Just three months before the elections in the United States, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) confirmed the threat in statements to the press and assured that the efforts of the Havana regime “are already underway.”
In that regard, an ODNI official said that Cuba “is carrying out localized influence operations” aimed at U.S. candidates who are opposed to the communist regime in Havana, which has been in power for 65 years.
The State Department told Radio Martí that it will not tolerate any efforts aimed at interfering in U.S. elections. “The inclusion of Cuba in the Intelligence Community Assessment of Foreign Threats to U.S. elections is the result of the Cuban regime will target candidates in South Florida,” who are working to maintain U.S. sanctions on the island’s regime, a spokesman for that office said.
The official is referring to the report that the ODNI presented in December on “Foreign Threats to the 2022 US Elections.” The document, written in December 2022 and declassified a year later, accuses Cuba and other countries of having tried to interfere in the elections in the state of Florida.
The largest Cuban community resides in South Florida, just 90 miles from Cuba. The report indicates that the communist island is again trying to influence the upcoming elections as it did two years ago.
The report in question notes that the island’s regime attempted to discredit candidates for Congress and governor in the state of Florida. “Havana likely wanted to advance its goals in foreign policy, including the removal of sanctions, travel restrictions, and the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation,” and that one goal of the regime was to “denigrate certain U.S. candidates in Florida.”
Infiltration, an old issue
For Poblete, the regime’s interference in the elections and the infiltration of intelligence agencies into the Cuban community and its organizations “is not a new issue.”
Poblete, who specializes in national and international security issues, said the regime is not only seeking to infiltrate the South Florida community through its organizations, “the report says Cuban officials have worked to have relationships with the U.S. media, which has critical opinions about Havana’s critics in Congress.”
An example, Poblete pointed out, is the “network of social media accounts, almost certainly covertly linked to Cuba,” whose function is to amplify content that seeks to discredit U.S. policy.
He added that many of these accounts appear to have a conservative line and for the lawyer “one must always ask oneself if they are trying to penetrate the Cuban exile community by pretending to be conservative. That is the first thing I thought when I read this report.”
Migration, which has increased in recent years on the island due to poverty and repression, is one of the factors that the regime could be taking advantage of to infiltrate spies.
“So many Cubans have arrived from the island who were born and raised in that system. Some people worked for the regime. I know people who worked with ETECSA (a telecommunications company) and are living in Miami. These are things that are worrying because we see what happened with (former US ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel) Rocha and Ana Belén Montés (former Pentagon analyst, convicted of spying for Cuba). And the immigration that has arrived from the island, not all of them, have been raised in the system. Their ties with their family or with people in the system continue, and that is mind-blowing to me.”
Rocha, who appeared to be a conservative official, is the most recent case of Cuban infiltration in the United States that has been discovered. He spied for that regime for more than four decades and had access to secret and highly sensitive information on U.S. foreign policy, which would have caused serious damage to the nation’s interests.
The extent of the damage is still unknown, but so far attention has focused on two events: his participation in the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996, and the death of opposition leader Oswaldo Payá, victim of a car accident caused by the intelligence services of the Castro dictatorship.
Elections
Poblete believes that the regime has several targets. The main one is the attempt to divert the vote to affect candidates who are not convenient for Cuba and to favor those who advocate unconditional relations with the dictatorship.
“This is not a 2024 operation, this has been going on for decades, believing that the exiles will vote for a different position, that they will advocate for the lifting of sanctions. That is not going to happen, Senator Marco Rubio will not be overthrown, nor will Senator Rick Scott, nor any congressman. The Cuban exiles are united in their policy towards Cuba, and if they want change, they already know what they have to do.” He is referring to changes in policy in Cuba, public freedoms and free elections.
He says that the target is not only South Florida, but also other parts of the country. “They have lost many in Congress, not long ago Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from Texas died, and Barbarie Lee from California is retiring from Congress. Many people have left who have supported the unconditional rapprochement with the Cuban regime of Barack Obama’s branch and the radical Democratic wing,” the lawyer pointed out.
“I think it is more designed for that, and to influence. In Miami they are using it to spy, to infiltrate exile organizations, with the media, they did it with Brothers to the Rescue and look what happened with that, they penetrated that organization, and other targets are the NGOs.”
“They’re doing it for a lot of reasons, but not necessarily to influence South Florida, but to try to build that base that they had in Congress and that they’ve been losing. But in Miami it’s not going to have any effect, the congressmen are going to continue winning by good margins, and (former President Donald) Trump will win Florida by good margins. This is designed to influence outside of that, to counteract in Congress.
For Poblete, the big question is what U.S. counterintelligence is doing to eliminate the problem. At the same time, he said he hopes that federal prosecutors will continue to investigate the case.
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