Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is warning that 32 bills currently sitting before Congress amount to a socialist policy agenda he says is “straight from Castro’s playbook.”
Miyares, whose mother fled Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba in 1965 at age 19, now serves as honorary chairman of the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, a national free-market trade group. The organization has launched a “Socialism Watch” initiative to track the bills, which span healthcare, energy, labor, housing and taxation.
“The year Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, Cuba had the same GDP as Greece. The year that he died, too bad the same GDP as Sudan,” Miyares told Fox News Digital. “Socialism doesn’t work. It impoverishes every country that embraces it.”
What’s in the bills
The legislation flagged by the group includes proposals to:
- Ban fracking nationwide starting in 2029
- Prohibit greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants and restrict new liquefied natural gas infrastructure and most U.S. oil and gas exports
- Create government-backed job-guarantee programs for qualifying applicants
- Replace private health insurance with a national Medicare for All program
- Impose annual taxes on accumulated wealth, including unrealized gains
- Establish a $300 billion “Housing is a Human Right Act” that would declare shelter a government-guaranteed right and fund “social housing”
- Set up a “National Infrastructure Bank” to finance state projects
- Fund a $1.6 trillion “Green New Deal for Public Schools”
Supporters of the housing bill describe it as an effort to end homelessness. Miyares and other critics say it’s designed to push private landlords out of the market by putting the federal government in charge of housing supply. The group also warns the school infrastructure bill would shift control of local districts to Washington.
A family history in the fight
Miyares’ mother, Miriam, left nearly everything behind when she fled Cuba. Miyares has said his uncle, who opposed Castro, was arrested after the Bay of Pigs invasion and subjected to a mock execution — an experience Miyares says shaped his mother’s decision to leave.
“So many young people have forgotten really, really painful lessons of history that you cannot judge a bill or an economic system based on intentions, you have to judge it on results,” Miyares said. “What we’ve seen time and time again is socialism fails everywhere it’s been tried.”
Miyares argues these ideas are no longer confined to campus activists or online arguments — they’re written into actual bills before Congress.
“AOC joked that woke one was crazy,” Miyares said. “Well, it’s clear that woke two should belong in an insane asylum because it’s a full-blown embrace of Marxism and socialism.”
“These young people are embracing socialism thinking that it leads to helping those that are poor, disadvantaged,” Miyares said. “The reality is it does the opposite. It actually hurts the very people that it wants to help.”
