Above photo: Lincoln Diaz-Balart. Hola News.
Collaboration with Empire, Economic Warfare, and Immiseration of His Own People.
“One should never speak ill of the dead,” so the old cliché goes about the recently deceased. Those with less inclination toward sentimentality, however, hold that this rule applies only to those who have lived a life exclusively in private and whose actions have had an effect only among their close-knit circle of family, friends, coworkers and neighbors. For those who have lived a public life and who have wielded power over others in a political capacity, their decision to live such a life exempts them from this freedom-from-criticism even, or perhaps especially, in death. For it is in the aftermath of a public figure’s passing that they will receive the greatest adulation, and the temptation to minimize their misdeeds will be most pronounced.
In the case of Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the former Florida congressmember who passed away on March 3, 2025, aged 70, there are two further factors at play. First, there is the fact that he died at a time in which the great majority of his obituaries, because of the power structure of the media industry and its overwhelming deference to the US’s two duopoly parties, will be long on lionizing and short on criticism. Second, there is the fact that Diaz-Balart evidently did not himself buy into this notion, at least if his reactions to the deaths of his political adversaries such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are anything to go by. Indeed, he said shortly after the death of Fidel Castro: “The brain of evil, of that tyranny, and of, really, the movement throughout this hemisphere against democracy, against the rule of law, in favor of terrorism, in support of narco-trafficking… that brain and coordinator has died.” Following the death of Hugo Chavez, he said: “Hugo Chavez was a puppet of Fidel Castro.”
And so it falls to an independent journalist writing in alternative media to provide some balance and critical analysis of Diaz-Balart’s political career. But I do have some special insight into the man’s life and politics. Diaz-Balart’s family knew my mother’s family in Cuba and then in Miami after both left the island following the 1959 overthrow of Fulgencio Batista. I interned for a short time at his office in Washington, which ironically had the effect of turning me into an anti-imperialist, so disgusted I was with the hypocrisy, double-standards and shameless self-interestedness of his foreign policy stances.
It was when I asked one of his staffers why Diaz-Balart didn’t advocate for an “embargo” against Saudi Arabia, on the same grounds on which he advocates one against Cuba and with the same condition that it be lifted only when its ruler (an absolute monarch, no less) agrees to hold “free and fair” elections, that I had an epiphany that has stayed with me and influenced my political trajectory ever since. Hearing his dissembling and derisory answer (that “the alternative would be worse”) made me realize the most central truth about US foreign policy: that Washington’s sole criterion for its treatment of other countries is not their democratic credentials, their human rights record, their good governance or lack thereof, or the integrity of their institutions, but rather the extent to which they are obedient to US geostrategic and, especially, US economic interests. What else could explain Washington’s obsequious treatment of the Saudi Wahhabiist state? And how could it be a coincidence that the US had privileged access to its oil reserves and made money for its military industrial complex via lucrative arms contracts?
Following travels through Latin America, graduate studies in international affairs, immersion in the work of figures such as Saul Landau and Greg Grandin, and growing involvement in activism and writing about the region, this realization evolved into a deeper understanding of the US’s role on the world stage. Far from Diaz-Balart’s notion of a benevolent United States standing up for the “American values” of democracy, the rule of law, and so on, the so-called ‘shining city on the hill’ is, in fact, a ruthless rogue state that constantly intervenes in other countries’ affairs and constantly flouts international law. And it not only sides with and actively props up, but sometimes even installs, some of the worst governments throughout the globe. Indeed, far from supporting democracy, the US has overthrown countless democratically-elected governments not to its liking. This has been especially pronounced in the US’s so-called “backyard,” which Grandin has described in his book of the same name as “Empire’s Workshop.”
The fact that Diaz-Balart made a career out of collaborating with this rogue state in waging a decades-long economic war against his own country and, by extension, his own people will stand as the most salient thing about his political life and legacy. Shortly after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed a number of punitive measures on Cuba. These have been progressively increased by subsequent US administrations of both parties ever since. Together they have come to be known as the “embargo” against Cuba though are more accurately described as an economic blockade because they penalize third countries. Though President Barack Obama reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2016, the blockade has nonetheless remained in place. His successors to the White House, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, rolled back many of his reforms and, in the case of Trump, strengthened the blockade by enacting further coercive measures.
