Outraged Lawmakers Protest Biden Plan to Give Cuba Access to ‘Sensitive National Security Facilities’

Republican Senator from Florida Marco Rubio speaks during a rally in support of Republican
AP Photo/Gaston De Cardenas
Frances Martel

Republicans in Congress demanded answers on Monday after Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) revealed that the administration of far-left President Joe Biden has agreed to allow a delegation from Cuba, an adversarial communist regime and a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism, to tour American Coast Guard facilities.

According to Rubio, who called the agreement “unconscionable” and “reprehensible” in a letter sent to Biden on Friday, the Department of Homeland Security, under Alejandro Mayorkas, and Department of State, under Antony Blinken, agreed to allow Cuban regime agents to visit the headquarters of the U.S. Coast Guard and port facilities in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The visits are scheduled to take place this week, when the Cuban-American community is observing the 27th anniversary of the murder of four Americans – Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales – by the Castro regime. The men, members of a refugee aid group known as Brothers to the Rescue, were flying in international waters looking for wayward Cuban balseros, or rafters, when Cuban forces shot them out of the sky. Five American presidents later, the Cuban Communist Party has faced no punishment or retribution for the killings.

The one person convicted of aiding the killings, a Cuban spy active in the United States named Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, given two life sentences for his role in providing the intelligence necessary to kill the Brothers to the Rescue volunteers, was freed by President Barack Obama in 2014 and returned to a hero’s welcome in Havana. Prior to his release, the Obama administration, under which Biden served as vice president, engaged in a bizarre diplomatic effort to transport Hernández’s sperm to Cuba to inseminate his wife and allow him to become a father.

Rubio explained in his letter to Biden:

Not only is the regime’s Border Guard subordinate to Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior, which is on the list of Restricted Entities and Subentities Associated with Cuba, but there is also a high likelihood that the delegation will include members of Cuba’s intelligence agencies. This is reprehensible and sends a terrible message to Americans and the world. I demand that you immediately cancel this visit and provide a clear explanation for why you are sharing our nation’s security protocols with one of our nation’s oldest foreign adversaries.

“Extending an invitation to Cuban intelligence operatives into sensitive national security facilities in order to share with them our nation’s coastal and maritime security protocols is an egregious dereliction of duty,” Rubio wrote to the president last week, “that betrays one of the most fundamental tenets of the oath you have sworn, to protect America from foreign enemies. You must cancel this visit immediately, and explain to the American people how this was allowed to happen on your watch.”

Following the publication of Rubio’s letter, on Monday, four Republican Congresspersons – Reps. Mark Green (R-TN), Michael McCaul (R-TX), Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), and Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) – addressed a letter to Mayorkas demanding answers regarding how his department coordinated with the Cuban government to allow a rogue communist state access to the facilities listed.

“During the week of February 27, a Cuban delegation consisting of officials from Cuba’s Border Guard and Ministry of Foreign Affairs is expected to visit the United States to meet with the U.S. Coast Guard and tour U.S. port facilities,” the letter read. “We are deeply concerned about the U.S. national security implications of allowing government officials with a known adversarial foreign intelligence service to access sensitive U.S. Federal Government facilities.”

“Not only is Cuba still a U.S. designated State Sponsor of Terrorism along with North Korea, Iran, and Syria, but Cuba remains a chief counterintelligence threat,” the lawmakers asserted. “The U.S. Director of National Intelligence consistently identifies Cuba as a core and continuing counterintelligence mission, similar to Iran and North Korea.”

The Congresspersons demanded Mayorkas clarify if the Biden administration conducted appropriate background checks on the Cuban regime agents visiting the sensitive sites, offer documentation on who the individuals are, and identify who was in charge of organizing the event.

The lawmakers also asked, “Since January 20, 2021, have any other officials from a country designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism visited U.S. Federal Government facilities within the interior of the United States under the International Port Security Program?”

The lawmakers condemned the operation more explicitly on their social media accounts.

“I fully condemn [Mayorkas’] invitation for agents of the murderous Castro regime to tour national security facilities across America!” Gimenez wrote.

Salazar noted that Cuba’s Border Guard, the agency participating in the visit, has been implicated in multiple human rights atrocities, recalling the most recent mass murder: the killing of of eight Cubans attempting to flee at sea in Bahía Honda, outside of Havana. The Cuban Border Guard “collided” into their makeshift maritime vessel, sinking it and killing eight people.

“Border Guard troops also repress. Who sunk the vessel at Bahía Honda?” Salazar asked. “How embarrassing!”

The Castro regime deliberately drowning would-be refugees is a decades-old, ongoing human rights atrocity. Perhaps the most egregious of these incidents is the March 13 Tugboat Massacre in 1994. On that occasion, Cuban regime agents used hoses to sink a tugboat attempting to reach the United States, drowning 41 civilians. Among the victims were 11 children. The youngest, Hellen Martínez Enríquez, was five months old.

The Biden administration has not made any public statements on the Cuban agent visit to Coast Guard facilities at press time. In response to the letter published by Rubio last week, the State Department told the Miami Herald, “We have nothing to confirm at this time.”

The Castro regime has also not publicly commented on the matter. In an article published on Monday regarding the return of Cuban refugees to the island, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, Granma, asserted, “Cuban authorities have reiterated their commitment to regular, secure, and orderly migration and insist on the danger and risk conditions to life that illegal exits by sea, and the irresponsible involvement of migrants in these acts, represent.”

Cuba heavily regulates who is allowed to enter and exit the island, severely limiting the rights of many anti-communist dissidents. In recent years, Havana has also taken to expatriation – the forced removal of Cuban dissidents from the island – to erase the influence of prominent anti-communists.

The White House has not articulated any defined foreign policy regarding Cuba, despite Biden being past the halfway point of his presidential term. Biden has left most of the policies of President Donald Trump in place, including maintaining Cuba’s status on the state sponsors of terrorism list due to its ties to Hezbollah, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and other terror groups.

To the extent that the Biden administration has expressed any interest in Cuba, it has been in attempts to prevent Cubans – who predominantly vote Republican when becoming citizens – from arriving to America by sea. The number of Cuban refugees attempting to enter the United States has skyrocketed since the July 11, 2021, nationwide protests against communism. While the Biden administration has done little to stem the flow of migrants from the southern border – most of whom have to pay exorbitant fees to cartel-linked human traffickers to make the journey – the Coast Guard has emphasized the apprehension and return of Cuban refugees to the island by sea.

Under Mayorkas, the Biden administration has begun detaining apprehended Cuban refugees at the American military facility in Guantánamo Bay, previously used to house suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.

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