OPINION:
One of the greatest myths in the Western Hemisphere is the nobility of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
For decades, the Cuban military dictatorship’s public relations machine has snowed the American left by projecting Che Guevara and the Castro brothers as heroes. In reality, the Castro regime betrayed the real freedom fighters who battled to end Fulgencio Batista’s iron rule, paraded innocents into lawless “revolutionary justice” stadium trials, and transformed a Caribbean paradise into an island-wide slave plantation.
Despite this cruelty, the left buys into Cuba’s false reality that the poverty-stricken island is a paradise of equality. To enhance this false image, pro-Cuba intermediaries invite well-positioned Americans to the island, where they are given controlled tours designed to persuade them to offer their help.
The organization responsible for this diabolical influence campaign is the Institute of Friendship Along With the Peoples, known as ICAP, a group sponsored by the Cuban Intelligence Directorate, or DGI, that targets leftist activists all over the Western Hemisphere.
In 1969, Cuba’s intelligence apparatus helped create the U.S.-based Venceremos Brigade, whose aim, according to a 1976 FBI report, “is the recruitment of individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. government, which would provide the Cuban government with access to political, economic and military intelligence.”
A 2019 online Cuban state press report boasts that the brigade has imported more than 10,000 Americans to the island since 1969.
A 1982 U.S. Senate report confirms that shortly after the Venceremos Brigade’s formation, “the DGI [Cuban intelligence] quickly began tasking VB members to collect public information on prominent Americans. … The DGI found telephone books to be an especially useful item, as the books could identify and verify the identity of high-interest personnel. VB members also provided considerable details on U.S. Congressional members, staff and their relatives.”
One of the organizations that openly associate with the New Mexico Venceremos Brigade Committee is the Pueblo Action Alliance, a leftist environmental coalition that has enlisted Somah Haaland, the daughter of U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, as its communications coordinator, according to the independent news platform ADN America.
Since her appointment, Deb Haaland has been the subject of several news articles for taking aim at natural resource drilling projects. Last year, the interior secretary appeared with her daughter in a documentary film, “Our Story: The Indigenous Led Fight to Protect Greater Chaco,” aimed at outlawing the development of oil and gas drilling leases near New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historic Park as a means of preserving Native American land and artifacts.
On Aug. 17, the secretary’s association with the Pueblo Action Alliance, or PAA, and the film became the subject of an ethics complaint filed with the Department of Interior Office of Inspector General by the government watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust. It accuses Deb Haaland of “apparent ethical breaches” and says that in June, the secretary “withdrew public lands from future fuel leases within the Greater Chaco area.”
It alleges that Deb Haaland’s daughter “is a prominent member of an activist organization that lobbied federal officials seeking to restrict oil and gas leasing in the area” and asks the department to determine if she compromised her impartiality by using her regulatory authority to implement the drilling ban.
On March 18, 2021, Deb Haaland’s first day on the job, the Pueblo Action Alliance shared a photograph on its Instagram account depicting the newly appointed secretary sitting at her desk with a black leather folder displaying the organization’s name across the front. Another photo depicting the secretary wearing a PAA T-shirt congratulates her on her confirmation, referring to the senior U.S. official affectionately as “Auntie Deb.”
Two years before Deb Haaland’s appointment, PAA Executive Director Julia Bernal — Somah Haaland’s boss — traveled with the Venceremos Brigade for a 50th anniversary visit to Cuba, where she and her fellow travelers were given a tour of the headquarters of the Institute of Friendship Along With the Peoples.
Once the brigade arrived in Cuba, state press reports and photos revealed that Ms. Bernal’s group was greeted by Fernando Gonzalez Llort. Mr. Gonzalez Llort, a former member of the notorious Cuban Wasp spy network, was convicted in 1998 by federal prosecutors of engaging in espionage-related activities in Miami.
In May 2020, Somah Haaland changed her Facebook profile to identify herself as media coordinator of the Pueblo Action Alliance. The following month, she shared a video of her now-boss, Ms. Bernal, and called upon young Americans to join.
“Want to go to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade?” a post on Somah Haaland’s Facebook page reads. The post also explains how her associates “never request permission from the U.S government to go to Cuba, and we never will!”
On Jan. 29, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board opined that the interior secretary’s “anti-permitting reform” has left mining projects in Alaska, Arizona, Minnesota and Nevada “stuck in permitting purgatory.” Six weeks later, on March 14, the independent Cuban news site 14ymedio reported that Deb Haaland’s decision to halt mining in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest has helped Cuba profit because it has compelled the U.S. to buy from Canadian companies that sell minerals extracted from land stolen by the Castro regime.
It is unknown if Deb Haaland is fully aware of her daughter’s group’s relationship with the brigade and its contacts with Cuban officials. Out of an abundance of caution, Interior Department security or the FBI should interview the secretary and brief her about the potential risks that may have been created by her association with the Pueblo Action Alliance and the fact it openly coalesces with the Venceremos Brigade, an organization with five decades of interaction with Cuba’s communist regime.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former Washington prosecutor and the former director of the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting (2017-2021). He now serves as a member of The Washington Times’ editorial board and as an adviser to ADN America.
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