Vic Mellor’s ‘Rhode Island First’ Has a Cuba problem

Mellor’s campaign puts it this way: Trillions in foreign investment are pouring into the country, and none of it is reaching Rhode Island because nobody in the state’s delegation is on speaking terms with the Trump administration. He knows people there, so he’ll bring some of it home. Call it patronage. Call it “Rhode Island First.” It is a campaign suited to the times.

Unsurprisingly, there is a grubby detail: are a few grubby details. Mellor, a close associate of retired General Michael Flynn, is a registered foreign agent of communist Cuba.

In late May he traveled to the island, ostensibly to deliver humanitarian supplies, and had two long dinners with Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl “Raulito” Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, who runs the regime’s General Directorate of Personal Security. On June 6 Mellor flew to Havana again. The trips, first reported by USA Today, raised the obvious question of whether he was there in some official capacity. A spokesperson for the State Department was blunt: He “is not authorized to speak on behalf of the United States government and is not involved in anything the administration is doing.”

Mellor initially told USA Today he had gone at the urging of the Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce — a curious claim, since its members are barred from dealing with anyone tied to the Castro regime. The Chamber’s response was unequivocal: It “did not in any way endorse or urge Mr. Vic Mellor’s trip to Cuba,” said a spokesperson.

Both the administration and the Chamber disavowed him. So if the trips were not on their behalf, why the meetings with Castro’s grandson?

Mellor later offered another explanation: He had gone simply as a private citizen — a salesman for Rhode Island — pursuing business opportunities for the day Cuba opened up.

“There’s a massive opportunity for Rhode Island in Cuba,” he said. “At some point they are going to open up for business, and I leveraged my connections down in South Florida to get on the island … and I’ve made some great connections there.”

His Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, submitted a week after the State Department’s statement, undercut the pure salesman story.

FARA, passed in 1938 as German propaganda circulated in the United States, requires anyone working in the United States on behalf of a foreign government to register with the Justice Department and disclose what they’re doing. It doesn’t prohibit the work. It just makes it public, on the premise that Americans should know when someone shaping their politics is doing it for a foreign principal.

An attachment to one of Mellor’s filings is a nine-page teaching document that instructs the operators of a social media account called “CubanConversation” on how to argue about Cuba with Americans. It lists “five disciplines” for every response. One is never to use the other side’s vocabulary — “regime,” “dictator,” “failed state” — because that cedes the framing battle.

The document then applies the method to an X post by Republican Representative Carlos Giménez of Florida, the only Cuban-born member of Congress, who had pressed the administration to close an embargo loophole, tagging the accounts of Republican Representatives María Elvira Salazar and Mario Díaz-Balart, both of Florida. It analyzes why the post is effective and supplies three suggested replies.

I asked the Mellor campaign what purpose this material served. I received no reply.

After reading the document, the State Department’s disavowal looks less like simple distancing and more like a line being drawn. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spent his career advocating maximum pressure on the Castro regime — precisely the position the teaching document targets.

Mellor’s decision to file under FARA one week after the State Department’s statement also reads differently: Was he converting an exposed relationship into a declared one?

Mellor maintains the registration was a voluntary transparency measure, that he took no compensation, and that he was simply positioning Rhode Island for future trade. Those claims are on the record. They do not erase the filings or the teaching document.

Rhode Island voters deserve clearer answers before the Republican primary on Sept. 8.

For instance, federal law bars sitting members of Congress from acting as agents of a foreign principal. Would Mellor withdraw the registrations if he won — and does he see any conflict in the first place?

Also, why do his FARA filings list Florida as his state of residence and not Rhode Island, which he instead listed as his “business address”?

And perhaps most importantly, what does helping the Cuban government win arguments with elected American officials have to do with the people of Rhode Island?

After all, aren’t they the ones Mellor is supposedly putting “first”?