American Thought Leaders - How Cuba Penetrated America’s Security Elite | John Suarez

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

🔥IMMERSED: Round closes July 30. Invest before the round closes. Learn more about Immersed here: https://ept.ms/44RDBfk“The Cuban regime has been very successful at portraying itself as harmless,” but in reality, Cuba’s intelligence service is “more formidable than the KGB,” says John Suarez, the executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.A new 100 page State Department report details the full scope of Cuba’s operations, penetrating all levels of the U.S. government, including the CIA and State Department.How did a country like Cuba become what the State Department describes as the “capital of 21st century communism?”Suarez says the regime’s long-term infiltration operations recruit agents early, especially via university exchanges.For instance, Ana Belén Montes spied for Cuba for 17 years as a senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, leaking critical information that compromised U.S. intelligence operations.In another case, a high-ranking U.S. diplomat, Victor Manuel Rocha, shaped American foreign policy for 40 years to benefit Havana until his arrest in 2023.The Chinese Communist Party is among Cuba’s top backers, installing infrastructure in Cuba to spy on U.S. communications.In this episode, we trace how this small island built a global intelligence network and how sympathizers in free societies help whitewash the regime.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Cuban embassy sent letters to all the members of parliament and to all the NGOs claiming I was a terrorist. John Suarez is the executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba. The Cuban regime has been very successful at betraying itself as harmless. It's a poor Caribbean island that poses no threat. And the reality is that that report demonstrates that Cuba's intelligence service is more formidable than the KGB. In this episode, he reveals how the Cuban regime has been working to subvert American democratic institutions, often from within the United States, for decades, and why it's been ignored for so long.

They've penetrated everywhere. Government, academia, business, and they're operating as we speak. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellogg. John Suarez, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for the invitation. So many people are learning for the first. time that the Cuban government had multiple proxies working on its behalf against America right here on the ground. Tell me what we know. Well, we noticed that they had a bad experience

on the Friday of after Thanksgiving in 1962 when Cuban diplomats tried to carry out a bombing campaign in several high-profile commercial establishments, Macy's being one of them, in New York City, and the FBI broke it up. It was hugely embarrassing. Number of diplomats were declared persona non-grata, and after that, the Cuban regime began using proxy terrorist groups. And one of the most notorious ones was La Forces Armed Forces of National Liberation Puerto Rican Terrorist Group, trained, funded, provided logistical support, and through the 1970s and 1980s carried out 130 bombings in the New York area. They caused the first evacuation of the Twin Towers. And on January 24th of 1975, they attacked a historic landmark called Francis Tavern.

This was a place that had been around since before the establishment of the United States government. In fact, George Washington bade farewells to his troops there in 1783. And on January 24th, 1975 at lunchtime, one of these terrorists went in, left a bomb. It went off. It killed four. They had great structural damage. The bomb maker of the group, Guillermo Morales, who was later captured, tried and sentenced, escaped from prison, made his way down to Mexico, got a shootout with federallies, and from there wound up in Cuba, where he's currently harbored today. The son of one of the four men killed, Frank Conner, his son Joe Connor, actually testified before Congress in December demanding the return of Guillermo Morales and to get justice for his father.

So this is an ongoing tragedy. So this new report that many people are telling me is the most comprehensive thing they've seen and kind of maybe not of just this country, but among other countries even. There's many things in there that you, of course, already knew about, but kind of give me a picture of what's in there and why is it so significant? I think it really demonstrates that Cuba punches above its weight. The Cuban regime has been very successful at betraying itself as harmless. It's a poor Caribbean island that poses no threat.

And the reality is that that report demonstrates that Cuba's intelligence service is more formidable than the KGB. They've had successes in penetrating all levels of the U.S. government. The Pentagon with Annabal N. Montez, the State Department with William Kendall Myers and his wife. There was a recent case of Manuel Rocha, who had been ambassador to Bolivia, who'd sat on the National Security Council. He'd been spying for Cuba for 40 years. Not mentioned in the report is a CIA defector, Phil Agi, back in the 70s, who defected to Cuba. And there are many other of those cases.

