Patrick Oppmann serves as a CNN international correspondent and the network’s Havana bureau chief, responsible for covering Cuba and the surrounding region for all the network’s platforms.

He is fluent in Spanish, and has traveled widely throughout Latin America.

Oppmann recently reported exclusively from a Russian warship visiting Cuba, part of the largest flotilla of Russian Navy vessels to visit the Caribbean island since the end of the Cold War.

He was one of a handful of reporters inside Cuba when unprecedented island-wide protests broke out in 2021, the largest anti-government demonstrations to take place since the Cuban revolution. For weeks, Oppmann covered the Cuban government’s crackdown on protestors and resulting condemnation from the Biden administration.

Oppmann reported from the Bahamas in 2019 on Hurricane Dorian, spending weeks on Grand Bahama before, during and after the Category 5 storm caused catastrophic damage to the islands. Having previously covered Hurricanes Katrina, Wilma and Irma, Oppmann was instrumental in CNN’s coverage of the strongest hurricane ever to make landfall in the Bahamas. Oppmann was awarded a Deadline Club Award and was nominated for an Emmy for his reporting on the devastating hurricane.

In 2018 Oppmann traveled to Guatemala to report from the disaster zone of the El Fuego Volcano explosion, one of the most deadly volcano explosions to take place in decades.

Oppmann reported from Havana on the death of Fidel Castro in 2016 and led the team of CNN journalists that traveled to the island for the Cuban leader’s funeral.

On December 17, 2014, Oppmann was the only reporter for a U.S. television network to report live from Cuba when the historic announcement was made that the U.S. government would change its policy towards Cuba and seek to reestablish full diplomatic ties with the island’s communist government.

Oppmann was also the first reporter to interview and film Cuban doctors preparing to fight the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014.

While tracking the movements of a fugitive couple who kidnapped their children in Florida in 2013, Oppmann located the Hakken family in Cuba after they had sailed to Havana during a custody dispute. The couple was later returned to the U.S. by Cuban officials and convicted of kidnapping.

In 2010, Oppmann spent weeks reporting from the remote site where desperate efforts were underway to rescue 33 trapped Chilean miners. During that assignment, Oppmann regularly broke news about the rescue operation’s progress and was among the first reporters to speak with several of the miners after they were successfully pulled from the mine.

Oppmann also contributed to CNN’s Peabody Award-winning coverage of the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill, and spent weeks traveling from Louisiana to Florida to report on oil’s impact on people living in the region.

Oppmann joined CNN in 2000 as an assignment editor and then field producer with the network’s Miami Bureau. While in Miami, he covered a wide range of stories including the loss of the Columbia Space Shuttle, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks. He moved to the network’s Seattle bureau in 2009, where he covered a number of stories for all CNN platforms.

Oppmann’s reporting has also been featured in The Christian Science Monitor, The St. Petersburg Times, The Buenos Aires Herald, TIME Magazine and on National Public Radio. He is a graduate of Duke University, where he majored in Spanish and Latin American studies.