Diaz-Balart was elected to congress in 1989 and is best known for serving as the author of much of the legislation that codified the blockade into law. The fact that he did this while making out that it was all done for the good of the Cuban people makes it all the more despicable. After all, the Cuban-American exile brigade frequently invokes the suffering of the Cubans left in Cuba as justification for the blockade. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, another Cuban-American exile hardliner who also served as a congressmember representing a district in South Florida, spelled it out in her statement about Diaz-Balart’s death: “The oppressed people of Cuba had no greater advocate for their freedom than Lincoln [Diaz-Balart].”
Yet it is the blockade itself that has been the primary cause of their suffering. According to UN figures, it has caused over $160 billion of damage to the Cuban economy. The Center for International Policy, meanwhile, has stated that the blockade has “created a situation of scarcity and uncertainty that has affected all aspects of Cuban society.” Though no hard data exists on the number of deaths caused by the blockade, a 1997 study by the American Association for World Health concluded, as The Los Angeles Times put it, that it “has significantly increased suffering and deaths in the Caribbean nation.” Needless to say, Diaz-Balart also supported the same kind of measures against Nicaragua and Venezuela, which have imposed on those countries’ people similar levels of suffering and hardship.
Because the blockade is based on unilateral coercive measures rather than multilateral sanctions, it is illegal under international law. It also violates international law because it is a form of collective punishment that harms Cuba’s civilian population rather than ostensible targets in the government. As a result, the blockade stands in the opprobrium of the international community, with practically every country in the world other than the US and its proxy state, Israel, voting in favor of a UN resolution condemning it. The measure has passed with the vast majority of UN General Assembly members’ support every year since the vote was first held in 1992.
The blockade outlaws almost all direct trade between Cuba and the US with minor exemptions for medicine, some foodstuffs, and humanitarian goods. Diaz-Balart not only opposed these exemptions but advocated for what he termed a “secondary boycott,” which would have meant that any company that invested in Cuba would have been disallowed from doing business in the US as well. Of course, the Cuban-American exile brigade propaganda response to this is the notion that “Cuba can trade with the rest of the world.” Left unsaid is the fact that the blockade penalizes third countries for trading with Cuba. The State Department has prosecuted and fined several European banks for violating the terms of the embargo. The French bank Société Générale was fined a whopping $1.3 billion in 2018!
This practice massively disincentivizes other countries and their companies from doing any type of business with Cuba. Diaz-Balart openly stated during his time in congress that another major purpose of the blockade is to keep hard currency out of the hands of the Cuban government. This difficulty in accessing the four currencies accepted for international trade on the global market (the US dollar, the Pound sterling, the euro and the Japanese yen) also makes it very difficult for the Cuban government to trade with other nations.
If the blockade isn’t meant to alleviate the suffering of the Cuban people, then what is its purpose? For Diaz-Balart, its purpose was twofold. First, it formed part of the vendetta that he held against the revolution and its leaders. Diaz-Balart, like so many leaders of South Florida’s Cuban-American exile community, came from a family that was close to the US-backed Batista government and formed part of Cuba’s internal quisling class who served as proxies of US economic imperialism. Diaz-Balart’s father was deputy minister of the interior in Batista’s government and was later elected to the Cuban Senate in 1958 on a pro-Batista platform but was unable to take his seat due to the revolution the following year.
Though a central part of Cuban-American exile folklore is the idea that “Free Cuba” “fell” to Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, the reality is that Batista was himself a dictator who had come to power via a coup in 1952. His fascist government operated a secret police force that tortured and murdered political opponents. The estimate of 20,000 dead is the figure often touted as the total number of his victims but even CIA documents say this is likely a massive undercount as it, according to a 1963 CIA memorandum declassified in 2005, “includes only a relatively small number killed in actual military encounters.” The document adds: “The [Batista] regime’s campaign of terror got out of control and the government in Havana probably had no clear idea of how many killings the police and army forces were committing.”
Batista also allowed the mafia to control large swaths of the economy in exchange for bribes. When the 26th of July Movement toppled his government in 1959, he was so unpopular that an opinion poll held at the time showed that 86 percent of Cubans supported the revolution. The above cited CIA memorandum likewise states that “the anti-Batista forces… by mid-1958 had the support of 80 to 90 percent of the population.” So Diaz-Balart’s support for the blockade was motivated by a wish for revenge not just against the revolutionary leaders themselves but against the people who remained in Cuba for the crime of supporting the overthrow of the US-backed dictator to which his family owed its power and privilege and their support for Fidel Castro and the revolution he led.
