The FBI should take immediate interest in this Cuban intelligence colonel now operating freely on U.S. soil.
My political activism was ignited in 1963 when the woman who lived next door to my family gave me a copy of Senator Barry Goldwater’s book Conscience of a Conservative, but my fervent anti-communism was crystallized by Goldwater’s second book, Why Not Victory? In it, the man soon to be the Republican nominee for President in 1964 framed the epic struggle between atheistic, godless communism and those who would live free.
My sensitivity to the brutality of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba was shaped by the story of my second wife, Nydia Bertran de Espinosa Stone, whose family had suffered under that harsh dictatorship.
My father-in-law, Joaquín Bertran, was serving as the military attaché at the Cuban Consulate in Washington, D.C. when Fulgencio Batista fell. Like many in both Cuba and the United States, he initially misjudged Fidel Castro—lulled by the U.S. media’s portrayal of Castro as a Robin Hood–like figure, whom The New York Times even likened to “Abraham Lincoln.”
The newly empowered Castro regime ordered my father-in-law to return to Havana for “discussions about a reassignment,” but he aborted his return only after a man from the CIA knocked on his door the night before he was to leave, warning him that he was on a list of people who would be eliminated if he returned to Cuba.
When he defected to the United States, leaving behind his home, savings, and possessions in Cuba, he lost everything. With only limited English, he struggled to survive and support his family, working in turn as a printer, house painter, and Fuller Brush salesman. The revulsion my in-laws felt toward the Castro regime burned white-hot. Already an ardent anti-communist, I inherited from them my own special disdain for Castro and his bearded rebels. My opposition to the regime has always been both personal and political.
In recent weeks, I have exposed and called out Congressmen Carlos Giménez and Mario Díaz-Balart—whose opposition to the Cuban regime seems largely rhetorical—for looking the other way while a Florida-based defense contractor does business in Cuba’s Mariel Port under the direct supervision of the Cuban military. I have also called out Giménez’s shielding of Cuban intelligence operations at Florida International University—an outright national security threat and a profound moral betrayal of the Cuban exile community.
Born in Havana in 1965, Ivette García González built her career inside the Cuban regime’s intelligence–diplomatic complex. A historian, writer, and PhD in Historical Sciences, she taught at the University of Havana and served as a tenured professor at the “Raúl Roa García” Higher Institute of International Relations (ISRI).
The ISRI, a university-level academic institution located in the Plaza de la Revolución municipality of Havana, was established under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX) to train Cuba’s diplomatic corps, with priority given to members of the Communist Party of Cuba, the Communist Youth, and relatives of the regime’s ruling elite.
During the socialist era and the years of the Warsaw Pact, Cuban intelligence operated freely across multiple countries. However, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, its global reach was sharply curtailed. It was then that the regime refocused the ISRI, turning it into a training ground for future diplomats who could be legally recruited as intelligence agents (G-2).
Once these individuals graduate as diplomats and are legally recruited, they not only carry out covert activities under the guise of Foreign Service officials within Cuban embassies abroad, but also serve as secret agents within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX) itself and other central government agencies, where they carry out specific missions and gather intelligence. This operational model remains in place to this day.
From 2007 to 2011, García González served as First Secretary of the Cuban Embassy in Portugal, representing Havana at public events and acting as a defender of the regime abroad. One of her most visible assignments was championing the defense of the so-called “Cuban Five,” members of the Wasp Spy Network.
The Wasp Spy Network was a Cuban intelligence operation that infiltrated exile groups and U.S. military installations in the 1990s. Its operatives were arrested in the United States and convicted of espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, and providing targeting intelligence that led to the 1996 shoot-down of civilian planes flown by Brothers to the Rescue, killing four Americans over international waters. While the world viewed them as dangerous spies, Havana glorified them as heroes—and García González used her diplomatic post to legitimize that narrative, treating convicted operatives as martyrs while ignoring the victims of their actions.
García González has also been a key enforcer of Cuba’s so-called “medical missions”—programs internationally marketed as humanitarian, but which in practice operate as state-sponsored forced labor schemes designed to facilitate covert intelligence operations.
