Cuba Tries to Pin Bob Menendez Scandal on ‘Ultraconservatives’: ‘The Most Republican Democrat’

Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, celebrated the indictment of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) in a column this weekend branding him “the most Republican Democrat” and blaming the American right for the country’s alleged “endemic impudence.”

The propaganda outlet referred to Menendez, a lifelong Democrat from one of America’s bluest states, as an “ultraconservative” and omitted the litany of corruption allegations against Democrats from its abridged history of political malfeasance in America. In a long-winded screed invoking Ulysses S. Grant, the Teapot Dome scandal, and Jeffrey Epstein, Granma also found time to spuriously accuse Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) of drug trafficking.

The state newspaper did not mention the current president of the United States, Joe Biden, in its “reporting” on the indictment whatsoever, despite the extensive list of accusations of corruption against him. Researchers and investigators have compiled a large amount of evidence that Biden and his family, most prominently son Hunter Biden, leveraged Biden’s influence in the Senate, and later as vice president and president, to secure lucrative business deals with corrupt actors worldwide, from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma to the Chinese government.

Sen. Menendez reportedly hired Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, to handle the indictment against him this weekend.

The senator and wife Nadine Menendez were indicted on Friday on charges of accepting “hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes” from several businessmen, including one tied to the government of Egypt, in exchange for access to Sen. Menendez’s power in Congress. Sen. Menendez, who faces his second indictment in eight years on charges of corruption, denied the allegations, accused prosecutors of discrimination against Hispanic Americans, and vowed, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Granma, a mouthpiece for the brutal Castro regime, did not contain its glee at Sen. Menendez’s misfortune but appeared to exonerate the Castro-friendly Democrat Party from any relationship with the proceedings.

“American political life transpires from scandal to scandal. The personalities of the empire’s ‘jet set,’ public officials and high-ranking administrators see themselves involved in endemic impudence,” the propaganda outlet narrated.

“Senator Bob Menendez, considered ‘the most Republican of Democrats,’ architect of many of the ‘initiatives’ proposed with the end of hurting Cuba, faces criminal charges presented by the Southern District of New York,” Granma celebrated, later referring to Sen. Menendez as an “ultraconservative politician implicated in a scandal with Dominican prostitutes.”

Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, speaks during a hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, March 8, 2022. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg)

Sen. Menendez faced criminal charges in 2015, which resulted in a mistrial, tied to his relationship with high-powered donor Salomon Melgen and their visits to the Dominican Republic. Melgen was sentenced to prison but former President Donald Trump commuted that sentence in 2021.

Granma attempted to collect evidence of the alleged “endemic” corruption among conservatives that Sen. Menendez represented, and had to go back to the administration of former President Ulysses S. Grant to find it.

“One of the first cases was that of Crédit Mobilier, the firm contracted to construct the Union Pacific Railroad, which used shares to bribe officials in the Ulysses S. Grant administration.”

The scandal in question occurred in 1864.

Other examples of modern-day America’s alleged decline Granma cobbled up included the Teapot Dome scandal under President Warren G. Harding, Watergate, and the Iran-Contra affair, all occurring under Republicans. Notably missing from the list were scandals under administrations run by Sen. Menendez’s party, from John F. Kennedy’s suspected mafia ties to the extensive corruption under Lyndon B. Johnson to the more modern scandals under the Clinton and Obama presidencies.

The Cuban Communist Party mouthpiece made its agenda clear by attacking the other two Cuban-American senators in Congress, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Rubio. Sen. Cruz it heckled for his notorious vacation in Cancun during a devastating winter storm in his state in 2021 – an event that did not involve any alleged corruption.

“Cruz belongs to the most conspicuous anti-Cuban lobby in the United States along with Marco Rubio,” Granma added, “the Florida senator who is suspected of having a not-very-transparent past with mafiosos and drug traffickers.”

The propaganda outlet, as it often does, did not elaborate on this accusation or offer any evidence for the claim – or tie it back to the topic of the article, Sen. Menendez, in any way.

Menendez, as well as the other Cuban-American lawmakers, have long faced similar disparaging attacks in Cuban state media due to their opposition to the corrosive rogue regime. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one of the most powerful perches in Congress, Sen. Menendez has been a vocal opponent of Democrat policies offering financial and diplomatic concessions to the brutal Castro regime in Cuba, one of the world’s most prolific human rights abusers and a decades-old threat to the national security of the United States.

Sen. Menendez notably condemned former President Barack Obama’s policies of allowing a tremendous influx of profits to the Castro regime and expanding diplomatic relations with a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism. While especially vocal on the issue of Cuba given his background as the son of Cuban refugees, Sen. Menendez has also enthusiastically opposed Democrat policies gifting billions of dollars to other rogue regimes, most prominently the Islamic theocracy in Iran.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.