The spokesperson for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, stated this Friday that the Cuban regime supports sophisticated transnational terrorist networks, in remarks made on the program «The World Over» on the EWTN network, hosted by Raymond Arroyo.
The interview takes place four days after the State Department published the report Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, a 100-page document that organizes nearly seven decades of accusations regarding espionage, ideological subversion, and the exportation of political violence by Havana.
Pigott described an architecture of covert operations that transcends borders: "We are observing sophisticated transnational networks backed by the Cuban regime and other actors, capable of planning in one country, recruiting in another, financing themselves from a third, and executing an attack in a fourth country."
The spokesperson placed that threat in the context of the resurgence of extremist left-wing terrorism on a global scale, providing concrete data about its reach.
In the United States, he noted, "the extreme left's plots and anti-government attacks represent more assaults than any other ideological group."
The situation in Europe is no less concerning, according to Pigott: left-wing terrorist attacks are "comparable, in number, to those of jihadist terrorism."
The host Raymond Arroyo introduced the topic by playing a statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, made during the Ministerial Conference on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, held at the State Department with delegations from over 60 countries.
In that speech, Rubio directly pointed to the Cuban regime as the architect of decades of ideological infiltration: "The extensive network of intelligence and ideological influence of the Cuban regime has helped build the extreme left in our country and in our hemisphere, and it remains closely linked to extreme left groups and movements both in the West and beyond."
Pigott emphasized that both the ministerial conference and the report address the same urgency: “This type of transnational terrorist network requires a transnational response as well. That’s why the ministerial meeting was held at the State Department and why this report is so important: because it highlights the influence of the Cuban regime and the actions it has been undertaking.”
The choice of EWTN as a platform to disseminate the message from the State Department is not a coincidence: the Catholic network has a global reach and a conservative audience receptive to anti-communist discourse, and "The World Over" is one of its most-watched programs.
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