Her academic and diplomatic résumé includes collaborations with universities across Latin America (Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru); authorship of regime propaganda such as La Habana: Tiempos de conflicto (published by Verde Olivo, the official publishing house of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces); and active participation in “professional” associations including the Cuban Association of the United Nations (ACNU) and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
LASA has long functioned as a platform for Cuban intelligence—hosting regime operatives, organizing solidarity events for the “Cuban Five” and the Wasp Spy Network, and even honoring expelled Cuban spies who had operated under diplomatic cover. The association has been thoroughly penetrated by Castro-aligned academics and intelligence assets. On multiple occasions, the U.S. State Department itself has denied visas to Cuban “academics,” deeming their presence detrimental to national interests. In short, LASA has become a fertile ground for Havana’s intelligence services—a forum designed to identify, cultivate, and ultimately recruit agents of diverse backgrounds.
In September 2008, while serving as First Secretary of the Cuban Embassy in Portugal, Ivette García González unveiled a glorifying presentation titled “Spirit of Che Guevara in the Revolution of the 21st Century” at the Câmara Municipal de Palmela (Town Hall of Palmela, Portugal). The event commemorated Che Guevara, an Argentine terrorist responsible for the massacre of thousands of Cubans who opposed communism.
Ivette García González is not the “independent academic and intellectual” she claims to be, but rather operates under the Cuban regime’s diplomatic cover—a communist indoctrinator and an intelligence colonel.
ENFORCER OF CUBAN INTEL’S DOCTOR TRAFFICKING MACHINE
While serving as First Secretary of the Cuban Embassy in Portugal, Ivette García González was not simply a cultural attaché or academic envoy. She became an active participant in one of Havana’s most lucrative and abusive enterprises: the export of Cuban doctors under what the regime calls medical missions. Marketed globally as humanitarian outreach, these deployments are in reality coercive labor schemes orchestrated by Cuban intelligence, where genuine doctors are embedded alongside trained intelligence officials posing as medical professionals.
Over the decades, Cuba has dispatched tens of thousands of these “brigades” to more than sixty countries, including Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, Peru, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Guyana, Algeria, Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Iran, Jamaica, Ecuador, Argentina, Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, and Sierra Leone. Each mission has been sold to host governments as an act of solidarity, but behind the scenes, they function as mechanisms of political control, espionage, and cash flow for the dictatorship.
The testimonies of those who served under García González’s watch in Portugal—and in other countries where Havana deployed its medical brigades—expose the reality. Doctors rarely saw more than a fraction of the salaries paid for their services. The Cuban state seized the vast majority, remitting only a sliver to the professionals in the field. Many received so little that their income abroad was no better than what they had earned in Havana.
To enforce obedience, Cuban authorities confiscated passports upon departure, stripping doctors of their freedom to travel and making defection nearly impossible. Surveillance and ideological indoctrination shadowed them constantly, and the regime made clear that families back home would face reprisals for any sign of disloyalty.
The U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch have classified these practices as a form of human trafficking and modern slavery. Even the United Nations—so often a shield for dictators—has been forced to acknowledge these abusive practices.
The combination of withheld wages, restricted movement, and political coercion produced a system designed not to heal, but to control and exploit. Within this framework, García González’s role was not that of a detached diplomat, but that of an enforcer—legitimizing and expanding the very apparatus that transformed Cuban doctors into instruments of both profit and intelligence gathering, as documented by Portugal’s Independent Doctors’ Union and published in the British Medical Journal.
It is worth noting that García González’s ex-husband, Cuban Military Counterintelligence (CIM) officer Leonardo Angulo Carmenate, served as a supposed “diplomatic attaché” for administrative affairs at the Cuban Embassy in Portugal. For those unfamiliar with Cuban intelligence, such embassy posts are reserved exclusively for intelligence personnel. García González herself identifies Angulo Carmenate as a Military Counterintelligence officer in her book La Habana: tiempo de conflictos, published by Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces.
This admission further reinforces García González’s links and prominence within the Cuban repressive apparatus (as well as the fact that she has personally acknowledged the presence of the Revolutionary Armed Forces’ security organs within Cuban embassies abroad). It is also well established that, like many other intelligence services worldwide, Cuban intelligence often deploys husband-and-wife duos working together in various operations.
It is exceptionally revealing that during her tenure as First Secretary of the Cuban Embassy in Portugal, García González was chosen to replace Ambassador Eduardo Carlos González Lerner in sensitive debates. This underscores not only her elevated rank within the regime’s so-called “diplomatic” structure, but also the deep trust placed in her to handle politically delicate matters abroad. Portugal, as a member of both NATO and the European Union, represents a strategically important post, which makes the decision to grant García González such authority even more significant. This appointment highlights both her influence within Cuba’s foreign policy and intelligence apparatus and her trajectory as a hand-picked figure entrusted with safeguarding Havana’s interests.