And what it reveals, and Chris Simmons, who was one of the counterintelligence agents, mentioned in the report, says explicitly that the Cuban intelligence. service is superior to that of the KGB. I don't even know. How is that measured? You know, because we always consider the KGB, or I guess now the FSB as being sort of, you know, potent, a very potent force. In what ways is it? In the ways that they were able to penetrate all aspects of the U.S. government, traffic, and information. They were doing it at times for the Soviet Union, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they began doing that work, but more in a selling to different adversaries

of the United States, and they got Americans killed. We know just the information Anabel and Montes was providing led to the death of scores of soldiers in Central America, including American soldiers. So she was, you know, actually very important in her role. She was a high-ranking analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the military counterpart to the CIA. She had knowledge of methods and materials of intelligence gathering that the director of the CIA did not have access to.

And she was working for the Cuban 17th. years. Mount Rush for over 40 years. And the way that the Cubans achieved this was by recruiting them when they were just students. So they get them early. So when you have these exchange programs with universities, that is a prime ground that the intelligence services used to identify and recruit agents. They would also find people that were ideologically sympathetic are through Vencinemos

brigades, where they would get Americans to go and cut cane in Cuba. And they would have those who come out that are agents. of influence, but within those agents of influencing positive things about the regime, they would also identify and recruit agents. It would be doing more serious work for their espionage capabilities, and they've penetrated everywhere, government, academia, business. We just saw MAGA Republican candidate for Congress in Rhode Island just a few weeks ago filed his paperwork to be an open agent of the Cuban dictatorship, saying that he had met with Raul Castro's grandson, and he's an agent of influence, but a legal one because he registered.

These others are illegals that were acting in a clandestine manner to spread the influence of the regime. I mean, I've been hearing, that's interesting, the case that you're describing of the registered agent. Isn't Cuba somehow trying to make nice with the U.S. government at the moment, given the realities? There's a double discourse. They are in dialogue with elements of the U.S. government.

We've been hearing the stories about El Cangrejo, Raul Castro's grandson, meeting with the U.S. counterparts. But inside of Cuba, repression has been skyrocketing. There are more political prisoners that there were. They're more political prisoners today than there were in January. And the rhetoric of the regime is quite hostile against Secretary Rubio, for example, and other elements of the government trying to play off the Secretary of State from the president. So they're playing their games to try to,

hang on to power. They really must not like that Secretary Rubio is of Cuban ancestry. They do not, because they know that Secretary Rubio has their number. And you can see it by the policies enacted by the administration. They've identified the new class, which has enriched itself under the Castro regime, that has offshore accounts through something called Gaessa, which is a military conglomerate that runs somewhere between 60 to 80 percent of the Cuban economy. And they're freezing assets, they're identifying regime elites living here in the United

States engaged in God knows what kind of activities in deporting them back to Cuba or detaining them, that one of the pilots had been involved in the hunt for Brothers to the Rescue pilots in February of 1996 that led to the death of three Americans and a U.S. resident. Well, that pilot was residing in Florida. He'd actually gotten in during the Biden administration. Well, he lied on his immigration application. They've prosecuted them. And he's also looking at murder conspiracy for the Brothers to the Rescue shoot down. How do you tell, for example, in your, I know your organization, of course, has been targeted by the Cuban regime for all sorts of reasons. But how can you tell if someone is, you know, a good faith, someone who's looking for freedom

and trying to get away from people, or someone coming to so chaos or, you know, so, chaos or worse? It's very difficult. Oftentimes you don't, you can't tell. What we try to do is look at the fruits that somebody produces. And it could be that they're an agent or that they're crazy, but you can see if they're sowing chaos and harm to distance yourself from them. But you don't know, because if they're very good operatives and they know that you're looking for that, they're going to be providing you with useful information to get to gain your trust until there's some, they get an order from Havana that they have to carry out something not so favorable and they do it and that's when you realize, ah, this is who this individual is. But oftentimes you don't know. I can tell you this.

