Free Republic

Cubans across the island nation banged pots and pans in a mass protest event against the regime on Friday and Saturday nights, demanding an end to the communist regime as the nation’s elites prepared to celebrate the anniversary of Fidel Castro’s first large-scale terrorist attack. July 26 marks the anniversary of the 1953 attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba by a terrorist cell organized by Fidel Castro, at the time an unpopular law student attempting to elevate his political profile. The attack killed 54 people and was, at the time, a massive failure for Castro’s movement,...

Amid Cuba’s months-long fuel and electricity crisis, one of the island’s most iconic exports is feeling the pinch: cigars. Retailers say the industry is facing one of the worst supply squeeze in history as blackouts, fuel shortages and shipping disruptions make it nearly impossible to produce luxury cigars and get them off the island in the temperature controlled conditions they require. “I’ve been telling clients, ‘Listen, it’s been months since I can get them,’” said Manu Harit, a London-based cigar specialist whose business is almost entirely built on Cuban cigars. Over the last year, he said, orders have been filled...

It’s notoriously difficult to prove vote fraud. But there are some huge red flags here. In President Trump’s prime time address on July 16, he revealed newly declassified evidence that (Mainland) China had spent a mint to acquire considerable election data for the 2020 election, including the full personal data sets on 220 million eligible and/or registered American voters. As many reporters point out, we don’t yet have all the data to tie up in a neat little bow proving how this data was used to commit vote fraud. That would require other, very different types of information. It’s notoriously...

Dear America, from an immigrant Cuban tastes freedom for the first time in his life

**SNIP** Now another person with close ties to Swalwell appears to be using his campaign account like a personal slush fund. That's Adam Gray, who was co-chair of Swalwell's failed gubernatorial campaign. Gray, who was once a member of the California Assembly, had a reputation in the state legislature for taking charter flights and staying at luxury resorts. When he was elected to Congress, he reportedly kept living large, running up campaign expenses for limousine services, Uber rides, and more than $16,000 on Major League Baseball (MLB) tickets. FEC documents show that Gray's campaign spent more than $5,000 on limousine...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department released a sweeping 99-page report on Monday portraying communist Cuba as the Western Hemisphere’s foremost engine of Marxist subversion, arguing that the island nation has spent decades cultivating revolutionary movements inside the United States and across the globe. The report, released alongside a statement from the State Department, casts the Castro regime not simply as a geopolitical adversary, but as the ideological nucleus of what it describes as the modern radical Left. “For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the...

A leftist Democrat sparked fierce backlash after he appeared to insist that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s views on Cuba carried less weight because he has not visited the island. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., made the striking claim during a heated exchange with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz on Wednesday at a committee hearing. Pocan, who has compared Cuba to a "silent Gaza," visited the communist island earlier in July, where he called for the U.S. to relent on its pressure campaign against the Cuban government, blaming U.S. sanctions for the island's economic devastation and fuel shortages....

Under Governor Abigail Spanberger, Virginia has become a hotbed of illegal alien crimeWASHINGTON – The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released the following statement after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested an illegal alien who has been charged with murder and aggravated sexual battery in the death of a 2-year-old girl in Virginia.According to local reporting, the child’s mother took her to the Goochland County Sheriff’s Office on July 4. Deputies began life-saving measures to save the child, who was then taken to a local hospital, where she later died.The Louisa County Sheriff’s Department arrested Raul Genesis...

WASHINGTON — Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) is calling for all congressional staff to undergo background checks and dishing on growing foreign influence campaigns that she describes as “the worst kept secret on Capitol Hill.” Cammack has introduced a resolution that would also mandate disclosure of staffers’ nationalities as well as any payments by foreign governments to current or new Capitol hill hires. The proposal comes after reports emerged last month that the FBI has been investigating a senior GOP aide for allegedly acting as a foreign agent on behalf of Qatar, as well as revelations that spies for Cuba and...

WASHINGTON — A powerful House panel subpoenaed three far-left nonprofits Wednesday as part of a sweeping review of Shanghai-based Marxist millionaire Neville Roy Singham’s network of subversive groups in the US. The House Ways and Means Committee is probing the path of $39 million disbursed from Singham to the People’s Forum, lefty media outlet BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Fox News Digital first reported on the subpoenas. Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) ripped the three groups for failing to cough up a “single responsive document” in response to the committee’s prior requests for information. Smith’s team is concerned...

Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega said the Central American country would no longer hold elections, further closing off any potential path for the opposition to challenge the government he leads with his wife, Rosario Murillo. Ortega, Nicaragua’s longest-serving leader, has remained in power since 2007 after previously governing during the 1980s. His current presidential term is scheduled to run through 2027. “There won’t be any more elections here for them to try to seize the government and seize power,” Ortega said. He delivered the remarks Sunday during a speech commemorating the 1979 Sandinista revolution, in which Ortega participated in the overthrow...

The State Department on Monday warned that the Democratic Socialists of America serves as a willing vector of Cuban Communist influence in the United States, bolstered by a network of organizations tied to Cuban intelligence. In a new report released on Monday detailing Cuba’s decades-long effort to “make the revolution” in the United States, the State Department highlights the DSA’s deep connections to organizations connected to Cuban intelligence, including at least one sanctioned by the U.S. government. These connections include the organization’s public membership in the National Network on Cuba (which is linked to the sanctioned Cuban Institute of Friendship...

A new complaint requests that the federal government investigate the tax-exempt status of a left-wing nonprofit that has allegedly fomented violent riots. The Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) filed the complaint Tuesday morning with the IRS seeking an investigation into People’s Forum, Inc., a New York-based Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) linked to socialist megadonor Neville Roy Singham. CASA’s complaint alleges that People’s Forum routinely organizes and funds protests that engage in illegal activity. "People's Forum Inc. is the tax-exempt fiscal sponsor of many progressive and radical organizations, including the Venceremos Brigade, which engage in demonstrations often crossing the threshold...

A new US State Department report identifies the Antifa legal nonprofit, the National Lawyers Guild, as a central support organization for Antifa militants and traces the radical lawyers’ group’s activities to a decades-long network of left-wing terrorist influence tied to the Cuban regime. The 100-page report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” released on Monday, details how Havana spent nearly seven decades cultivating left-wing American radicals, extremist organizations and sympathetic institutions to advance revolutionary leftism inside the United States. It alleges that network stretches from the Weather Underground and Black Panthers to modern Antifa, anti-ICE organizations and socialist groups....

A Clinton-appointed federal judge in Florida has died just days after he controversially released a Cuban plane hijacker who was awaiting deportation. Judge John E. Steele, 77, passed away, according to a law clerk for Chief Judge Marcia Morales Howard of the Middle District of Florida — where Steele served. A legal source in Miami also confirmed Steele’s sudden death. The circumstances of his passing were not immediately clear. Steele came under criticism for his July 8 ruling to release Cuban plane hijacker Maikel Guerra Morales from ICE custody.

CBS News reported that senior U.S. defense officials have reviewed early-stage military options for Cuba, including an Army-led air assault involving thousands of troops from the 101st Airborne Division.

The world that we’re looking at today is radically different than that of just five years ago, radically different in the sense that it is much more in the interest of the United States. And I know that seems controversial because [President Donald] Trump is written off as someone who is too fluid and volatile... It’s more important to see what he’s done. Let’s go through the world abroad as it is today systematically. Look at Latin America. Five years ago, the Chinese were controlling, through their surrogate companies, the entry and exit to Panama. Russia and China were the...

A criminal who hijacked a plane from Cuba to Florida in 2003 and served 20 years in prison had been in ICE custody awaiting deportation — till a Dem-appointed judge dumped him back on the street last week. Cuban national Miakel Guerra Morales — who assaulted crew members during his terrifying midair hijacking — was detained by ICE in December, then ordered freed July 8 by Florida Judge John E. Steele, who said he’d been in custody too long. The Department of Homeland Security on Monday railed against the Bill Clinton-nominated federal judge’s decision to release Guerra Morales. “This activist...

President Trump declared Sunday that the Strait of Hormuz is open after the US hit 140 targets in Iran over the latest attack on cargo ships in the critical passage. Trump doubled down on US Central Command’s insistence that the key oil choke point was now open following an intense bombing campaign against Iran overnight, which targeted missile and drone sites, naval assets, ammunition storage facilities, communication networks, and surveillance locations. “Yeah, it’s open. We bombed the hell out of them last night,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” contradicting Tehran’s warnings that the strait remains closed.The president went on...

Cuba's state power operator UNE announced on Monday that the national electrical system had suffered a "total disconnection," plunging the island into darkness amid its worst economic crisis in decades, severe fuel shortages, and daily blackouts averaging 20 hours. Cuba's national power operator announced on Monday that the island's electrical system had suffered a complete collapse, triggering a nationwide blackout as technicians worked to restore service. The state-run company UNE said in a post on X that the National Electric Power System had gone down completely without immediate explanation. "A total disconnection of the National Electric Power System is occurring....