THE CUBAN REGIME’S INDOCTRINATION ARCHITECT: IVETTE GARCÍA GONZÁLEZ’S GLOBAL NETWORK
UNEAC:
On January 17, 2019, Ivette García González was designated President of the Historical and Social Essay Section of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC)—an organization publicly presented publicly as a national association of writers and artists, but long recognized as part of the regime’s “cultural” apparatus and as an instrument of state propaganda and intelligence influence operations, designed to control intellectual spaces and blur the line between academic production and covert interference. At the same time, Abel Enrique González Santamaría was placed as Vice President, and Carlos Alzugaray Treto—a career diplomat of the regime and an agent of Cuban intelligence—was named Secretary.
What exactly does this reveal, however?
Abel Enrique González Santamaría, a Colonel in the Ministry of the Interior (MININT)—one of the regime’s most powerful intelligence institutions—is widely acknowledged as the right-hand man of Alejandro Castro Espín’s, serving ashis number two within Cuba’s intelligence and counterintelligence complex. He is also a former Deputy Advisor of the now-defunct Commission of National Defense and Security, an oversight body that once even held authority above the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic.
Alejandro Castro Espín — known as “El Tuerto,” a nickname stemming from an eye injury sustained during military service in Angola — is the son of dictator Raúl Castro and the figure who dominates Cuba’s entire National Security apparatus: intelligence, counterintelligence, and the Armed Forces (MINFAR). In day-to-day operations, these functions are deliberately blurred, since the regime—hiding behind various fronts—ensures it is never clear whether one is under the grip of an intelligence or counterintelligence operation. Given the broad prerogatives of Castro Espín, he can freely employ one activity or another—or even both—extending even to state institutions and, at times, within the Communist Party of Cuba itself.
Although Castro Espín is formally and publicly associated with being the czar of the political police (G-2), his reach extends far beyond that—encompassing the overall coordination of the universe of secret operations. Most critically, and what grants him additional power, is that he has served as the bridge between the State Security apparatus and the Castro family’s innermost political circle—ensuring the regime’s absolute control through repression, political influence, and a controlled “opposition.”
That Ivette García González was chosen by Cuban intelligence and the State to head the Historical and Social Essay Section of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC)—an intelligence front now disguised as a cultural institution—above Abel Enrique González Santamaría, widely recognized as Alejandro Castro Espín’s right-hand man, is exceptionally telling. It reveals the hierarchy inside Cuban intelligence and makes clear just how high García González stands within its operational chain of command.
All of this reveals just how deeply compromised García González truly is—this so-called professor who, in reality, is a high-ranking enforcer and senior officer of Cuban intelligence, holding the military rank of Colonel—an appointment that, in every case, must first be approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. Clearly, the magnitude of García González’s role and her overtly operational conduct—in matters of espionage targeting U.S. intellectual circles and groups engaged in Fifth Column activity within the United States—cannot be understated.
Ivette García González, Abel Enrique González Santamaría, and Carlos Alzugaray Treto operated within the aforementioned “Raúl Roa García” Higher Institute of International Relations (ISRI), an institution designed for the training and potential recruitment of Cuban diplomatic personnel.
FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERISTY (FIU):
Ivette García González actively participated in the Thirteenth Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, organized by the Cuban Research Institute (CRI) at Florida International University’s Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs, held virtually via Zoom from February 2–4, 2022. Far from a neutral academic gathering, the conference functioned as a regime-aligned forum—amplifying voices and narratives that served Havana’s interests.
In Panel 7, García González presented her paper, “Reform or Transform? Currents of Thought and Political Options Amid Cuba’s Current Crisis,” representing the Institute of History of Cuba—an institution tightly controlled by Cuban intelligence.
The event convened a roster of prominent “academics”—many widely believed to function as academic agents serving the regime in Havana—including Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Eliana Rivero, Silvia Pedraza, Susan Eckstein, Isabel Álvarez Borland, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Guillermo Grenier, María de los Ángeles Torres, Margalit Bejarano, Dagoberto Valdés, Manuel Cuesta Morúa, Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, Pavel Vidal, Ted Henken, Coco Fusco, Tania Bruguera, Lillian Guerra, Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, and Armando Chaguaceda, among others. In practice, this FIU-hosted event provided cover and legitimacy for regime-linked figures to shape narratives within U.S. academic and policy circles.