I used to meet with members of the democracy movement Brothers to the Rescue and I did see some of the members of the WASP network and I had not a clue who they were at the time. Yeah, this is this is the challenge frankly with dealing with any that they did. You know, dissidents or people, even any variety of dissidents that are coming from regimes, because some portion of them are, of course, people who are here to do the opposite, kind of for the opposite reason. Well, in the report, they described how a Cuban defector, who was a high-ranking intelligence officer, appeared before the CIA, and then revealed that everybody they thought

was working for the CIA in Cuba was actually a double agent working for the Cuban government. And because the Cubans knew that the CIA was going to burn them, they went ahead preemptively and showed video of CIA agents meeting who they thought were their agents that they were supposedly handling. And no, they were being monitored by the Cuban intelligence service. So they were able to fool the CIA in a systematic global fashion inside of Cuba. So someone who's an amateur, I'm just a human rights activist, not an intelligence specialist. I recognize the limitations there. But I'm sure you've been accused of being on the CIA's payroll and stuff, right? Yes.

It seems to be like kind of part of the course, right? Anybody who is serious about countering a regime. Well, once I was accused in Geneva of that, I immediately denounced it. I had a colleague who didn't take it so seriously, and she was a Slovakian. And I warned her, you need to say you're not and denounce it as, and she didn't do it. And then when she tried to go back to the UN a few years later, you need to get credentials from NGOs to be able to enter the building. And the organization that had sponsored her, because of that controversy, refused to allow her to get a credential, even though she wasn't CIA, just from the slander. So this just works even in the official setting.

It's not just for, you know, to kind of pump up the detractors. But I can tell you, the other thing they tried to do to me, because I was visiting Norway and I was lobbying for the release of political prisoners. and they sent, the Cuban embassy, sent letters to all the members of parliament and to all the NGOs claiming I was a terrorist. So I had news crews coming in asking me if I was a terrorist. Now, at the time, they were saying that I was hanging out in South Africa when I was about 12 years old and working for the apartheid regime, which was obviously a lie. So I was able to denounce that and deny it quickly and show that the charge was ridiculous. But on top of that, I had by just pure happenstance, I'd met with,

the sister of a Danish student who had been murdered by a Cuban soldier while studying Spanish in Cuba, Jacques-Lavchal. So this young Dane, the official version of the Cuban government was that he crossed to the wrong sidewalk in a security zone that wasn't, there were no signs, there were no warnings. And the warning was to be shot at overhead with an AK-47. and that unfortunately the soldiers AK-47 jammed, and that's why they cut him in half. That was the official story.

But they never identified the soldier, and there was never any formal inquest. The father went over there to try to find something out. They couldn't. So when I was approached and asked if I was a terrorist, I shut that down quickly, and then I said, you might want to ask the ambassador. I just met with the sister of this young man, Trachim Lovshal, if they'll identify the soldier who shot and killed him, which they still haven't done. And this was 1997 when it took place.

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and what it is exactly you do today. What happened to me was I wanted to be a biologist. I ended up working in a lab for a number of years, and I would go to staff meetings. And one year, we had some folks come in to explain to us that the scientific method, logical reasoning and mathematics were racist and patriarchal. And that got me into conservative activism. And a couple years went by, and then Morton Blackwell, the Leadership Institute approached me to work as a youth coordinator in Nebraska, in a congressional race. And when I was out there, I ran into Cuban diplomats lobbying in the Midwest, which shocked

me at the time. And I went back in 1994, this time to Iowa. And then I ran into Lady Sandra Levinson with the Institute of Cuban Studies out of New York, personal friend of Fidel Castro, who was taking young Americans to cut cane in Cuba from the 60s. And in the 90s, when this took place, was still taking, young Americans to be brainwashed in Cuba. And this was just after the August 5th, 1994 uprising. And she was portraying that things were perfect in Cuba, that there were no political

