The communist Castro dictatorship is engaged in targeted campaigns in Florida to affect local and state races in Florida, according to U.S. intelligence. This is nothing new for the regime in Havana, which has a long history of trying to get rid of elected officials who confront them and elect candidates who support them.
Nora Gamez Torres and Michael Wilner report via Yahoo News:
Cuba will attempt to influence 2024 elections in Florida, U.S. intelligence warns
The U.S. intelligence community believes the Cuban government will attempt to influence U.S. elections in 2024, possibly deploying targeted campaigns to affect state and local races in Florida, officials with the Office of Director of National Intelligence said.
The assessment comes after the director’s office assessed last year that Havana attempted to affect midterm elections in Florida in 2022.
“We’ve seen interest in down ballot races,” one of the intelligence officials said. “On Cuba, we very much expect that the same kind of activity will occur.”
The intelligence community had found that, in 2022, Cuba conducted influence operations in the United States “aimed at denigrating specific U.S. candidates in Florida.”
After the assessment became public in December last year, U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez said he believed he and fellow Miami Republicans Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar and Mario Diaz-Balart had been targeted, though he said he had not been told that directly by U.S. intelligence officials.
Cuban officials worked to build relationships with members of the U.S. media who held critical views of Havana’s critics in Congress, a U.S. intelligence report found, and that a network of social media accounts “almost certainly covertly tied” to Cuba “amplified derogatory content” on U.S. politicians viewed as hostile to the Cuban state.
Cuba’s efforts are of concern, even though they are at a smaller scale than the attempted influence campaigns of Washington’s major adversaries in Russia, China and Iran, the officials said.
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What a great way to get your ideal elected officials NOT elected. I think Miamians, most of them, will see an endorsement from the regime and run to vote for the guy that they didn’t endorse.
Cuba is a hellhole. If I saw a candidate recommended by that regime, I’d run to vote for the guy who’s opposing the recommended person.