READ: ROGER STONE EXPOSES REP. CARLOS GIMÉNEZ FOR SHIELDING CUBAN INTELLIGENCE PRESENCE AT FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
CASA-CUBA:
Beyond Portugal, Ivette García González has played a key role in exporting Castroism across Latin America. She has served as a coordinator of indoctrination and student exchange programs, including CASA-CUBA, designed to bring young Americans to Cuba under the guise of academic exchanges. Far from being cultural dialogue, these programs function as channels of influence, indoctrination, and recruitment in favor of Cuban intelligence.
ARCHIPIÉLAGO:
Following the July 11, 2021 nationwide protests in Cuba—when thousands took to the streets across the island—Ivette García González repositioned herself as a “critical” intellectual operating within opposition-adjacent spaces. She joined Archipiélago—a short-lived, regime-tolerated online “opposition” group that functioned as a controlled outlet for dissent. Within it, she served as both member and moderator, later chairing the Commission for the group’s international representation (2021) and heading the Independent Commission to Support the 15N Protesters—a movement that called for nationwide demonstrations on November 15, 2021.
These activities cultivated the appearance of an opposition profile, even as her trajectory remained tethered to regime-sanctioned structures.
The reality is that Archipiélago was an operation orchestrated by Cuban intelligence—designed and created to stifle grassroots momentum and redirect genuine dissent into channels the regime could monitor, anticipate operationally, and shut down whenever deemed convenient.
CUBA PRÓXIMA AND CUBA EN FAMILIA:
In parallel, Ivette García González joined the board of the Cuban intelligence think tank Cuba Próxima, serving as one of its ideologues, and coordinated Cuba En Familia—a platform marketed as connecting Cuban exiles with the families of political prisoners in the island, but in practice weaponized to census, catalog, and organize those relatives under the guise of “assistance.”
Beyond its surveillance function, Cuba En Familia also operated as a financial control mechanism, where exiles were incentivized to “adopt” a political prisoner or their family in order to send them money—a cash flow that always remained under the strict supervision of the intelligence apparatus. Behind the façade of “humanitarian assistance,” it was a classic Cuban intelligence program designed to control both the exiles and the relatives on the island, as well as to secure hard currency.
FROM INTELLIGENCE COLONEL TO MANUFACTURED DISSIDENT AND CHIEF IDEOLOGUE OF THE CONTROLLED “OPPOSITION”
At the “Raúl Roa García” Higher Institute of International Relations (ISRI), Ivette García González’s authored course books remain available, not just preserved but mandatory reading for “diplomatic career studies.” In a country notorious for erasing inconvenient traces, the regime’s decision to keep her works in circulation underscores her enduring position within the apparatus.
Today, García González seeks to reinvent herself as a “dissident” voice—participating in platforms such as Cuba Próxima (a Cuban intelligence think tank) and chairing initiatives like Cuba En Familia (a Cuban intelligence front disguised as a humanitarian project). But her true record tells another story: a trafficker of doctors, a promoter of modern slavery, an apologist for convicted spies responsible for the killing of U.S. civilians, a communist indoctrinator of foreign youth, an enforcer of Havana’s propaganda machine, and a Cuban intelligence colonel.
Far from retreating, she has embedded herself in civil society and academic circles, recently attaching her name to organizations such as the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL), an NGO and think tank based in Argentina. In practice, CADAL has become her international platform of legitimization, a space from which García González projects herself as an intellectual and even as an “opposition” figure, despite her record as an operative of the regime.
LA JOVEN CUBA:
Ivette García González also serves as project coordinator of La Joven Cuba, where she contributes as a writer while overseeing the project’s direction.
Strikingly, the first logo of La Joven Cuba was designed by Cuban spy Gerardo Hernández Nordelo—one of the infamous “Cuban Five,” the spy ring we discussed earlier—who was convicted in the United States of espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, and providing intelligence that led to the shoot-down of civilian planes flown by Brothers to the Rescue. After his release and return to Havana, Hernández Nordelo was rewarded with a senior post as national coordinator of Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR)—the regime’s domestic mass surveillance network. That La Joven Cuba proudly adopted his design is no coincidence, but a clear marker of the project’s alignment with Cuba’s intelligence and ideological propaganda machinery.
Before moving to the United States in 2017, the current director of La Joven Cuba, Harold Cárdenas Lema, managed the opinion section (“blogs”) of El Toque—another digital media outlet in Cuba that presents itself as independent but in practice operates within boundaries strategically tolerated by the regime. Cárdenas Lema held this position for several years and, during that time, maintained a long and close friendship with its director, José Jasán Nieves, a link to Cuban intelligence.