prisoners, that the only problem was the U.S. economic sanctions. And I was horrified by that. And that got me thinking, we need to have an English-speaking anti-Castro voice. And that's where I got active with other students. We set up something called the Free Cuba Foundation. And And then a couple years later, I ended up at new college, which was a very left-wing school at the time. And I ran into Frank Calzone, who was the head of the center for a free Cuba. And I debated some communists. Things went well in the debate. And then Frank, we developed a relationship.

And then a couple years later, I went to work for him as a program officer. And then when he retired in 2019, I was at Freedom House and their Latin America programs. And the board of directors of the center approached me to take a lot of time. approach me to take over as executive director, which is what I am currently. So what do you do? What do I do? And your organization. The organization established in 1997 seeks a democratic, nonviolent transition to democracy

and the rule of law in Cuba. What we do is we take part in the U.S. Cuba policy debate, also the European Cuba policy debate. We reach out to the diplomatic community. So we also talk Latin America, Canada. We also help victims of repression, getting humanitarian assistance to the families of political prisoners in the island. We take victims of repression to speak. We've taken folks like Sirlea Villalé, a woman who, for speaking up, was attacked with a machete, lost a hand, lost use of her knees.

We had her speak at the UN Human Rights Council. She also was able to visit with the president in the White House. We've also done things at the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights and occasionally get op-eds published in major publications, most recently regarding the indictment of Rao Castro, I had a piece published in the Wall Street Journal. Well, so let's talk about that. What happened in Venezuela, the U.S. operation in Venezuela,

and then this indictment and so forth, are described by some people as a kind of U.S. overreach, right? How do you respond to that? Well, I think not too many talk about the Cuban overreach, where Cuba has been involved in undermining democracies. And Venezuela had had a decades-long democracy. They attempted and failed repeatedly to send guerrillas and armed groups to overthrow the Venezuelan government in the 1960s. And then they found a different vector using Hugo Chavez in the 1990s. and then a spy, which they had recruited and developed from a very young age, which was Nicholas Maduro.

And we found that when the U.S. went in that police action to take Mr. Maduro, who was under indictment, that his Praetorian guard were not Venezuelans. There were Cubans. 32 of them officially killed in the engagement with U.S. forces. So Cuba has been punching above its weight for this being this small country. Not only in the Americas, there's a, there's a, there's. is a book from the Naval Annapolis Press that has a chapter called the Zoo Program that runs from 1967 to 69, where Cubans traveled to Vietnam to torture American POWs under the custody of the North Vietnamese. Cubans were also involved in supporting Haleimingitsu in Ethiopia,

a war criminal who engaged in genocide against his own people. Well, Cuban troops were assisting in destroying, killing cattle, poisoning wells of water, so people would die in large scale and also took part in something called the Red Terror in the early 80s. The Cubans were also involved in Paris when Carlos the Jackal was murdering French people in terror actions in hiding. Cuban diplomats were visiting his hideout, and it was spotted by French intelligence, and three Cuban diplomats were declared persona non-gratialists. and kicked out of France.

So they've been doing a lot. And so something I keep thinking about, right, these Cuban intelligence were really originally trained by the Soviets, right, by the KGB and then became like the special forces or something? Not just the KGB. They were trained by the KGB, the East German Stasi, and the Czechoslovak STB. So the East Germans had the reputation of being the best of the best.

So the Cubans had the KGB, the East Germans, and the STB, and their own native ability. We must recall that in the Cuban War of Independence and the 1890s, the Cubans were involved in engineering the assassination of a Spanish prime minister by an anarchist. And the interesting part of it was the anarchist initially wanted to assassinate the royal family. And the Cuban independence fighters convinced them that that was a waste of time because they were figureheads. and encourage them to go after the prime minister. Why? Because the prime minister was the supporter behind the scenes of a general that was putting Cubans into concentration camps during the War of Independence.

And when that prime minister was assassinated, that general was reassigned. So the Cubans have a good ability at conspiracy. And then you add that with the East German Stasi, the KGB and the Czechoslovak STV and they punch way above their weight. And American intelligence services have described them. Chris Simmons, counterintelligence guy who caught Annable and Monta said that they are better than the KGB as an intelligence service. And so given the level of activity, and again, sort of exposed in this report or documented or compiled in this new State Department report that reflects in your mind that this isn't by any means overreach,

this is a fair police action and so forth. Like, just explain to me what the charges are against him. The, the problem is that to go into the Solis cartel and the drug trafficking out of Venezuela, we should go back to the origins of drug trafficking in the Americas. In 1961, one of the instructions, and there's a book called Red Cocaine, from the 1980s that goes into this.

There was a Czechoslovak STB agent, high-ranking official that was meeting regularly with Raul Castro in the early 60s. And they had been tasked by the Soviet Union to improve the capacity and grow the drug trafficking networks in Latin America. And they were doing that throughout the 1960s. In the 1980s, there's a documentary

from PBS, WGBH Frontline, which you can find the transcript of online called Cuban cocaine, which demonstrates again how the intelligence, the Cuban intelligence service was facilitating drug trafficking, how drug traffickers would land their planes in Cuba, be fed, vetted, and then fly out to go to the United States. They had images of the U.S. Coast Guard being blocked by the Cuban Coast Guard, protecting speedboats filled with cocaine, heading to the United States.

Now, when in 1989, Manuel Noriega is captured for his involvement in drug trafficking, Fidel Castro and Raul Castro both get very nervous. Raul Castro actually had an indictment back then sitting with a prosecutor that was shelved during the Clinton administration for his role in drug trafficking. And Carlos later, major drug dealer, describes how when there was a conflict between Manuel Norega in some of the cartels, the mediator to make peace was Fidel Castro. So by the time you get to 1989 in Manoiorega, he does a purge of the military, he finds some scapegoats and people that could identify him directly with the drug traffickers.

They're executed, and they claim that they've stepped away from drug trafficking. Well, when Hugo Chavez comes on the scene, the Solis cartel is named after the insignia on General's uniforms in Venezuela. They were involved in low-level trafficking of drugs. While the Cubans get involved and they help improve their capacity and grow it geometrically. And they become a major source of cocaine into the United States and also Europe. And that's the Solis cartel. And that's being run by Cubans, but also Nicolas Maduro.

So Nicholas Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan officials were indicted for their role in trafficking of cocaine through this instrument called the Solis cartel. And Raul Castro? Raul Castro was indicted for his role in the Brothers to the Rescue shootout of 1996. And we'll see if they want to go back and revisit that chapter in terms of the drug trafficking. What do you think should happen next? Clearly, the U.S. has some intent in changing the status quo in the Americas. We've seen it already, obviously.

As we discussed a few months ago, the United States has said the Trump administration has said quite explicitly. They're not going to tolerate the status quo. Their negotiations with Mr. Maduro did not go well. So Mr. Maduro is now in the U.S. District of Southern New York. They're also putting pressure on Nicaragua. But what seems, at least in this hemisphere, there has been a full court press with Cuba. And they're negotiating with Raul Castro's grandson, who isn't the intellectual heavyweight. It's probably his uncle, which is Alejandro Castro Espine, which is a brigadier general,

son of Raul Castro, who was the negotiator for Cuba or for Havana during the Obama administration. He was the counterpart to Ben Rhodes. He was also the person who accompanied Raul Castro on visits to Moscow to meet Mr. Putin. We also haven't mentioned, and I think it's important to point out, that currently since 22, there have been over 25,000 Cubans fighting in Ukraine, including Cuban Special Forces, La Vespas Negeras. And Miguel Diascanel met with Vladimir Putin, wishing success in his military operation against Ukraine. So we have all these pieces, and the Trump administration is saying, we're not going to tolerate this anymore. You cannot be engaged with American adversaries 90 miles away from our shores, and they're pushing

