The Props Come Down

As seen on “Just the News, No Noise” with John Solomon and Amanda Head Tuesday, September 22nd.

Cuba’s power grid collapsed again on Friday, at least the sixth time this year. Four days later, President Trump told the UN General Assembly the island is a failed state that will fall, and the Cuban delegation walked out. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a Cuban exile’s daughter, told hosts John Solomon and Amanda Head Tuesday on “Just the News, No Noise” that the president “was 100% accurate.” The island failed because of communism, not Washington, she argued, and the patrons who kept the regime upright are falling away.

“As somebody who still has relatives on the island, it is dismal. It is misery,” she said. The government’s own statistics office acknowledged in 2024 that Cuba had lost a tenth of its population since 2020. “They have bare shelves, and it’s not because of the United States of America, as Ilhan Omar and many of her socialist allies would say. It is because communism simply does not work.”

“Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — all friends of the Cuban regime,” Malliotakis said. A Jan. 29 executive order declared a national emergency over Cuba and threatened tariffs on its oil suppliers, and since U.S. forces deposed Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump has ruled that no Venezuelan oil goes to Cuba. The rest, she said, are spent: “Venezuela no longer is doing it. Iran doesn’t have the money or the capabilities to do it. China, they’re struggling themselves economically, so it is all taking a toll on the island nation.”

Havana has lost a patron before. When Soviet subsidies vanished in 1991, the economy shrank by about 35 percent and blackouts became routine, until Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela agreed in 2000 to ship some 100,000 barrels a day. No Chávez is coming this time.

Her remedy is the one applied to Moscow, where by her count every NATO ally but Turkey has imposed sanctions. Allies who keep doing business with Havana must understand, she said, “that money does not get to the people; it gets to the regime.” The endgame: “We need to drive this regime out. We need free market, free elections, and freedom for its people, of course, and free press.”

Havana meanwhile holds a seat on the UN Human Rights Council through 2026; the United States withdrew in February 2025, saying the council shields abusers. “They jail, they beat, they even murder their own citizens, and they’re on the Human Rights Council. Give me a break.”

Venezuela is her case study. In 2004, Hugo Chávez’s legislative majority expanded the supreme court from 20 to 32 justices, which by her telling is how it took complete control. “They took over the oil fields in Venezuela. They took over the electric grid in Cuba. What has that gotten them? Rolling power outages.”

Tuesday’s other deal was Greenland: two new U.S. bases, at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig, under an agreement that bars non-NATO bases on the island. Malliotakis, who applauded it, sees minerals as well as missiles: “Making this deal where Russia and China will be prohibited from a military standpoint and a critical mineral standpoint is such a big deal for us.”

Her last subject was her oldest cause, animal testing; she convened industry, the FDA and animal advocates, she said, and all agreed the method is antiquated. This week HHS said NIH has closed its last intramural beagle laboratory and the FDA has struck animal-testing language from its rules, and USDA reported 19 dog-breeder licenses denied, terminated, suspended or revoked this year. “It’s a great week for animal welfare, quite frankly.”

Six decades of revolution have produced bare shelves, dark nights and an exodus; her prescription is to stop paying the regime’s bills and let the failure finish its work. “The Cuban people have suffered for over 60 years, and they are so hungry for freedom,” she said. “And we’re hopeful that it will come with this president and this secretary of state.”