Cuban-Born Actress Maria Conchita Alonso: Biden Administration Deserting Cubans

The Biden administration warned Cubans against coming to America after taking to the streets in unprecedented fashion to protest the Cuban communist dictatorship and its policies that have impoverished citizens and robbed them of basic freedoms. Cuban-born actress Maria Conchita Alonso fired back, highlighting the hypocrisy of those who seek to quell the protests, suggesting those who hate the U.S. move to Cuba instead.

On Tuesday, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas delivered a warning directly to Cubans who may be considering escaping the current chaos in Cuba. 

“Allow me to be clear, if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,” he said. “Again, I repeat, do not risk your life attempting to enter the United States illegally. You will not come to the United States.”

Appearing on Steve Malzberg’s weekly Sunday commentary show Eat the Press, the Grammy-nominated singer-actress activist responded by claiming it is no surprise.

“I’m not surprised about it because [the Biden administration is] friends with the regime in Cuba,” she said. 

“I’ve seen videos of them [former Obama-Biden administration officials] partying in Cuba, going to baseball games — they’re friends,” she added. “They’re not going to help the Cuban people who are out there, not demanding (like some in the press and others have said) the vaccines for the COVID, but demanding, finally, their freedom.”

Alonso then proposed why she believes such protests have begun to take root recently.

“Because the new generation in Cuba has not been attacked mentally as much as the older generation, so they see what’s going on in the world,” she explained.

“They want their freedom, they want to be able to eat, they want to be able to choose what to do with their lives, to read whatever they want to read,” she added. 

She also mocked those who blame Cuba’s situation on former President Donald Trump.

“When they attack Trump, it is so funny. Really, I mean it’s sad, but it’s funny that all this is [happening] because of him,” she said, adding, “This has been going on forever.” 

She also noted that the Cuban regime has plenty of funds and a strong tourism industry as it continues doing business with countries, with the embargo only effective within the regime and Cubans suffering as a result of its corruption.

“Cuba has so much money,” she said. “There’s thousands and millions of tourists that go every [year] to Cuba.” 

“The embargo is within the Cuban regime,” she added. “[The communist regime stops] people from being human beings and having the freedom to choose what to do with their life.”

Replying to a Reuters story warning that protests in Cuba will increase the number of coronavirus cases, Alonso asserted that such was “normal from communists, from socialists.”

“They’re never gonna speak up the truth,” she said.

She then pointed to the hypocrisy of those who express support for Black Lives Matter while remaining silent as Cubans are subject to brutal treatment.

“When [George] Floyd died, when he was killed, the whole world talked about it and attacked and everything. But now when all these Cubans put their lives in danger — some of them have been killed already; they’re being tortured — no one says anything,” she said. 

She then accused the Biden administration of “helping the regime, not the Cubans.”  

“[The Biden administration] allows thousands, maybe millions, to come in [illegally] through our borders here in the states, but they won’t allow 50, maybe a hundred, that will take little boats,” she said. 

“It shows you what side they are on, and they’re not on the side of human rights and of the Cuban people,” she added.

Alonso also suggested that those who hate the USA relocate to Cuba.

“What I say sometimes is, ‘Hey, if you hate so much this country, why don’t you move to Cuba?’” she asked. 

She then highlighted the lack of gun rights entrusted to Cuban citizens.

“Cuba’s [citizens] have no guns because one of the first things that [former Cuban dictator] Fidel Castro did was he took away every single gun from every single Cuban person,” she said, “and so they are on the streets with rocks and with sticks against tanks, against everything you can imagine that governments and regimes have to attack their people.” 

“They are fighting for their freedom and asking just for the main little things to be able to survive: medicine and food,” she added.

Blasting The View’s Joy Behar for touting Cuba’s literacy program under the repressive regime, Alonso clarified the true extent of the exposure permitted to Cubans.

“When Behar talks about the literate in Cuba — ‘Everybody knows how to write and read’ — let’s just be clear about something: they only allow you to read what they want you to read,” she said. 

“The only way to control your people and brainwash them is to put on top of them everything they want you to believe is true,” she added. “So all the books they want, only the news they want, is what the Cuban people can see and can read.”

Thousands of Cubans in more than 40 provinces have been participating in the largest demonstration in decades in a call to end 62 years of abusive communist rule on the island. 

Since protests began, police have opened fire on crowds and beaten people in the streets. Independent media confirmed the arrests of at least 5,000 people since protests began, Breitbart reported. 

Current figurehead President Miguel Díaz-Canel also openly called on civilians to violently attack protesters on the streets in an “order of combat” issued late Sunday.

Alonso, best known for her roles in the films The Running Man, Predator 2, and Moscow on the Hudson, has long been a prominent conservative figure in Hollywood and has been at the forefront of public opposition to repressive socialist policies.

Born in Cuba, she fled to Venezuela at the age of five before immigrating to the United States, becoming a vocal critic of the communist dictatorships she grew up under.

In 2010, the singer led a protest against Hollywood director Oliver Stone for his propaganda film South of the Border. 

In 2011, she called actor Sean Penn a “communist a—hole” for his enthusiastic support of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez after the pair ran into each other at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). 

Later, Alonso penned an open letter to Penn, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

“Being born in Cuba, a country where freedom of speech is nonexistent, it’s startling to observe how Venezuela, where I was happily raised, is fast becoming Cuba’s mirror image: Dismantling of fundamental democratic rights deserved by its people and citizens of the world,” she wrote.

In 2012, she compared policies promoted in then-President Obama’s second term to the slow march to socialism that Venezuela experienced under the late Hugo Chavez. 

In 2014, the singer-actress lost a role in a Los Angeles production of The Vagina Monologues after filming a political ad in favor of a Tea Party candidate.

Later that year, she rallied outside the White House with dozens of other demonstrators to urge the U.S. to impose harsh sanctions on the Venezuelan government.

In 2016, she expressed strong opinions concerning then-President Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba, accusing him of “legalizing a regime that has been torturing Cubans.”

Follow Joshua Klein on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.