The U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, stated this Saturday that broad sectors of American academia and the press maintain sympathies for the Cuban regime, attributing this attitude to both anti-Americanism and ideological affinity with Havana.
The statements were made during an interview on the program "My View with Lara Trump" on Fox News, posted by the official account of the Department of State on X, and are framed within the defense of the report "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism," a document of approximately 100 pages that the Department of State presented on July 20.
"I know there are many people in the American academic world, and frankly in the American press, who sympathize with the Cuban regime, and have done so for a long time," Rubio said. "It is partly motivated by their anti-Americanism and partly by ideological affinity."
Rubio responded in this way to those who described the report as "fear tactics" to justify a potential military action against Cuba.
In response to those criticisms, the Secretary of State was straightforward: "Everything that appears there is a fact, and frankly, I don't believe they can dispute it."
In the same interview, Rubio described Cuba as a superpower of espionage that operates in a unique way: «Cuba is the only country that has consistently implanted and embedded spies in our system without even paying them,» he pointed out, noting that ideological affinity replaces payment as the recruitment mechanism.
He cited two specific cases to illustrate his argument. The first is that of Ana Belén Montes, the principal analyst on Cuba at the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was sentenced in 2002 to 25 years in prison for espionage and released in January 2023.
"It was one of the biggest intelligence failures of the U.S. and one of the largest infiltrations we have had in our system," Rubio stated.
The second is Víctor Manuel Rocha, former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, sentenced for having acted as a Cuban agent for more than four decades. "We had a U.S. ambassador who turned out to be a Cuban spy and was recently convicted," he recalled.
Beyond classic espionage, Rubio connected the Cuban regime with networks of political activism on U.S. soil.
He pointed out that the same individuals who were involved in the 2020 riots later became pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses, and less than 48 hours after Nicolás Maduro's arrest, they appeared in front of the courts with pre-printed signs demanding his release.
"There is nothing organic about all this. It is funded, it is organized, and Cuba is part of that network and, in some cases, a critical part," he emphasized.
The Secretary of State also extended Cuban responsibility on a regional scale, stating that every communist insurgency that destabilized governments in Latin America over the past 40 or 50 years found its support, assistance, or even its origin in a Cuban influence operation.
Rubio, a Cuban-American raised in Miami, concluded his argument by appealing to geography and geopolitics: "This is 90 miles from our shores."
"A failed state 90 miles from our shores that happens to be aligned with U.S. adversaries is a national security threat to our country."
The State Department report on Cuba, presented on July 20, accuses the regime of having infiltrated the highest levels of the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon, and documents 18 signals intelligence facilities on the island with operational involvement from China and Russia.
Filed under: