The United States Intelligence Community believes that the Cuban regime will try to influence the elections 2024 in that country, probably through the deployment of selective campaigns to affect state and local elections in Floridasaid officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, quoted by the Miami Herald.
The assessment comes after the office assessed, last year, that Havana tried to influence that state’s midterm elections in 2022.
According to the officials cited by the American media, in 2022, The Cuban regime carried out influence operations in the United States “aimed at denigrating specific candidates in Florida.”
After the evaluation of the 2022 elections was made public in December 2023, Republican congressman Carlos Giménez said he believed that he and his colleagues María Elvira Salazar and Mario Díaz-Balart had been targets of those operationsalthough he stated that he had not been informed of this directly by intelligence officials.
An intelligence report cited by the Miami Herald pointed out that Cuban officials worked to establish relations with US media opposed to criticism of Havana in Congress. In addition, a network of social media accounts that were “almost certainly secretly connected” to the Cuban Government “amplified pejorative content” about politicians considered hostile to the regime.
For intelligence officials, The efforts of the Cuban regime to influence the elections are worryingeven though they are smaller in scale than attempts by larger adversaries in Russia, China and Iran.
Last year, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it had taken down hundreds of fake accounts related to the Cuban Government and its institutions, which published propaganda content on Facebook and Instagram and attacked critics on the Island and in the United States, recalled the Miami Herald.
The Cuban regime also has in the US spokespersons like activist Carlos Lazowho makes propaganda in their favor under the pretext of defending families and amplifies the discourse that blames the US embargo for the shortage of food, medicine and basic products of all kinds that hits the population.
Among the media that defend Havana’s interests in that country is Radio Miami Today, which at the beginning of June signed an agreement with the state agency Prensa Latina.
That medium, which is defined as “the Voice of the Cuban Patriotic Emigration”, has admitted having guaranteed from its beginnings that Prensa Latina had a news space in Miami, a city in the state of Florida, in whose elections the regime would try to influence, according to officials of the US Intelligence Community. Its director is Max Lesnik, friend of the late dictator Fidel Castro and creator of the slogan “Cuba yes, Yankees no.”
Havana has also had, and probably still has, spies in the United States for a long time. In April, former American diplomat of Colombian origin Víctor Rocha was sentenced to 15 years in prison for acting as undercover agent of the Cuban regime for four decades.
