This is Jorge Luis Vega García, former lieutenant colonel of the Ministry of the Interior, accused of torture in prisons.
14ymedio, Miami, 24 July 2025 — Former Cuban Interior Ministry Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Luis Vega García now resides in the United States, where he arrived with humanitarian parole on January 20, 2024. According to what Mario J. Pentón revealed Thursday in Martí Noticias, the former official entered the United States through Tampa Airport, Florida, with his wife and son, and was able to benefit from the Cuban Adjustment Act. His history as “one of the most feared repressors” was not detected during the immigration investigation process.
Some of his victims, such as Pablo Pacheco, Fidel Suárez, Blas Giraldo Reyes, and Benito Ortega, who served time in prisons such as Agüica and Canaleta, in Matanzas, where Vega García served, testify about him.
“There are faces from these years in prison that are unforgettable, it’s like a tattoo on your soul,” explains Pablo Pacheco, imprisoned during the Black Spring, in a video published by Pentón. The former political prisoner recounts in these images that “Veguita,” as he was known, was then captain and second-in-command of the Agüica prison, and wore “his short, Nazi-style hairstyle.” “You could see the evil in his face,” the former prisoner adds.
“Veguita is one of the many murderers in Cuba”
Fidel Suárez asserts: “Veguita is one of the many murderers in Cuba.” Along with other officials, such as Emilio Cruz, from the prison where the opposition leader was held, he continues, he was beaten nineteen times in one month. “They permanently disfigured my right side, from my leg almost to my neck,” Suárez claims.
Blas Giraldo Reyes, for his part, said that he tortured both political and common-law prisoners. They all described him as “an executioner.”
“The man asked me, ’Are you thinking of getting out of here someday?’” Suárez says Vega asked him, to which the dissident replied: “It’s not that I’m thinking of getting out, it’s that I’m out, because I’m a free man. You’re the prisoners here, when tomorrow comes and justice is done.” All the soldier did, he recounts, was “laugh and say that the Revolution was eternal, that it wouldn’t fall and no one could overthrow it.” If that moment ever came, the officer concluded, they would “tear everyone’s head off together and fill the halls with blood.”
Benito Ortega recounts the time Vega García prevented him from attending his mother’s funeral, demanding that he go dressed as a prisoner, which the opposition member refused to do.
Martí Noticias offers images of two documents signed by Jorge Luis Vega García that prove the signature is the same: one in Cuba in 2010 and another in the US this year. Sources with access to classified information assure Pentón that the regime erased the former military officer’s personal file from the island’s immigration system, a common practice, the journalist explains, to facilitate the “discreet departure” of trusted individuals.
“If you defended communism so much, if you identified so much with communism, what are you doing here, in the country you criticized so much?”
In a call, which he promptly disconnected, Vega García denied to Martí Noticias that he had ever been a member of the Cuban prison system, after which he blocked his phone number. “I’m convinced it’s him,” Pacheco stated, adding with bitter irony: “If you defended communism so much, if you identified so strongly with communism, what are you doing here, in the country you criticized so much, attacked so much? You don’t deserve to be here.”
Vega García’s case joins others like that of Daniel Morejón García, a US resident identified as a repressor by the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and deported to the island on May 30.
More than 100 Cubans linked to the regime appear on a list that Congressman Carlos Giménez submitted to the Department of Homeland Security a few months ago. It allegedly includes Jorge Javier Rodríguez Cabrera — a friend of Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as “El Cangrejo” — who was arrested by ICE on Monday in Las Vegas, where he had built a successful business.
Following this arrest, Giménez expressed his “great pleasure” and predicted that other arrests of “many people who are conducting business with Cuba illegally” are on the way.
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