Mario Díaz-Balart wants U.S. leading charge for freedom in Cuba, Western Hemisphere

Mario Diaz-Balart. Photo by Jacob Ogles

It’s no shock that happenings in Cuba are of concern to all Florida leaders, according to U.S. Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart. More than two-thirds of Cuban Americans in the country live in Florida, according to Pew Research, and many are touched directly by what happens on the island.

But the Hialeah Republican feels frustration with how many in Washington, particularly Democrats, feel ready to overlook human rights concerns there.

“For some people, it’s the school of thought of, ‘So what? What does it matter to have a terrorist dictatorship 90 miles away from the United States?’” Díaz-Balart said. Many colleagues, he said, feel content to “pretend that it’s Costa Rica with old cars.”

With an appropriations subcommittee gavel this Congress, Díaz-Balart wants to push the U.S. toward a more aggressive policy when it comes to supporting democratic allies and standing against opponents in Cuba and all of Latin America.

As House State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Subcommittee Chair, he advanced a budget bill that reduced overall funding, but steps up spending to address problems in Cuba.

He voices a certain alarm at the response. The bill left his committee on a party-line vote, and House Democrats issued a lengthy statement condemning the bill. In part, Democrats slam the budget for prohibiting global health spending in “any lab controlled by China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.”

“The world is full of threats that don’t respect borders, from climate change to pandemics to assertive dictators. We can’t stick our head in the sand and think it will all go away,” said U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member. “We need to work with partners to address these challenges. This Republican bill leaves America vulnerable and shirks our commitments.”

To Díaz-Balart, the list of countries seems like a grouping of nations hostile to the United States’ interest, a matter not often viewed as up for debate. It distresses him that mainstream Democratic leadership continues to look the other way at communist powers operating in the West.

That includes President Joe Biden’s administration. Díaz-Balart said the State Department had coddled Cuba, largely picking up from failed normalization efforts under former President Barack Obama.

“This administration has been constantly looking at ways to frankly appease that dictatorship, and to look to ways to give unilateral sanctioned relief,” he said.

And along the way, Defense officials have given tours to Cuban officials of Coast Guard facilities, including in Jacksonville and Tampa.

He knows extremists in either party, whether isolationists on the Right or card-carrying socialists on the Left, will quibble with his more hawkish views. But while Republican leadership in the House has pushed back on those fringe voices on issues like defending Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, there isn’t the same moderation of those voices on the Left, in Díaz-Balart’s view.

He suggests that mentality extend to relationships with foreign partners. He’d like to see the U.S. pressure European allies to reciprocate support in Ukraine with some pushback against Chinese and Russian incursions into the Caribbean and South America.

“I believe, by the way, that defeating (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is important. I mean, I really do,” Díaz-Balart said. “But you cannot on one side say, ‘We want help defeating Putin,’ and then on the other side, you’re basically helping to subsidize Putin’s strongest allies in the Western Hemisphere.”

In the budget passed out of Díaz-Balart’s subcommittee, he provides an extra $1 billion than the administration requested to deal with China, including $500 million for arms financing in Taiwan. But he cuts funding for groups like the World Health Organization, a group the Congressman feels did more interference and damage control for China during the pandemic than it did any reasonable marshaling of international forces.

“If you’re an ally, I’m fully funding you. We fully funded Jordan, fully funded Egypt,” he said. “But we’re not funding entities and organizations that are helping our adversaries.”

Whether Díaz-Balart’s budget goes anywhere remains an open question. Democrats control the Senate, where U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair, has called the House plan “catastrophic.” For now, Díaz-Balart looks forward to passing it off the floor and going into conference with the upper chamber.

There will be fights of particular local significance. For example, Díaz-Balart wants badly to improve funding for radio broadcasts in Cuba, and believes the U.S. can do more to ensure those living on the island can access the internet regardless of government attempts to limit service.

He noted that when Democrats were on a “spending spree” while they controlled both chambers of Congress, foreign broadcasting increased around the globe. But Cuban broadcasts were the sole exception.

After watching pro-democracy activists organize and protest in Cuba for more than a year, Díaz-Balart said it’s more important than ever to help deliver information to the people.

“Here’s the bottom line. There are ways to allow humans to communicate among themselves that the U.S. can do in 24 to 48 hours,” he said.