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María Elvira Salazar Under Fire for Accepting Campaign Contributions from Alleged Communist Cuban Spy

In a new opinion column, the Miami Herald underscored the hypocrisy surrounding María Elvira Salazar’s relationship with alleged Cuban spy Manuel Rocha.

Rocha was arrested this past weekend on charges that he spied for the Cuban government for roughly 40 years. The charges revealed Rocha repeatedly called the United States “the Enemy” and cozied up to far-right U.S. politicians.

María Elvira Salazar accepted campaign donations from Rocha totaling $750 and now plans to return those contributions back to her campaign donor, Rocha, after getting inundated with public scrutiny.

Read the Miami Herald’s latest column below.

Miami Herald: It’s no coincidence that the alleged Cuba spy peddled Trump and right-wing politics | Opinion
Fabiola Santiago | December 08, 2023

  • Rocha may have been a secret agent for a third-world country, as the U.S. Justice Department charges, and a valuable asset to help sustain the longest-lasting dictatorship in the Americas, one that keeps people poor and repressed, but he enjoyed the good life of an elitist conservative in Miami — until now, a respected one.

  • Rocha’s best disguise: Being the typical polished Miami-Dade MAGA supporter of former President Donald Trump. As such, he joined the local political chorus pushing for Trump to reverse President Obama’s engagement policy in favor of a hard line on Cuba.

  • The campaign of Republican Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, a bitter critic of President Biden and Trump supporter, a former journalist who in 1995 got an exclusive and controversial one-on-one interview with none other than Fidel Castro.

  • In true form, Salazar used a spy outed by the Biden administration to tell the same administration on X in two languages to “wake up!” to Cuba’s spying.

  • Such is the petty, partisan Miami world of light-weight politicians, a place where spies thrive. Who cares now that she’ll return the donations to a man in jail?

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