The American people are watching history unfold. With narco-terrorist Nicolás Maduro finally in U.S. custody, all eyes should be on liberating the oppressed people of Cuba, long under one of the cruelest communist dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere.
But before any meaningful progress can be made, a deeply troubling obstacle stands in the way: the man currently running Cuban policy for the State Department is not an America-First supporter. He is a woke Kamala Harris loyalist whose career has been defined by pandering to progressive politics, globalist climate agendas, and failed border-policy dogma. This is a massive vetting failure by the administration that must be corrected as soon as possible.
Joseph “Joe” Salazar now holds the title of Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Cuba, Central America, and Migration Affairs — a powerful post inside the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the U.S. State Department. This is no small role: the official U.S. point person tasked with shaping policy toward the entire Caribbean and Central America, including Cuba, at a moment of historic opportunity and danger.
But who is Joe Salazar, really?
Before being elevated into this sensitive role, Salazar was Special Advisor for the Western Hemisphere to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. In that capacity, Salazar wasn’t negotiating tough sanctions or pushing for democratic reform; he was jetting around the Caribbean championing Harris’s climate initiatives like the U.S.–Caribbean Partnership to Address the Climate Crisis 2030. During a March 2023 diplomatic mission, Salazar teamed up with Caribbean officials to advance Joe Biden–Kamala Harris’s climate agenda, not to pressure regimes for freedom.
Instead of being concerned with communist tyranny, the Biden-Harris State Department was first and foremost concerned with carbon emissions and global climate targets. The man who advanced those objectives for Harris is now setting policy for Cuba.
In Senate testimony in 2023, Salazar echoed the same failed, root-cause jargon that became the hallmark of Border Czar Kamala Harris’s border strategy, the policy that helped unleash the worst illegal immigration crisis in modern American history. When asked by Senator Mike Lee whether his office understood what was happening at the border, Salazar gave a canned response about “promoting safe and orderly migration” and “addressing root causes of irregular migration” — the same mantra that has failed catastrophically, flooding our country with ten-of-millions of illegals.
When pressed on whether alternative routes to illegal entry were increasing illegal migration, Salazar doubled down on failure: “We must continue to address root causes… strengthen protections for migrants… and promote humane migration management throughout the Hemisphere.”
Salazar’s Senate testimony shows more allegiance to foreign development programs than to American sovereignty. He praised Harris’s flagship economic initiative, Central America Forward, which funnelled billions in public-private investment and USAID programs into the region — again, rooted in social and economic redistribution rather than real border security, anti-communism, or anything approaching America-First policy.
This is the worldview he brings to Cuban policy: a focus on international development, illegal immigrant rights, and climate change, not restoring freedom to the Cuban people or neutralizing the communist Castro-Maduro axis.
With Caracas weakened and Latin America in flux, America has a historic chance to roll back tyranny in Cuba and reshape the hemisphere in favor of freedom and security. This has been an enduring U.S. foreign policy goal since the Kennedy administration, and we must seize this opportunity.
But the man in charge of Cuba policy in the State Department is a woke apparatchik installed for political loyalty to Kamala Harris. That’s not leadership, that’s a threat to U.S. interests at a time when America-First policy is the only thing that’s going to lead to change in Cuba and make America more secure.
His biography shows a long Foreign Service career, but no history of standing up to authoritarian regimes, no record of aggressive Western Hemisphere defense, and no commitment to the America First doctrine essential for confronting communist Cuba.
This isn’t the first time Cuban sympathizers have penetrated the U.S. government at the highest levels.
Walter Kendall Myers, a senior analyst at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, was exposed in 2009, during the Obama administration, as a long-time Cuban spy who had secretly worked on behalf of the Castro regime for nearly three decades. Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, passed classified information to Havana while he held positions granting him access to sensitive U.S. foreign policy intelligence, including information related to Cuba itself. Prosecutors revealed that Myers was ideologically committed to the communist regime, deliberately infiltrated the U.S. government, and exploited the State Department’s lax internal safeguards to advance a hostile foreign dictatorship’s interests from inside the American bureaucracy. The case remains one of the most damning examples of how deeply compromised the U.S. foreign policy establishment can be when left-wing ideology, careerism, and weak vetting collide.
If the United States is serious about freeing Cuba and defending Western Hemisphere interests, Joe Salazar, a former Kamala Harris special advisor in Trump’s State Department leadership, should not be anywhere near Cuban policy. We must be vigilant about potential internal security threats, like Walter Myers, who may be lurking around the State Department and other institutions.
We deserve a Deputy Assistant Secretary who stands unequivocally for freedom, security, and American sovereignty. The fate of the Cuban people, and the future security of the hemisphere, depends on it.