Both La Joven Cuba and El Toque became some of the strongest defenders of the Cuban regime’s introduction of gender ideology in the 2019 Constitution and the 2022 Family Code—a law marketed as “progressive” but in practice designed to entrench state control over family and social life. At the same time, like much of the so-called “independent” media, they vilified the evangelical movement, which had led the largest civic mobilization against state policies in recent Cuban history.
One contributor to both outlets (La Joven Cuba and El Toque), Miguel Alejandro Hayes Martínez, even went so far as to justify “the operations of State Security organs” against Cuban journalists whose platforms received U.S. federal funding—until he later joined one himself: Martí Noticias.
Today, La Joven Cuba is under serious scrutiny due to its documented ties to the Havana regime. Journalist Mario J. Pentón denounced the platform as a regime mouthpiece in a Facebook post, citing a scripted interview designed to legitimize the Cuban dictatorship.
Former collaborator Laura Vargas also went public, revealing that Cuban State Security deliberately allowed La Joven Cuba to publish messaging that appeared unauthorized—even openly critical of the regime—precisely to reinforce its image as “independent.” These critiques, however, were carefully limited; focusing on safe, regime-approved targets such as bureaucratic inefficiency, low-level corruption, or policy mismanagement—but never touched the Communist Party of Cuba or the Party’s top leaders, the military, or the intelligence services.
In reality, this tolerance was calculated. By allowing a controlled dose of dissent, the regime strengthened La Joven Cuba’s façade of independence, while at the same time ensuring that the digital outlet remained firmly under its control.
Taken together, La Joven Cuba and El Toque illustrate how Havana has perfected the model of controlled opposition and covert influence. Marketed abroad as “independent” media platforms, in practice they operate as extensions of Cuban intelligence, carefully calibrated to serve the regime’s strategic interests.
Through these outlets, Havana has been able to infiltrate academic and policy circles in the United States and Latin America, shape international narratives in its favor, delegitimize genuine grassroots opposition, and reframe dissent into sanitized forms the regime can monitor and manipulate.
By maintaining the façade of diversity of thought while ensuring loyalty to the dictatorship’s red lines—and even branding themselves with symbols created by convicted spies now rewarded with senior positions in Cuba’s surveillance state—La Joven Cuba and El Toque function as twin pillars of Cuba’s modern propaganda machine: a dual strategy of persuasion and control, designed not to inform, but to contain.
NOW IN THE U.S. — SEEKING ASYLUM
As of early 2023, Ivette García González resides in the United States, where she is seeking asylum and spending considerable time in New Mexico and Texas.
The questions are unavoidable:
How is it possible that Ivette García González—a trafficker of doctors, promoter of modern slavery, apologist for convicted spies responsible for the deaths of American civilians, communist indoctrinator of foreign youth, enforcer of Havana’s propaganda machine, regime diplomat embedded within the ISRI, and a colonel in Cuban intelligence—has been granted entry into and legitimacy within the United States?
Why was Ivette García González not vetted by the U.S. government? Or rather: why was she admitted into the United States after being fully vetted?
Who signed off on Ivette García González’s visa?
Do you really believe the Biden State Department—which ultimately approved Ivette García González’s visa—believed she was merely a harmless, inoffensive “academic”? Or rather: why did they knowingly authorize her mission for Havana under the cover of the Center for Democracy in the Americas (CEDA) or the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), both long-standing regime-friendly fronts in Washington?
What role did Emily Mendrala—former Executive Director of CEDA, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs (where she covered Cuba and regional migration), former Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor on Migration at the White House, and close ally of former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken—play in facilitating Ivette García González’s entry to the United States?
What role did María José Espinosa Carrillo—Executive Director of CEDA at the time of Ivette García González’s entry to the United States, who during her tenure led efforts to promote U.S. policies of engagement with Cuba, including more than twenty bipartisan congressional delegations to Cuba—play in facilitating García González’s entry to the United States?
Why has Ivette García González not been denounced, investigated, or deported by U.S. authorities?
Why does the silence surrounding Ivette García González persist among U.S. elected officials, many of them Cuban-American, who parade themselves as champions for a free Cuba? Why have Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, Rep. María Elvira Salazar, and Rep. Carlos Giménez chosen silence?
The answer is obvious when you consider Rep. Giménez’s track record of shielding Cuban intelligence infiltration at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, as well as safeguarding Crowley—a Department of Defense contractor that operates under Cuban military supervision and has bankrolled Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart’s political career. Both Congressmen talk a big game but consistently lie about their actions and look the other way.
