The Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect (ACERE) celebrates the decision made by Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to resign from his duties in the United States Senate, effective August 20, 2024, following the verdict handed down by jurors last month finding him guilty on sixteen counts of bribery, extortion, acting as a foreign agent, obstruction of justice and conspiracy.
While Senator Menendez has vowed to appeal the verdict, and already stepped down as Chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2023, the decision to abandon his seat as he awaits sentencing follows high-profile pressure to resign from Senate Majority Leader Charles Shumer, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, fellow New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, and dozens of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate.
Well-documented, but under-emphasized, in discussions of Senator Menendez’s legacy is the outsized role he has played in the formation of U.S. policy toward Cuba throughout his three-decade career serving New Jersey in both the House of Representatives and Senate. As the most senior Cuban-American lawmaker, as well as the top Democrat in Congress for Cuba policy issues, Senator Menendez has wielded his hardline stance on Cuba to consistently torpedo administration efforts to improve bilateral relations and ease outdated restrictions hurting the Cuban people and U.S. interests.
Menendez was first elected to Congress in 1992 with the generous support of one of his top campaign contributors, Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the influential pro-embargo lobbying organization, the Cuban-American National Foundation. On the campaign trail, Menendez endorsed the Torricelli (Cuban Democracy) Act, whose author said the bill was intended to “wreak havoc on that island.” A rising star in Cuban-American politics, Menendez was a leading architect of the 1996 Helms-Burton (Libertad) Act, a cornerstone piece of legislation which codified the embargo into law, provoked outrage among major U.S. allies and continues to undergird U.S. policy toward the island to this day.
In 2000, Congressman Menendez was a leading advocate to grant U.S. citizenship to the Cuban boy, Elián González, over whom the Clinton administration had to forcibly take custody in order to return him to his father in Cuba, a decision two-thirds of Americans supported. And in 2002, Menendez backed Under Secretary of State John Bolton’s unverified claims that Cuba was developing a biological weapons program, which have since been thoroughly disproven.
After the 2008 recession, Senator Menendez threatened to hold up President Obama’s federal stimulus package over minor Cuba-related provisions regarding trade and travel, forcing the administration to promise to narrowly interpret the language to secure Menendez’s vote.
In 2013, leading pro-embargo lobbyist Mauricio Claver-Carone, who five years later would become the architect of Trump’s “maximum pressure” Cuba policy, called Senator Menendez—to whom his PAC donated tens of thousands of dollars—“one of the most principled people” he knows.
When President Obama announced the landmark decision in December 2014 to normalize relations with Cuba and roll back elements of the embargo, Senator Menendez did not hesitate to express his opposition and disparage his colleagues for supporting the administration’s move. Menendez condemned Obama for “bypassing the law and the U.S. Congress” and lobbied the administration to not remove Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list. He similarly slammed Obama’s 2016 visit to the island—the first of a sitting U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge—and applauded President Trump for swiftly reversing many of Obama’s signature Cuba policies.
More recently, Senator Menendez has taken credit for preventing President Biden from returning to President Obama’s historic policy of normalization of relations with Cuba. He told a local media outlet that he didn’t want President Biden making any decisions about Cuba without first consulting him, and claimed that if it weren’t for Cuban-American politicians like him, U.S. policy toward Cuba would likely look very different. Miami political operative and Menendez ally Marcell Felipe went even further, claiming that the Biden administration was preparing to announce a series of Cuba policy measures within the first thirty days of taking office, which Senator Menendez used his influence to effectively “block.”
Furthermore, sources directly involved with negotiations tell ACERE that a deal had to be struck with Senator Menendez—including contributions to his campaign—in order to push through the Biden administration’s May 2022 policy announcement expanding travel and remittances to Cuba—promises Biden had made on the 2020 campaign trail.
And just last year, Senator Menendez wrote to the administration urging it to not lift sanctions on Cuba in response to a letter from 21 House Democrats asking Biden to do so because they are contributing to an unprecedented surge in irregular migration to the U.S.-Mexico border, which was later corroborated by over 50 leading economists.
Menendez’s most recent scandal was certainly not his first. In 1987, as mayor of Union City, NJ, Menendez donated to the legal defense fund of Cuban-American domestic terrorist Eduardo Arocena, the kingpin of Omega 7, which the FBI called at the time the most dangerous terrorist organization in the United States.
The following day, Menendez said that eight years earlier he had also contributed to the legal defense of Guillermo and Ignacio Novo and Alvin Ross, convicted (yet later acquitted) for masterminding the 1976 murder in Washington D.C. of former Chilean ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier.
In 2001, a scandal erupted in Hudson County, NJ after the mayor of Jersey City, Glenn Cunningham, called Congressman Menendez a “political terrorist,” echoing the sentiments of other Black local political leaders, to which Menendez responded that “the days of bossism are over.”
In 2002, Congressman Menendez introduced legislation and testified at a Senate hearing to delay a telecommunications merger that would negatively impact Spanish Broadcasting Systems Inc (SBS)— owned by a major donor and friend of his, Raul Alarcón Jr.—while failing to disclose that he owned thousands of dollars in SBS stock.
In 2006, a federally-funded nonprofit in New Jersey was issued a subpoena by Governor Chris Christie because Congressman Menendez had collected over $300,000 in rent from the group for over a decade while helping it obtain millions of dollars in funding, leading to suggestions of a quid pro quo, even as Menendez argued the lease agreement was approved by House Ethics lawyers.
In 2012, a pair of Menendez donors were convicted of devising a strawman network to illicitly contribute nearly $100,000 to the Senator in violation of federal campaign finance law, about which Menendez “inappropriately” inquired at the Department of Justice, according to officials.
In 2018, Senator Menendez was admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee, although acquitted by a hung jury, after being accused of doing official favors for a wealthy donor—including intervening in a Medicare billing dispute, aiding in lucrative contracts abroad and securing visas for foreign girlfriends—in exchange for lavish gifts and hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions.
Without a doubt, ACERE recognizes that Senator Menendez has made significant contributions to countless domestic legislative initiatives to the benefit of the undocumented community, uninsured individuals, children with disabilities, constituents affected by natural disasters, among other historically marginalized constituencies—and for those reasons, ACERE thanks Senator Menendez for his service.
Yet given the recent conviction—along with his history of questionable ethical decisions and disproportionate role in maintaining a universally-repudiated policy toward the island of his parents’ birth—ACERE welcomes his announcement to step aside from the United States Senate as he awaits sentencing in late October.
