José Enrique Morales links the Herrera Pardo family to State Security
14ymedio, Elena Nazco / Luz Escobar, Madrid, 19 July 2025 — After leaving Cuba for Mexico and requesting asylum in the United States during Donald Trump’s first term, José Enrique Morales Besada never thought he would cross paths with his attackers again. He was wrong. He discovered them eight years later where he least expected: in the very country that had given him refuge. The family of the men who brutally beat him and shattered his jaw in 2017 in Morón (a town in Ciego de Ávila province) for being gay, contacted him through social media and threatened him.
“It all started when I found out they were here in the United States,” Morales told 14ymedio in a phone interview. Now 28-years-old, he was twenty at the time of the attack. He thought he would never be able to sing again. It had been both his passion and source of income. He now earns a living as a healthcare worker and influencer under the name Vida Victoria. It was his followers who warned him that his attackers were now living in the U.S. “My followers started writing me to ask, ‘Aren’t these the guys who beat you up in Cuba?’ They also sent me photos of their profiles.”
Morales finds it astonishing that the assailants named in his asylum application, twin brothers Reisel and Leiser Herrera Pardo, would be living legally in the United States. Though now residents of Miami, the two were living for a time in Tampa, where Morales, now a naturalized citizen, currently resides. “One day I saw one of them in a pizzeria as I was leaving work and thought I was hallucinating. It turned out I wasn’t. They were here,” he recalls.
Following a video in which Morales talks about the arrival of the their family in the US, the assailants’ younger brother posted an insulting message to him online
Following a video in which Morales talks about the arrival of the brothers’ family in the US, Yaisel — the twins’ younger brother — wrote him an insulting message to him on an Instagram chat. Soon thereafter, Morales posted a video on the platform, reporting the threats he had received during the exchange. The attackers’ father, Reisel Herrera, whom Morales claims was a well-known Cuban State Security agent in Ciego de Ávila going by the name “Mamporro,” also joined in.
“They told me to give them my number and address, that they already knew where I lived, so everyone would see that I wasn’t as brave or as handsome as I look on social media,” reports Morales, who says he will soon file a complaint against them. “They made a mistake. They told me the twins were police officers. That is impossible given the length of time they have been here.”
According to Morales, his attackers came to the U.S. during the Biden administration and are now legal residents. He points out, however, that police officers are required to have American citizenship. “They could have taken a class that trained them to be security guards but falsely claiming to be a police officer is a crime,” he notes.
“On June 11, 2017, I was savagely attacked by Cuban State Security agents and members of the National Revolutionary Police. As a result of this beating, I suffered three bone fractures in my jaw, which was displaced to the left. I lost several teeth and had bone fragments protruding from under my tongue. My face was mercilessly disfigured,” Morales wrote at the bottom of his Instagram post, in which he shared audio recordings and conversations with his assailants’ brother and father.
“I am now horrified to find out that my attackers and harassers are here in the United States, the country where I came seeking freedom, protection and justice. They wander around with impunity, seeking refuge on the very soil that saved my life,” he added.
Though the 2017 incident was treated as a homophobic hate crime, Morales is now believes the beating has the hallmarks of political corruption.
Though the 2017 incident was treated as a homophobic hate crime, Morales now believes the beating has the hallmarks of political corruption. Two other young men from Morón had their skulls beaten in by the same twins at that time. One victim never reported it “out of fear,” he says, and the other now lives in the United States.
Both of these incidents, as well as his own case, lead him to believe that his attackers were political police agents like their father, whose jobs were to intimidate homosexuals. “They didn’t just do it to me; they did it to two other two boys also. That was their thing. Would anyone be surprised to learn that State Security hires young criminals as informants, as plainclothes thugs?” he asks.
He also believes that the reason his assailants were only fined and never faced trial was because Morón’s chief prosecutor at the time was their aunt.
Morales hopes that — at least in the United States, where the law operates very differently than it does on the island — such violence and threats of attack will not fall on deaf ears. In Cuba, not even the intervention of the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX) — an organization headed by Raúl Casstro’s daughter, Mariela Castro —led to justice. But now, he points out, “they are here.”
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