Support for the revolution has remained substantial throughout the decades and Castro remained a popular figure until his death in 2016. Even documents published by the State Department’s Office of the Historian have conceded that “substantial numbers still support [the revolution] with enthusiasm” and that before his death Castro retained “widespread support among the poorer classes, particularly in the countryside.” Though it is purely speculation, I suspect that Diaz-Balart knew this full well all along, as do his brother and Ros-Lehtinen.
The second reason Diaz-Balart supported the blockade was because it creates leverage for the US to impose its will on the island. In the case that the Cuban government falls, so goes the logic, the US would be able to dictate how Cuba should be organized both politically and economically. Diaz-Balart made no secret of this, stating openly that his vision of a “free” Cuba would mean both “free elections” and “free markets.” Of course, for a small Caribbean country like Cuba with a history of US domination, so-called “free markets” would translate into a surrender of its economic sovereignty to an imperial hegemon. Indeed, before the revolution Cuba’s economy had been divvied up to US corporations with much of the profit leaving the country to line the pockets of US-based shareholders. This was one of the major grievances against the Batista dictatorship held by the majority of the Cuban population at the time and articulated by the revolutionary leaders.
In terms of “free elections,” if the Cuban Communist Party or some other socialist party ran in the election and won in spite of Washington trying to rig it (as it most certainly would), does anyone seriously think that the Cuban-American exile hardliners or the US government would accept the result? And how could an election in Cuba be “free and fair” if the US continues to channel millions of dollars per year (so far over $200 million overall) into opposition groups intent on destroying the social gains of the revolution and handing Cuba’s economy back to the US and its domestic quislings? Indeed, what the Cuban-American exile brigade want is not a return to democracy but rather a return to their position of power, whether it be under a US-backed dictatorship or a US-rigged sham liberal democratic system.
Like the Diaz-Balart family, many of the South Florida-based Cuban-American exiles themselves come from this collaborationist bourgeoisie that served as the US’s proxy administrators of empire and wish to reestablish their class privilege in a “liberated,” that is to say, capitalist and US-dominated, Cuba. And though such people claim that they were persecuted and driven out of the country by the revolutionary government, the reality is that many left voluntarily because they were despised by the great majority of Cuban people for their association with the US-backed Batista and would be again if they returned.
In addition to his vindictiveness, Diaz-Balart’s support for the blockade was also deeply hypocritical. At the very same time he sanctimoniously bloviated about Cuba’s supposed deservingness of this treatment, he was not only turning a blind eye but actively working to enable some of the world’s worst human rights violators. For example, he not only never once introduced any measure condemning Israel’s occupation, displacement, denial of rights, and humiliation of the Palestinian people, but shamelessly took campaign contributions from the hardline Zionist special interest group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and staunchly supported its agenda in his congressional votes.
AIPAC posted on X shortly following his death: “We mourn the passing of former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart who was a stalwart supporter of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Rep. Diaz-Balart was a strong ally of the pro-Israel community and we extend our condolences to his family.” Diaz-Balart’s supporters would surely respond that Israel is a “democracy.” But Israel can hardly be considered a “democracy” when it is practicing ethnic apartheid not just according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the late Jimmy Carter but even according to its former attorney-general and the former head of Mossad.
Diaz-Balart also never signed any resolution condemning human rights violations in Colombia during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe. On the contrary, in 2008 Diaz-Balart said in a statement: “The United States Congress must stand in solidarity with President Alvaro Uribe… Colombia is our strongest ally in the region.” His brother Mario Diaz-Balart, also a congress member representing a South Florida district, was present at a ceremony where Uribe was awarded with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. During Uribe’s presidency, Colombia had what many including NACLA have described as “the worst human rights record in the Western Hemisphere.”
Uribe’s so-called “counter-narcotics” campaigns, for example, saw government-allied paramilitary death squads displace rural populations and murder union activists, social leaders, or whoever else stood in the way of powerful multinational corporations and wealthy landowners. For several years during Uribe’s presidency and for some years afterwards, Colombia held the dubious distinction of being the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists. Colombia’s population of internally displaced persons, meanwhile, currently stands at about 7 million people. The number surged during Uribe’s presidency as a direct result of this paramilitary activity. Human Rights Watch stated in 2005: “In the last three years alone, nearly 5 percent of Colombia’s 43 million people has been forcibly displaced.” (Uribe’s time in office began in 2002.)