for change on the political and economic front. The regime has responded with 176 measures, but the fundamental change has not been made, which would be an independent judiciary and rule of law, which would actually spark investment in Cuba. and secondly, a democratic opening, which would necessitate three things. Release of all political prisoners, setting the date for free and fair elections, and restoring basic civil liberties. You could have a free press again inside of the island,

something we haven't had since 1960. So would you say this is the best shot in a very long time right now? Yes. I think it's probably the best shot since 2002. And in 2002, there was a citizen-led initiative by Cubans called the Borrella Project, which attained eventually over 30,000 signatures calling for change, using existing laws within the system. And that was quashed by Fidel Castro,

who basically ignored the law on their books and changed the Cuban constitution to make it unreformable. So it would always be a communist regime, according to statute. And then the organizers of the petition drive were jailed. And then on July 22nd of 2012, the head of the movement, Osvaldo Payaa and his youth leader, Harold Sepeta, were murdered by Cuban state security. So the citizen-led effort was put down, and it was put down in part because you had the United States at that point during the Obama administration, demonstrating that they were willing to legitimize and engage with the dictatorship. And there were no serious consequences for the murder of opposition leaders.

And there was also a reduction in support for the Democrats while they were encouraging investment in the private sector in Cuba, which means the sons and daughters of the new class and Gaessa. So what you saw during the Obama thought was an empowering of the Cuban military. in the economic sector. And what we're seeing with this current administration is that they're going after that military conglomerate, they're sanctioning elites, they're identifying them when they're in the U.S. and other places.

They're trying to freeze bank accounts and pursue accountability with the indictment of Rao Castro and others involved in the murder of American citizens. And also what they're doing in Venezuela when they went after Nicolas Maduro obviously impacted the Cubans as well. As I already mentioned, the 32 killed. But the Cubans were also involved in getting resources from the drug trafficking, which that has been collapsed also by the actions of this administration. What about the protests of a few years back?

How did that connect with, was that, was that an, that wasn't as big an opportunity in your view? Because it wasn't structured. It was a spontaneous cry of despair. the island. What happened, it was a mistake made by the security apparatus, a rare mistake, which was protests broke out in San Antonio Los Banos just outside of Havana, and they didn't shut down the internet in the country. The internet stayed running, and everybody across the country was able to find out protests were taking place, and they got inspired. Why was the kindling such that people wanted to take out to the streets knowing what the consequences would be?

Well, the Cuban dictatorship had decided that they wanted to pitch their image as a medical superpower, and they were going to produce their own vaccines. They called it Abdallah, Sovereano, homegrown vaccines. So December of 2020, vaccine starts to circulate in the rest of Latin America, from Russia, China, U.S., etc. And Cuba does not allow any of that vaccine into its country because it wants to do. say it's going to inoculate Cubans with Cuban vaccines. So January goes by, February, March, April, the Cuban government does not document deaths in Cuba, but the Cubans are burying relatives in mass graves and listening to this happy talk in the official propaganda channels.

And by the time the vaccines come out in June, July, they're ineffectual, and they're bearing large numbers of people. And that was, I think, a determining fact in what caused that explosion of anger and demand for freedom and regime change in July of 2021. That's fascinating. And then what's interesting in August, a month after those massive protests, is when the Chinese COVID vaccine arrives in Cuba. So mentioning the Cuban medical system, we've been hearing for years how high quality, in Canada at least, right? And maybe in the U.S., although I haven't heard it as much, that the Cuban system is just fantastic.

And, you know, but in fact, people do go to Cuba for medical care. So it's not entirely untrue. And so what is the reality of the medical system in Cuba? The reality is that prior to the revolution, the Cuban system was an excellent medical system in Cuba. Cuba, widely available to most Cubans. And you had some premier doctors. In fact, growing up in Miami, many of them were exiled.

