Tom Llamas cannot remember a time when Cuba was not in his life. His mother is from Havana. His father was born in Banes, in Oriente. Tom grew up hearing stories about his parent’s traumatic escape from Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba. His mother remembers her family’s rush from their home to a new city and country. When Castro started to limit the ways to get out of Cuba-Tom’s father’s family escaped through Mexico. They had to cross the Rio Grande on a raft with a coyote to reach the United States and seek political asylum. Both his mother and father’s family’s came to this country with nothing in search of the American Dream and a second chance. The United States provided that life-saving and life-changing opportunity.

Tom was born in Miami and first lived in Little Havana before his family moved to Flint, Michigan and eventually Coral Gables. He graduated from Belen Jesuit Preparatory School. Throughout his life calls from Cuba and visits from relatives that still lived on the island were common occurences. He learned about the commitment to help Cuba by his parent’s actions of bringing money and comfort to loved ones who recently arrived in Miami. As a child he remembers taking his father’s cousin, Doña Nelly, to Disney World— and realizing how much the United States had to offer and how much his family struggled with living in Cuba.

He began his career at age of 15 interning at Telemundo in Hialeah and has worked in newsrooms every since. Writing and producing jobs turned into reporting and anchoring assignment in Miami and New York. Tom has covered numerous Presidential Campaigns, traveled on assignment around the world, and spent years building toward the job he holds today.

He is now the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas, a role he assumed in June 2025, and the anchor of Top Story with Tom Llamas on NBC News NOW. In this role he has anchored from China, Israel, Ukraine, Milan, Texas, Alaska, and Miami. Every weeknight he broadcasts live from 30 Rock in New York City.

He has conducted numerous headline-making interviews, including with President Trump, Iran’s President and Foreign Minister, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and soccer legend Lionel Messi. During his time with NBC News, he has covered the Trump-Xi summit, the deadly Texas floods, the New Orleans terror attack, the Lahaina wildfires, the war in Ukraine, and two Olympic Games. In 2025 he was named by TIME Magazine as a Latino Leader. He holds multiple Emmy Awards, Edward R. Murrow Awards, and NAHJ recognitions including the Presidential Award of Impact.

But the story he will never forget he covered years earlier as a local reporter in Miami. Cuban Americans in South Florida were paying smugglers to bring their families out of Cuba on go-fast boats. The dangerous and illegal operations were leading to boats flipping over and people dying.. He spent nearly a year getting access to embed with the U.S. Coast Guard in the Florida Straits during a nighttime operation. On one of those nights, in pitch black water, the Coast Guard interdicted a 25-foot open fisherman carrying 30 or more people — women, children, all with “the face of misery,” because they knew they were going back to Communist Cuba.

Weeks later, a woman called the newsroom. She had seen the coverage and said her baby and her husband might have been on one of those boats. He went to her house and showed her the video. She broke down when she saw her infant. She said her husband had driven the boat because the smugglers said he and their child could come for free if he did. She told Tom he had never driven a boat before.