The Trump administration released a report yesterday alleging that a decades-long Cuban influence campaign in the United States has had “remarkable success” by infiltrating “the highest levels of the American government,” supporting “left-wing terrorism on American soil” and turning “the United States against itself.” The 100-page report, published by the State Department and titled Cuba: The Communism Capital of the 21st Century, summarizes decades of subversive Cold War plots by the eimpoverished Caribbean island, which coincided with years of efforts covert and unsuccessful efforts by the United States to behead its communist government.
The report also makes sweeping accusations against left-wing American groups, including the Democratic Socialists of America, a growing activist organization that supports several Democratic lawmakers, in a section on “front groups and sympathizers.” It suggests that Cuba has influenced recent political unrest in the United States, including “the George Floyd riots and the rise of Antifa,” referring to the protests that began after Floyd’s murder and a loosely structured movement of far-left activists who militantly oppose fascism.
The threat posed by Cuba is described in terms far more alarming than those used by US intelligence officials and State Department diplomats for several decades, reigniting speculation that the Trump administration andis creating a pretext to overthrow the communist government in Havanaa goal that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has pursued for a long time. “Since its first years in power, the Cuban regime has believed that its own survival and strategic interests were intrinsically linked to the advance of the revolutionary left within the United States,” the report states.
“Cubans trained and armed tens of thousands of leftist guerrillas, oversaw violent insurgencies that plunged several continents into chaos, and supported deadly extremist attacks across the United States.” The reference apparently alludes to Cuban support for leftist revolutions in Latin America and Africa, mainly in the 1970s and early 1980s. During that period, at the behest of the Soviet Union, then its main ally, Havana sent its military forces to Angola and Ethiopia to support Marxist groups favored by Moscow.
The release of the report received support from some Republican lawmakers. Rubio has already emerged as the de facto leader of US policy towards Venezuela, another socialist Latin American state, following the US military operation in January to arrest its president, Nicolás Maduro. “Cuba is next!” wrote Rep. Carlos A. Giménez, R-Fla., on
Last month, Trump told reporters that Cuba had “collapsed” and that he would take care of the matter as soon as his government got over the war in Iran. “As soon as we finish, we will make a brief stop on the way back,” he said, without detailing the plan. Although the State Department report recognizes the difficult economic situation of Cubaattempts to give current relevance to the history of its revolutionary origins. “Cubans dedicated themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals and political groups around this cause, building an extensive revolutionary network that disproportionately influenced the most famous and influential extremist movements in the United States, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground to Antifa,” the report states.
“Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful left-wing nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.” The report exhaustively details the history of alleged Cuban conspiracies against the United States, frequently referencing now-defunct leftist groups that reached their peak more than 50 years ago. It contains some new allegations, including what it describes as a plan by a Cuban activist group to attack US military facilities and immigration detention centers. If the United States moves toward military conflictciting a document stating that the plan was to “make it politically and materially costly for the US government to wage war against Cuba.”
The State Department said the National Network on Cuba activist group is a key partner of the Havana-based Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (Icap), an “international solidarity” group founded in 1960. The US government announced sanctions against Icap last month, alleging that it supported “Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence activities.” The report also alleges Cuban support for the Democratic Socialists of America, a political movement whose members, such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have held positions of influence in the Democratic Party.
The report notes that, although the democratic socialists are a spontaneous group, they have traveled to Cuba in delegations linked to Icap and other groups recently sanctioned by the State Department. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who immigrated to the United States before the 1958 revolution, has campaigned against the communist government in Havana since his time as a senator.
Since taking over as head of the State Department last year, he has overseen the expansion of the sanctions policy against Cuba, a measure that his critics say would worsen the island’s economic crisis.
Last week, Rubio hosted a ministerial event at the State Department in which he sought to drum up support for what he described as a resurgence of “far-left political terrorism.” At that event, he told the foreign officials gathered there that Cuba’s “extensive ideological and intelligence network contributed to the consolidation of the extreme left in our country and in our hemisphere.”