canel and open up the island’s ailing economy.

“I think I’m going to run for president,” said Labrador. “If you asked me that six months ago, I’d have said, ‘No, that’s impossible.’”

It’s far from clear whether elections would take place if Cuba’s government were to collapse or be deposed. When the US removed President Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, it anointed Delcy Rodríguez, a senior figure from within the regime, as the country’s new leader, rather than someone from the large opposition led by Nobel Peace Prize Winner María Corina Machado. “It’s a moment of hope but also trepidation,” said Michael Bustamante, chair of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. “Whether we get to the phase of democratization is really an open question.”

Labrador, who has written two plays and a song about resisting Cuba’s regime, has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. To promote Cuba Primero, and his clinic, he hosted a beauty pageant in March in the Donald J. Trump Ballroom at the president’s Trump National Doral Miami Golf Club.

Hundreds of people watched as 60 mostly Cuban-American women, some clad in red, white and blue evening gowns evoking the Cuban flag, competed for the Miss Nova Femina crown. A dozen contestants performed a Labrador play about hunger, economic duress and repression in Cuba. A video about Cuba Primero depicted an AI-generated shark wearing a Cuban military cap menacing refugees on a raft.

Some people in the crowd cried. Others chanted, “Viva Cuba!” The Cuban exile community in Miami is experiencing a generational shift. The leaders of older dissident groups that traced their roots to the years after Fidel Castro’s takeover are ageing or dead. The opposition is more divided among several smaller factions. “We have our differences about how we think about freedom in Cuba,” said Ramiro Collazo, leader of Exilio Unido Ya, or Exiles United Now. “But hopefully we have a common goal of finishing with the Castro tyranny.”

For his part, Labrador had lost faith as US presidents repeatedly tried and failed to force change in Cuba with sanctions and diplomatic pressure, but saw a change with the arrival of the new administration. “Trump is different,” he said. Marco Rubio, the Miami-born, Cuban-American secretary of state, has been leading talks with Cuban officials, which people familiar with the matter say include the grandson of Raul Castro, the country’s former president and brother of the late Fidel. Labrador said he is unaware of the Trump administration including exile groups in its planning for Cuba, and doesn’t know whether elections are part of their plans.

Mike Hammer, the US chargé d’affaires to Cuba, has briefed Labrador in his living room on Trump’s strategy, the businessman said. Labrador said he’s spoken with Rob Allison, the State Department’s coordinator for Cuban affairs. The State Department regularly meets with a range of people to assess global events and develop policy, an agency spokesperson said. Labrador declined to discuss details of those conversations, except to say that the officials won’t say much about their exact plans. “We in the opposition really aren’t involved,” said Labrador. “But we’ve never been so close to victory.”

Cuba’s repression of dissent makes it difficult for opposition groups to operate in the open. More than 1,200 political prisoners, critics, protesters, activists and journalists are detained in the country, according to the human-rights advocacy group Prisoners Defenders.

“The risks are so high, so 100 people really is a lot,” said Labrador. He says hundreds more people support him inside Cuba, where the population was almost 11 million at the end of 2024, according to the World Bank, but are scared to become activists. “I don’t think anyone else can show they have more people actively resisting inside Cuba than us.”

Some exile groups say they have larger followings than Labrador. Cuba Decide, led by Inter-American Commission on Human Rights representative Rosa María Payá, says it has attracted thousands of supporters since 2015. It is described by the U.S. government as the “most prominent” opposition movement.

It’s hard to gauge Cuba Primero’s true influence. Labrador posts interviews and news reports about opposition activities on his YouTube channel, which has more than 230,000 subscribers. Labrador and Cuba Primero are on Cuba’s list of terrorists and terror groups. Labrador denies that he or Cuba Primero engage in terrorism, and said 30 Cuba Primero activists are in jail in Cuba for activities such as holding illegal political meetings or staging demonstrations. Cuba is designated as a state sponsor of terrorism by the US, a charge the regime has rejected.

On Feb. 28, a Cuban coast guard patrol fired on a fishing boat in the island’s territorial waters that was carrying 10 heavily armed members of two Florida-based exile groups. Five of the men were killed and the rest were detained on terrorism charges, according to the Cuban government. Labrador said he has no ties to the groups involved and doesn’t approve of violence.

“Our goal is to convince people to resist through nonviolent means, and it’s worth the risk of going to jail,” said Leudys Reyes, who spent six years in prison in Cuba on charges of disseminating “enemy propaganda” and engaging in “public disorder” for his work as a Cuba Primero organizer.

Reyes was released from jail in 2024 and says he was forced to leave Cuba due to death threats. Labrador helped get him to Miami via Nicaragua.

“There is no one bigger than we are in Cuba,” Reyes said in an interview at Labrador’s home.

Labrador arrived in Miami in 1989, at age 19. In 1997, a doctor he knew convinced him to finance a varicose vein clinic in Miami’s Little Havana.

Six doctors perform 100 procedures a week, Labrador said, and he plans to open a second clinic. In 2018, inspired by the San Isidro free-expression movement in Cuba, Labrador founded Cuba Primero. He began sending money and medical supplies to help San Isidro, which was led by Cuban rapper Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez. The group later collapsed when Osorbo and other leaders were imprisoned.

Tribune News Service