Danny Valdez, a friend and adviser to socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, met with Cuba’s president during a luxury visit to the communist country, where the delegation discussed challenging US policy toward the island, according to a travel diary obtained by The Post after it was deleted.
Valdez, who hosted a fundraiser for Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral campaign, traveled to Cuba with members of the Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee from Oct. 22 to Oct. 26, 2023. His account appeared in a Nov. 9, 2023, blog post titled “The Cuba Diaries.”
On the third day of the trip, the delegation met with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel to discuss efforts to end the US embargo, which has been in place since 1962, three years after Fidel Castro established a communist dictatorship on the island, Valdez wrote.
“It was genuinely a big accomplishment for our delegation that this meeting took place,” Valdez said. “It was a sign that the Cuban government took our organization seriously and saw us as potential partners in the work of ending the US blockade.”
During the meeting, Díaz-Canel criticized the economic restrictions imposed by the United States.
“No other country has to operate under such conditions. Vietnam and China are not under blockade, and are able to develop their approach to socialism,” Díaz-Canel said, according to Valdez.
Valdez and the other members of the delegation have not been accused of criminal wrongdoing in connection with the visit.
A group photograph from the trip shows Valdez smiling beside Díaz-Canel, who became Cuba’s first non-Castro leader in more than six decades after Fidel Castro’s brother, Raúl, stepped down in 2021.
In April 2026, Valdez founded Cuban Americans for Cuba, a nonprofit organization that campaigns for an end to the US embargo.
“We are Cuban Americans united by a common goal: to end the US embargo on Cuba,” the group’s website states.
DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique also appears beside Díaz-Canel in the photograph published on Valdez’s blog.
During the visit, Valdez, Siddique and other DSA members stayed at the Grand Aston Havana, a privately owned five-star hotel with 600 rooms, a rooftop pool, spa, bars and restaurants.
“We undoubtedly had an abnormally luxurious experience of Cuba,” Valdez wrote. “We were driven around in a large air-conditioned bus. We had ample access to food and water. Our hotel was sleek and modern, with a rooftop pool, a gym, and a full bar at our disposal.”
Valdez said the hotel appeared to “hoard food,” contrasting the group’s comfortable accommodations with scenes of people going hungry and buildings he described as resembling structures that had been “bombed out.”
He also highlighted the hotel’s “welcome cocktail,” which he described as a “sweet, blue concoction with rum in it.”
The delegation ate at several of Cuba’s leading restaurants before ending the trip at La Torre, an upscale restaurant on the 33rd floor of Havana’s landmark Focsa building.
According to the “Ninth Study on Social Rights,” published in August by the Spain-based Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, 94% of Cubans live in extreme poverty, while eight in 10 people on the island reportedly skip meals each day.
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Valdez, who mounted a brief campaign for New York City Council in District 3, which includes the West Village and Chelsea, said in a 2025 DSA candidate questionnaire that he advised Mamdani on Cuba policy.
He also described his relationship with Mamdani in an X post published in November 2025.
“Almost a year ago, we hosted a small fundraiser in our living room for a friend, organizer, and socialist in office running what felt like a long-shot campaign for mayor,” Valdez wrote.
Valdez, who lived in a Chelsea apartment until 2025, works as an information technology lead for science education nonprofit BioBus, according to his LinkedIn. It is unclear where he resides currently.
His family fled Cuba following the communist overthrow of the island, but Valdez seemed to bend over backwards to justify the Cuban regime’s horrific human rights abuses – including the imprisonment of his own grandfather.
“Of course I wish that the Cuban government did not resort to the type of political repression that led to my grandfather being jailed for six years,” he wrote, adding, “But wishes do not make political reality.”
He rattled off a litany of gripes against the US policy toward Cuba, which he claimed forced the communist regime to govern as if it is in a “constant state of war.”
“When one understands where the aggression in this conflict originates, and appreciates the scale at which a war is indeed being waged against Cuba, it is difficult not to side with Cuba,” he added.
Valdez, who did not respond to The Post’s request for comment, even goes so far as to defend Cuba’s Committee for the Defense of Revolution (CDR), a Gestapo-like outfit that surveils neighborhoods and disappears anyone deemed a threat to the regime.
He credited the CDR with building a “thriving community” that was enriching the lives of children, despite admitting that the CDR was responsible for his grandfather’s arrest.
The DSA delegation met with numerous high-profile Cuban political figures during their four-day long jaunt, including Fidel Castro’s niece, Mariela Castro, at the island’s National Center for Sex Education.
There she regaled the crowd of socialists with the tale of how she established a “National Day Against Homophobia.”
When the date she selected, May 17, coincided with the already established “Farmers Day,” Castro ran into a roadblock, but managed to remedy the situation by combining the two as “Farmers Against Homophobia Day.”
In August, the DSA released a tribute to “100 Years of Fidel [Castro],” who crushed dissent and drove the economy on the lush tropical island into ruin.
“Fidel was an organizer, a fighter, and endures as a stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination for the Global South,” the statement said, without mentioning Cuban political prisoners.
Valdez confirmed the trip to The Post and that he met with Cuba’s president. He also said that he advised Mamdani on Cuba policy during his mayoral campaign ahead a September 2025 appearance on “The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos” podcast.
He said he and the DSA traveled to Cuba to “challenge the blockade” and “affirm our position that we do not support the general policies the US has toward Cuba.”
Siddique did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.