The Latin American Report # 603

I am following very closely the annual battle over appropriations legislation in the United States, because of the message it sends about its foreign policy. Naturally, I am interested in the Cuban case. The influence of Cuban-origin citizens based in Florida—and well established in Washington with figures such as Marco Rubio and Mario Díaz-Balart, who chairs the powerful House Appropriations subcommittee for the State Department—was good enough to preserve funding for most U.S. government programs linked to the Island—many of them highly inefficient and therefore wasteful of federal budget, like Radio Martí—amid Trump’s broad attack on this issue.

For example, with this New York Times report from last June we learned that, after Ukraine, Cuba was the country least affected by DOGE’s cuts, with the difference that USAID programs are illegal here. (There is a rationale for this, because USAID does not implement humanitarian assistance programs here in the form of food and medicine—except for alleged “political prisoners”—, but rather regime-change ones.) During the first quarter of the year it was reported that the International Republican Institute had withheld just over 5% of its large NED-, USAID- and State DRL-funded awards, all related to Cuba and Venezuela. NED president Damon Wilson himself joined former senator Mel Martínez in an op-ed demanding the release of the funds that the organization receives through the State’s DRL for its Cuban chapter.

House Report 119-217, introduced by Díaz-Balart, departs from the spending priorities or policies that the Trump administration is trying to set, particularly on foreign assistance. Thus, the House Appropriations Committee—which tends to have the upper hand over its Senate counterpart in these matters—disagrees with the White House’s proposed cuts, zeroing out classic accounts such as the Economic Support Fund, Development Assistance, and the Democracy Fund. Although it consolidates them into a new one called “National Security Investment Programs”—a move closely related to the new name of the relevant subcommittee—, it ends up placing into that account the funds that had usually been divided across the aforementioned ones that Foggy Bottom had zeroed in its CBJ.

The same happens with the NED—the House Appropriations Committee recommends continuing its funding—, although if there is anything to thank the Trump administration for in this regard, whatever its real motivations, it is the pressure demanding a return to the transparency that characterized the organization since its inception—something closely tied to its original mission. It led them to restart publishing the annual list of grants, even if they ultimately decided not to name the recipient organizations as part of a new policy intended to “protect” their contractors. But if the NED needs to do that, then it is on the wrong path, isn’t it? Nevertheless, Díaz-Balart did accept the introduction of the so-called “America First Opportunity Fund,” but funded from other accounts and approximately $1.1 billion below the request.

In the specific case of Cuba, Díaz-Balart again proposes $35 million for the regime-change programs that USAID first began implementing in 1996, but which today are also carried out by State DRL and the NED, which split almost equally a fund that for a long time had been parked at $20 million per year. By the way, here the industrial character of the “democracy promotion” sector—with organizations such as the IRI, NDI, PADF, and Freedom House usually receiving multi-million dollar sums—is manifest. The House itself protects them when it places some language in the appropriations legislation stating that grants over $1 million can only be awarded to organizations with experience administering programs aimed at Cuba. This is: just them.

Everything indicates that, from Pennsylvania Avenue, the Cuba issue will not face resistance, but rather the opposite. A congressional notification sent in late September that seeks to redirect some paused funding allocates $400 million for, among other missions, “confronting the Marxist, anti-American regimes of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.” I will keep an eye on this development, which will take time insofar as we are now only waiting for a continuing resolution to be approved, so that work can continue on the permanent appropriations for the current fiscal year.

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This is all for today’s report.