US detains Cuban ICAP worker over Hasan Piker Cuba visit

Federal agents detained Carlos Antonio Lloga Dominguez, a Cuban national who spent more than a decade at the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio terminated his legal status. The State Department said Lloga Dominguez, his wife and his son are now in federal custody pending removal from the United States.

The detention lands at the center of a widening U.S. crackdown on Cuba-linked institutions and the people connected to them. The State Department said Lloga Dominguez worked for more than 10 years at ICAP, which it described as a Cuban organization founded by Fidel Castro in 1960 that supports intelligence and counterintelligence activities. It also said ICAP was designated for sanctions under Executive Order 14404 earlier in June 2026.

For Washington, ICAP is not being treated as a normal cultural exchange outfit. The State Department said the group claims a network of more than 2,000 organizations in over 150 countries, and it pointed to ICAP president Fernando González Llort, who served 15 years in U.S. prison in the Wasp Network case. The administration has framed Cuba as carrying out a decades-long campaign of political, ideological and institutional warfare against the United States, even as the U.S. embargo on Cuba remains in place, dating to February 1962.

The immediate trigger for the scrutiny was the March 2026 Nuestra América Convoy, which traveled to Cuba from March 21 to March 23 to deliver humanitarian aid. CODEPINK said its delegation left Miami on March 20 with 6,300 pounds of medicines and medical supplies, and WLRN and PolitiFact said Hasan Piker and Isra Hirsi were among the participants, alongside activists from Progressive International, The People’s Forum and CODEPINK.

The convoy quickly became a political target. Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar criticized the activists and claimed an Irish band’s concert caused a hospital outage and deaths in Cuba, an allegation PolitiFact and WLRN found no credible evidence to support. Piker said U.S. law required Americans to stay in certain hotels and cast the attacks as a distraction. Cuba’s government backed the convoy, and President Miguel Díaz-Canel met with Progressive International’s David Adler during the Havana event on March 21.

Lloga Dominguez’s detention gives the episode a sharper edge. What began as a high-visibility solidarity trip has now reached the level of federal custody, with U.S. officials using Cuba’s state-linked institutions as the legal and political basis for action.