US spy agency: Cuba will try to influence 2024 election

Officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the U.S. BroadCast Unitedligence community believes the Cuban government will attempt to influence the 2024 U.S. election and may deploy targeted campaign activities to affect Florida and local elections.

Last year, the Director’s Office assessed that Havana tries to influence midterm elections 2022 in Florida.

“We’ve seen interest in lower-level elections,” one BroadCast Unitedligence official said. “In Cuba, we fully expect the same activity to occur.”

The BroadCast Unitedligence community found that in 2022, Cuba conducted influence operations in the United States “aimed at discrediting specific U.S. candidates in Florida.”

After the assessment was released in December, U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Miami, said he believed he and his fellow Republican congressmen. Maria Elvira Salazar and Mario Diaz-Balart targetedBut he said he had not been directly informed of that by U.S. BroadCast Unitedligence officials.

The U.S. BroadCast Unitedligence report found that Cuban officials worked to build relationships with members of the U.S. media who were critical of Havana’s critics in Congress, and that a network of social media accounts “almost certainly with covert ties to Cuba” “amplified derogatory content from U.S. politicians viewed as hostile to Cuba as a country.”

Officials say Cuba’s efforts, while smaller in scale than influence operations sought by Washington’s main adversaries, Russia, China and Iran, are still concerning.

Last year, Facebook parent company Meta said it had removed hundreds of Fake accounts linked to the Cuban government and its agencies posted propaganda and attacked Cuban and American critics on Facebook and Instagram.

The Cuban government network targets Cubans inside and outside the country, with a wide audience. The Facebook page has 650,000 followers and the group has 510,000 members. The Herald previously reported an operation to uncover hundreds of fake accounts that Posting Cuban propaganda on Twittercurrently called X.

Since Cuba began expanding internet service, dissidents and independent journalists have begun to decried the hacking of their phones and social media accounts and online harassment by fake accounts linked to the Cuban government. Former students described how Cuban state security carried out online operations inside the University of Information Sciences to target dissidents and critics.

In 2020, Lea Gabrielle, then the State Department’s special envoy and coordinator of the Global Engagement Center, said the agency had noticed “increasing coordination between Russian, Cuban and (Venezuelan government) accounts driving disinformation and propaganda narratives.”

Recently, Cuban government media and influential people have been very active in promoting Russian disinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

While Cuba relies on China to build its internet and cybersecurity infrastructure, Cuban authorities recently signed agreements with Russian officials in the field, including to develop artificial BroadCast Unitedligence capabilities.

This year, the Foreign Malign Influence Center within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is preparing for adversaries to deploy more sophisticated tools, including artificial BroadCast Unitedligence, in their influence activities.

Intelligence analysts and experts trained in commercial and proprietary forensic capabilities will be deployed to counter AI-driven threats, BroadCast Unitedligence officials said.

Analysts across the BroadCast Unitedligence community keep an eye out for potential foreign malign influence threats and submit BroadCast Unitedligence information they deem worthy of attention to the center for review. The group will then decide within 24 hours to a week of receiving the material whether to act on it, either by privately notifying the target or issuing a notification to the public.

“Will this affect the election results? That’s the guidance we follow,” said one of the officials.

Michael Wilner is an award-winning journalist and McClatchy’s chief Washington correspondent. He has been part of the White House team covering the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic since 2019. Wilner previously served as Washington bureau chief for The Jerusalem Post. He holds degrees from Claremont McKenna College and Columbia University and is a New York City native.

Nora Gámez Torres is the Cuba/U.S.-Latin America policy reporter for El Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald. She studied journalism, media and communications in Havana and London. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from London City University. Her work has won awards from the Florida Association of News Editors and the Society of Professional Journalists. // Nora Gámez Torres studied journalism and communications in Havana and London. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology and has covered Cuba for El Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald since 2014. He also reports on U.S. policy toward Latin America. His work has won awards from the Florida Association of News Editors and the Society of Professional Journalists.