Diaz-Balart’s relationship with Uribe, in fact, perfectly demonstrates his extreme hypocrisy regarding two accusations he hurled at the Cuban government: support for narco-trafficking and terrorism. In the case of narco-trafficking, declassified US intelligence documents say that Uribe collaborated with the Medellin Cartel and that the organization financed his campaign for the Colombian Senate. In terms of terrorism, the Parapolitics scandal revealed ties between dozens of Uribe’s political allies (including his cousin Mario Uribe) and right-wing paramilitary organizations such as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which the US government itself designates as a terrorist organization.
This was at the very time that Diaz-Balart was one of the major advocates of the US listing Cuba as a state-sponsor of terrorism. The basis for this included dubious claims about ties to Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) along with vague allusions to Cuban cooperation with Iran, another supposed state-sponsor of terrorism. Leaving aside the credibility of these assertions, in addition to his association with Uribe, Diaz-Balart himself frequently associated with and advocated for people who easily meet the US’s own definition of the word ‘terrorist’.
Along with the aforementioned fellow Cuban-American exile hardline congressmember Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Diaz-Balart condemned efforts of the FBI to work cooperatively with Cuban authorities to bring the mastermind of the Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 bombing and the 1997 Havana hotel bombings, Luis Posada-Carriles, to justice. In the early 2000s, they even tried to get Panama’s then-President Mireya Moscoso to release Posada-Carriles after he was captured by Cuban intelligence. Diaz-Balart also lobbied for the release of Orlando Bosch, Posada-Carriles’ co-conspirator in the airline bombing. Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen can hardly credibly present themselves as champions of the Cuban people when a total of 3,478 Cubans have been killed in US-sponsored terrorist attacks, with a further 2,099 wounded.
The duo has also had extensive links to the Nicaraguan “Contra” paramilitary organization, which waged a dirty war against the Sandinista government (that ousted the US-backed Samoza dictatorship in 1979) and perceived sympathizers. Ros-Lehtinen hosted a number of former Contra members at her Miami office in 2008. Diaz-Balart, meanwhile, led efforts to get Otto Reich appointed as the George W. Bush administration’s assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. Reich reported to Oliver North when he was in charge of funding the Contras (later exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal) and, according to The New York Times, “was in charge of a covert program during the Reagan administration to generate public support in the United States for the anti-Sandinista rebels, known as the contras.”
Of course, Diaz-Balart’s supporters will surely claim that he had a democratic mandate to do all of the things I have enumerated above since he was elected many times to represent his constituents. But this argument has a number of problems. Leaving aside the US’s own dubious democratic credentials and status as a dollarocracy, there is the issue that the Cubans who left Cuba to live in the US are not representative of the Cuban people who remain in Cuba – that is, those who are actually affected by the blockade. For reasons enumerated above, many of the émigrés bear the same grudge against the revolutionary government and, in turn, the Cubans in Cuba who support it. And obviously, those who left the island are likely to be those who are most critical of the government.
But there is another, more subtle factor at play. Cuban exiles imported to South Florida not just their language and customs but also their clientelistic political culture. Batistaites such as Diaz-Balart hold many positions of political power in South Florida, not just in congress but even more so at the local level, as well as many positions of economic power. Failing to toe the line by pronouncing one’s fidelity to the political stances of this Batistaite political and economic elite can mean social ostracization, retaliatory repercussions, job loss, or other economic consequences.
Since I have criticized other obituaries for being too one-sided, perhaps I should add some balance to my own. Diaz-Balart admittedly did have some redeeming qualities. He appeared by all accounts to have been a dutiful public servant to his constituents, making sure that he had many staff devoted to case work from residents of his congressional district. He also declined to side with his party’s hardline nativist wing and remained a champion of immigrants after his defection from the Democratic Party in 1985 and throughout his time in congress.
Whether he would have cozied up to the xenophobic MAGA movement that currently dominates his party remains an open question. But if the actions of his brother Mario and his political protégé Marco Rubio are anything to go by, it doesn’t look good. Rubio ultimately accepted a position in Trump’s cabinet as secretary of state (where he will, no doubt, push for ever greater coercive measures against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela). His brother, meanwhile, reportedly brushed off suggestions that a second Trump administration would lead to deportations of some of his constituents – which, needless to say, is exactly what has happened.
Either way, these mitigating factors will never be able to mask the stench of his role working with the government of a hostile foreign state to immiserate the very people whose wellbeing he claimed to be motivated by. Though I extend my condolences to his family and friends, I personally will shed more tears for the victims of the illegal economic warfare he made a career of supporting and the victims of the terrorists who he spent that career defending.