One of them that was known as the Chino Castellanos, Dr. Castellanos was a pioneering cardiac surgeon, angioplasty searching the arteries and veins with x-ray. He pioneered that in the 1930s. He was actually nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And there were multiple nominations for the Nobel Prize in Medicine pre-Castro. There have been no nominations for Nobel Prizes in Medicine under the Castro regime. So the doctors aren't of the same quality as what there was before. The system has been politicized.

So the doctors are revolutionaries first and doctors second. So there have been instances where dis and dis-endarmes. have died under suspicious circumstances. And also, there's a two-tiered system. The average Cuban, especially post-1990, doesn't have access to decent health care. You have to be part of the regime elite or a tourist from abroad.

One of the doctors that had hung around that was very good, she ended up having to defect to Argentina because she was protesting this two-tiered system. and it exists to the present day. And you'll see images of these very substandard, filthy hospital facilities where Cubans only go if they're really in bad shape because it's not very hygienic and you have to bring everything.

The towels, the blankets, the pillows, and you have to be able to take food and you have to be able to slip the doctor something because it's not free. In theory, it's free. But in practice, if you want to get care, you've got to pay them something because the doctors aren't making enough money

to survive on their own from the government salaries. How does Cuba fund itself? You have the remittances from the diaspora abroad, which the military is able to take a good chunk. You have drug trafficking. I just want to expound on that just for a moment. Okay, so basically the people that have escaped Cuba, right? To help their families, they're sending money back

in the regime, is able to take a chunk out of that. Right. So in a way, they kind of tolerated because they, that's part of their, and usually that's a significant part of their revenue stream, you're saying. Yes. Yeah. Prior to the Soviet Union collapsing, it was verboten up until 1980, from 1959 to 1980, it was looked on very negatively for you to have contact with your family abroad.

If you did, you could be subject to an act of repudiation. Yeah. If you were a child and you were trying to talk to a grandparent or something living abroad, they would take you out. and just have people screaming at you and probably mark against you as being not ideologically conforming. And that could also impact your ability

to get into higher education. So after the economic crisis, they used to call the diaspora worms. And then the saying in Cuba was the worms became butterflies. And then they would say, in Cuba, they would do a play on the word faith. In Spanish, it's faith.

F-E, which means you have to have faith to survive in Cuba. And then they say F-E, family and the exterior to be able to get the remittances to survive. Fascinating. Okay, so part of it is these remittances. What else? The other part of it is, has been the Russians and sunk $32 billion and the Chinese put in billions. Currently, one of the main sources of funding is the European Union in Spain. There was a report that came out just a couple weeks ago demonstrating that Spain has sunk in over the last 10 years, over $2.5 billion into the Cuban regime.

And they've forgiven much of the debts accrued, as have the Russians and the Chinese and the Paris group. So that's another major source of funding. And then the other thing that they've been doing with investors who come in building hotels and they've been siphoning money from that and from tour. But that's collapsed over the last five years thanks to the pandemic. So they've been having a tougher time of things. How is the Chinese Communist Party connected with them? The Chinese Communist Party, the first, there are two phases. The first phase was between 1959 and 1966.

In fact, Chinese dissident wrote an essay for me a few years back, describing how when they had the great leap forward when millions of Chinese were starving to death because of Mao's policies, Mao was shipping rice to Cuba at a time when Cuba didn't need the rice. But it was trying to compete with the Russians as to who was the greater communist power with more influence. But by 1966, Russia was demonstrating they could provide more to the Cubans and the Chinese. So Fidel Castro kicked them to the curb insulting them. shortly after the Tri-Continental.

There was a conference in 1966, which I mentioned where they gathered all the terrorists and guerrilla groups together to spring up at Terrorist International. There was a large delegation of Russians, but also a large delegation of Chinese officials there. And this was in Havana in January of 1966, so literally 60 years ago this year.

