The U.S. State Department published this Thursday on X the opinion article by Republican Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis titled “America Must Reckon with Havana’s Malign Influence”, related to the Trump administration's public communication campaign against the Cuban regime.
The agency's tweet directly cited the legislator: “The State Department recently published a report outlining Havana's campaign of espionage, subversion, and ideological influence against the United States.”
In the same thread, the agency shared a graphic with the caption "Cuba: the capital of 21st-century communism," linking to the report published on its official site.
The text by Malliotakis, published in the medium VOZ, supports and expands on the 100-page report presented by the Department of State on July 20 under the direction of Secretary Marco Rubio, who accompanied it with the statement: “For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the main sponsor of radical leftism and third-worldism in the United States. The American people deserve to know.”
The congresswoman, daughter of an exiled Cuban mother after Castro came to power, links the ideological influence of the regime to the disturbances of 2020 on U.S. soil and cites two emblematic cases of espionage documented in the report: that of Ana Belén Montes, recruited by Cuban intelligence who became the lead analyst on Cuba at the Defense Intelligence Agency; and that of Víctor Manuel Rocha, who spied for Havana for over 40 years while holding senior positions in the Department of State, the National Security Council, and as ambassador to Bolivia, and was sentenced in April 2024 to 15 years in prison.
Malliotakis also points to organizations such as The People's Forum - which hosted Miguel Díaz-Canel at its headquarters in New York and supports the Venceremos Brigade - CODEPINK, and the National Lawyers Guild as channels of influence for the regime on U.S. soil. Regarding these groups, she warns: "Cuba serves as a bridge between like-minded organizations and governments such as China, Russia, and Iran."
A particularly critical section of the article points to the Democratic congress members who traveled to Cuba in 2026. In April, Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan Jackson made a five-day visit and met with Díaz-Canel. In July, Mark Pocan, Teresa Leger Fernández, Maxine Dexter, and Delia Ramírez were also received by the Cuban leader and condemned Washington's sanctions policy.
Regarding those trips, Malliotakis wrote: "Those visits risk legitimizing a dictatorship that has starved, tortured, and even killed its own citizens, and they are a slap in the face to the political prisoners, journalists, and dissidents who continue to be persecuted."
The chancellor Bruno Rodríguez described the report as a "slanderous pamphlet" and accused Rubio of fabricating pretexts to justify a military aggression against Cuba.
The amplification of the article by the Department of State is part of a policy of maximum pressure that includes over 240 sanctions since January 2025 and the national emergency declaration of January 30, 2026, which identified the Island as an unusual threat to national security.
Malliotakis concluded her column with a warning that the State Department chose to amplify to thousands of followers: "Those who escaped from Cuba and Venezuela did not come to America to recreate the systems they fled from. My mother's generation escaped communism in search of freedom. Our generation must ensure that this ideology never has the power to dismantle the freedoms we enjoy here."
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