Why has Coco Fariñas—who still lives in Cuba and is regarded as a politically persecuted freedom fighter—openly admitted in an X Space this year that Ivette García González is a “graduated intelligence official,” while also asserting that Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart and Rep. María Elvira Salazar have known about the national security threat her penetration into the United States poses?
Why does the silence regarding Ivette García González persist even among so-called “opposition leaders” such as Rosa María Payá (Cuba Decide)—ironically nominated by the United States and elected to serve as Commissioner on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a post she currently holds—and Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, the latter tied to the previously mentioned Cuban intelligence think tank Cuba Próxima, on whose board García González serves?
Why do “independent” Cuban media outlets, particularly those claiming to fight the regime, uniformly avoid mentioning Ivette García González altogether? Why are they forbidden from exposing this longtime Cuban intelligence colonel now operating freely on U.S. soil?
What other intelligence projects is Ivette García González currently developing and carrying out that, if not stopped, could place our national security in even greater danger?
The Cuban Directorate of Intelligence (DGI), like intelligence services worldwide in their practice of counterintelligence deception operations, has for decades resorted to the constant reconfiguration of its covert intelligence assets and legal links—such as the case of Ivette García González—presenting them as “dissidents” in order to infiltrate and control opposition networks.
By placing García González in leadership positions within controlled “opposition” groups such as Archipiélago, La Joven Cuba, Cuba Próxima, and CADAL, the regime channels discontent into moderate, non-revolutionary currents that call for dialogue and reform—but never place the Communist Party of Cuba’s absolute grip on power.
This tactic draws on historical precedents such as the Wasp Network, allowing García González to collect human intelligence (HUMINT) on genuine dissidents, their sources of financing—including U.S. federal funds—and their alliances. Her rebranding effort goes far beyond propaganda: it enables active espionage operations, including surveilling and Counterintelligence Confrontation against exile communities, the discrediting and demoralization of hardline critics of the Cuban regime, and the manipulation of policy debates in international forums to dilute anti-Castro initiatives.
In addition, García González’s integration into key hubs where Cuban intelligence and academia converge amplifies her value as an asset by providing operational cover for long-term influence. This positioning grants her access to U.S. legislators, think tanks such as WOLA, and exile networks—under the aggressive operational façade of a “dissident academic” seeking asylum.
García González’s mission includes collecting sensitive intelligence on U.S. foreign policy strategies toward Cuba and Latin America—particularly through her connections with clandestine personnel in former socialist countries that are now far from friendly to the United States. It also encompasses monitoring the dynamics of the Cuban exile community in Miami and the U.S. national security posture. In addition, her activities involve recruiting social and ideological sympathizers and conducting Disinformation Operations favorable to the Havana regime.
The pattern is disturbingly similar to that of Carlos and Elsa Álvarez (2007), the Florida academic couple convicted of spying for Cuba while operating out of Florida International University (FIU) to conduct Enemy Activity against the security of the United States. Their modus operandi aligns closely with the current patterns of Enemy Activity exhibited by Colonel García González—who, in fact, has demonstrated an even higher level of operational intensity.
Under the façade of their professional and academic activities, Carlos and Elsa Álvarez secretly transmitted intelligence to Havana concerning Cuban exile groups, U.S. policy debates, and political attitudes—exactly the kind of cover operations that Ivette García González now conducts. Like them, García González operates within civil society and high-level academic circles in the United States, where her status as an “intellectual” provides both access and formidable cover against U.S. counterintelligence services. These are not mere political maneuvers but clear acts of Enemy Activity—prosecutable under U.S. law—including acting as an unregistered foreign agent, secretly transmitting sensitive Timely Intelligence to Havana and its officers, conducting Operational Influence campaigns through federally funded programs, and undermining U.S. national security.
The Cuban Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) relies on a sophisticated strategy of counterintelligence deception operations, both as immediate and long-term plans—leveraging the deep institutional trajectory of García González within the Cuban state to ensure absolute obedience, while simultaneously presenting her to outsiders as an “academic” or “dissident.” This dual façade grants Havana plausible deniability, enabling it to conduct high-impact ideological operations that preserve the dictatorship and fracture genuine opposition.
Given the gravity of Ivette García González’s record, her presence in the United States is not merely concerning—it represents a direct national security threat. The FBI should take immediate interest in this case. García González must not be allowed to whitewash her past under the guise of “civil society” either in the United States or abroad. She should be investigated, exposed, and—if the evidence corroborates what testimonies from Cuban and Portuguese doctors, investigations by European journalists, and her own record already indicate—prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
