Maria Elvira Salazar, famed journalist for Univision, is now running her bid to replace Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Congress, and Salazar also happens to be the frontrunner to do so in the Republican primaries.
However, she’s facing attacks for an interview she had with Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro 20 years ago that has resurfaced in a new hit piece from Stephen Marks, a Republican opponent also running for the Republican nomination. Because of cordial exchanges with Castro during their talk, opponents are painting her as a communist sympathizer, and this could be hurtful to a campaign looking to represent a district that’s home to 280,000 Cubans and where Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban-American elected to Congress, was the representative.
In response to the attacks, Salazar explains to WPLG that she has “been one of the staunchest, most hardest critics of the Cuban revolution on the air, and for this guy to come on the air and say I’m a Communist, I am livid. Not only because it’s conniving, because it’s not true. It’s manipulated. That video has been manipulated.”
Instead, she argues that she was acting as an impartial journalist when conducting the interview.