So the relationship cools. And then when Mikhail Gorbachev comes around with perestroika and glassnosed, Fidel Castro views that as a threat, begins purging the military of elements contaminated by those ideas, starts censoring Soviet materials. And then when Tiananmen Square happens, and China's relations temporarily cool with the United States,

he reaches out to Beijing. He supports the Tiananmen Square massacre. And then there are the visits where Fidel Castro goes to China, Raul Castro goes to China. There's pictures of Fidel Castro on the Great Wall. and then those visits are reciprocated with high-ranking Chinese officials. And in 1992, one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Chinese spies arrive in Cuba to work in facilities to do signals, intelligence, and spy on the United States. And that has continued to the present day.

And a couple of years ago, there was evidence that those bases were updated and expanded, and they're operating as we speak. something that really struck me recently was this speech that Secretary Rubio gave about far left extremism. And he did make connections to Cuba in that speech. How did that speech grab you? And number two, what connections are there today? Well, I can say firsthand, the Land American Studies Association, Lhasa Conference. I went years ago. but I was asked by at that point Frank Halsone to do it, and we went in, and there was a contingent of Cuban intelligence officers and far leftist, and we were handing out anti-Castro material and supporting at that time Ambassador Otto Reich, he was up for a position and the George W. Bush administration, and you could see the reaction from these hardcore leftists. Some of them were left-wingers from the academy, but others were from Havana, and obviously were.

Cuban intelligence officials. And this was at an academic conference here in the United States. So they've been working very close together for decades, and that hasn't declined. Now, the way they do it, some of them do it illegally through clandestine agents. And we saw the WASP network that was broken up in 1998. A number of those people were then pardoned in 20, not pardoned. They had their sentences commuted in 2017 and return to Cuba to a hero's welcome. And there are others that do it openly, but they do it openly by registering as agents, going through all the requirements to be able to send,

to travel to the island on academic exchanges, but to do an academic exchange with Cuba, you have to go along with the Cuban government, otherwise they're not going to allow you in. So you can do it legally, You can legally be an agent of influence for the regime and advocate for extremist positions. There's a First Amendment. There are civil liberties here.

And you can advocate for, you know, for a radical change of government. You have the Democratic Socialist of America that openly espouse support for the model. I mean, Bernie Sanders, for God's sakes, went on a honeymoon to the Soviet Union and met with Daniel Ortega and was praising China when he was in the Democratic primary. I don't know if you recall this. He actually came out and said that communist China was the greatest example of a state that lifted the most people out of poverty without mentioning the tens of millions

murdered by Mao. Well, starved by Mao, and then millions also executed by Mao with the cultural revolution. Right. It's just that's a pet peeve of mind that people don't tend to. There is a technical truth about the lifting of the millions,

but after driving people to start masturbation and cannibalism and so forth. And also the question is, how much of that uplift was due to U.S. policies underwriting, subsidizing communist China and shifting the industrial base of the United States for cheap labor to Beijing, which I don't think served U.S. interests,

and it did not lead to a liberalization of China. What it led to was a more perfect modern totalitarianism, which now threatens democracies across the world. Last question. Your reaction to Secretary Rubio's speech about communism writ large and the threat of left-wing extremism. I mean, I think it's a fair assessment that there is a threat from left-wing. There's a threat from left-wing extremism. We see it with the Democrat-Socelists of America. We see it with Hassan Piker, who just came out praising Mao on his spring. It's not a secret. They're very transparent about their position. But I'd say they're also right-wing extremists. as well. And we have people now, you know, resurrecting Hitler and trying to, I mean, Kanye West, for God's sakes, add a song and a video to it. So there is this polarization extremes that are embracing totalitarianism, and we need to find a way to embrace the Democratic center and reject

those extremists, be they Nazis or be they communist. Well, John Suarez, such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. Thank you all for joining John Suarez and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellick.