Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, a Cuban communist spy whose work led to the killing of four Americans in the 1990s, has found a new job promoting a regime-owned online shop specializing in expensive foreign products.
Hernández Nordelo, one of a web of spies known as the “Cuban Five,” had been the only person to receive justice for the Cuban government killings of Americans Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales in 1996. He was serving two life sentences in American prison when far-left former President Barack Obama freed him to a hero’s welcome in Havana in 2014.
A government employee speaks by phone next to a mural painting of the five Cubans jailed in the United States, in Havana 09 August 2005. (ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP via Getty Images)
Prior to his liberation, the Obama administration had also used American public funds to preserve and ship Hernández Nordelo’s sperm to Cuba to inseminate his wife, a bizarre diplomatic agreement Obama had agreed with during a period of concessions to the brutal communist regime.
The elite shop Hernández Nordelo is now reportedly promoting greatly undermines the Castro regime narrative that the American “embargo” is preventing Cubans from accessing basic goods, as it clearly provides access to foreign goods, but at a high price impacted by communist policies and requires foreign currency to patronize.
As reported by the Spain-based website Diario De Cuba on Wednesday, the website, known as tiendalotengo.com (“I Have It Shop”), began operating in 2020 and is owned by the Castro Regime’s ENCOMIL Import-Export Trading Company. The website’s business offices are located in Toronto, Canada.
According to Diario de Cuba, the website sells items that Cuban citizens cannot easily find — let alone actually buy — through normal stores, such as personal care items, household tools, clothing, footwear, mattresses, paints, home furnishing items, and canned food items. Most of the items are locally produced in Cuba.
The online store was promoted by the former Castro regime spy Tuesday as “an option for those who help their relatives from abroad.”
The website claims to be undergoing maintenance at press time.
Gerardo Hernández Nordelo was the leader of the “Cuban Five,” a group of spies that infiltrated the Cuban exile community and are considered responsible for providing the Castro regime with the information that allowed the communist regime to shoot down two planes, killing four American citizens in 1996 while the conducted humanitarian rescue operations to find and save Cuban balseros (“rafters”) amidst the Cuban migrant crisis of that time.
The former Castro regime spy was the only one of the Cuban Five that had been convicted of the murder of the four American citizens, having served roughly 16 years in prison before he was released.
Before Hernández Nordelo was released, the Obama administration used American taxpayers’ dollars to smuggle Hernández’s sperm out of prison so that his wife could be artificially inseminated. In addition to serving as the national coordinator of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) —the communist regime’s specialized neighborhood espionage network that identifies and silences dissidents — Hernández’s was granted a seat in the regime’s State Council in 2020.
Although the regime-owned store claims to deliver its products nationwide in Cuba, it only accepts foreign payments through Visa and MasterCard.
The Tiendalotengo store is not the first online store with ties to the communist Castro regime. In July, a group of Cuban activists in Miami accused the online store Supermarket 23 of having ties with another Castro regime-owned company and Cuban “Commander” Guillermo García Frías. The store was also accused of selling Cuban-made products absent from shelves at prohibitively higher prices.
The Castro regime found in these online stores a way to profit from Cuban citizens who want to help their families survive through communism from abroad. A similar case occurs with remittance sent from abroad from which, by 2020, the Castro regime was pocketing 74 percent of every United States dollar sent from abroad.
Restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on remittances sent to Cuba that prevented the communist regime from enriching itself through them were reversed by the Biden Administration in 2022.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.