Today’s sanctions expose another dangerous arm of Cuba’s communist dictatorship: the organizations and individuals used to spread communist ideology, cultivate foreign sympathizers, conduct subversive activities, and advance the interests of a hostile government beyond the island.
The designation of three leaders of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, including its president Fernando González Llort, makes clear what organizations like ICAP truly represent. González Llort is not simply an official of Cuba’s communist dictatorship. He was convicted for his participation in the Wasp Network, the Cuban intelligence operation that infiltrated the United States and targeted South Florida. His leadership of ICAP demonstrates the connection between Cuba’s communist dictatorship’s intelligence apparatus and the so-called cultural and educational networks it uses abroad.
The identification of ICAP facilities used to host international brigades also sends an important message: Cuba’s communist dictatorship cannot hide political indoctrination and subversive activity behind the language of friendship, cultural exchange, or international solidarity while denying the Cuban people the very freedoms it seeks to exploit in democratic countries.
The additional designation of nine entities, including Cuba’s Ministry of Construction, further exposes the economic machinery that sustains Cuba’s communist dictatorship. These government institutions and state-controlled entities do not exist to create prosperity for the Cuban people. They help finance and preserve a communist system that has maintained power through censorship, surveillance, political imprisonment, and repression for more than six decades.
I commend President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for confronting both sides of Cuba’s communist dictatorship: the networks it uses to advance its interests abroad and the economic structures it uses to finance repression at home.
South Florida understands this threat better than most. Our community has experienced the consequences of espionage conducted by Cuba’s communist dictatorship on American soil and has welcomed generations of Cubans who escaped the same communist system it continues attempting to promote abroad. The United States should never allow the freedoms of an open society to be exploited by Cuba’s communist dictatorship when those same freedoms are denied to the Cuban people.
These sanctions are not directed against the Cuban people. They are directed against the individuals, institutions, and networks that sustain Cuba’s communist dictatorship and keep the Cuban people oppressed. The objective must remain clear: protect the United States from hostile foreign influence, hold Cuba’s communist dictatorship and its operatives accountable, free Cuba’s political prisoners, and support a future in which the Cuban people can live under democracy, economic liberty, and the rule of law.
Dariel Fernandez
Tax Collector
Miami-Dade County
