Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Mike Prysner here in studio with Abby Martin.

The U.S. government and media have been for weeks calling for regime change in Cuba because of some

anti-government protests in the country and much larger ones held in Miami.

That rhetoric has turned into action with the Biden administration increasing sanctions on the

economically besieves island and the Republicans putting forward a plan for a U.S. military invasion.

The mayor of Miami, the representative of the Cuban exile community, has gone

so far as to call for the bombing of Havana, basically calling for the Libya model to overthrow

the government. There's been a huge propaganda campaign to distort what's really happening on the

ground, led by corporate media, which across the board has been showing photos and videos of pro-government

marches claiming that they were actually anti-government marches. And that's also been

bolstered by a highly suspect emergence of thousands of social media accounts engaging in a war

to control the media online. Just days ago, Biden announced that regime change in Cuba

had become a top priority

for the administration. That's a pretty serious escalation. So to help our listeners better

sift through the propaganda, we've got a great episode for you that we hope gives you

everything you need to know. Before we introduce our guests, we wanted to remind you that we are making

this episode free for everyone because of the serious nature of the escalation and how important

it is for us to educate and mobilize others against the U.S. attacks. So if you support what we do,

help make it possible at patreon.com slash empire files and receive access to the library of patron-only

content we have there, And, of course,

there's much more to come. So I'm very happy to introduce our guest today, Gloria Lariva.

Gloria has traveled to Cuba probably more times than she can count, going very frequently

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