A new report claims Havana influenced “the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa” and accuses the Democratic Socialists of America of Cuba ties.
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The Trump administration issued a report on Monday alleging that a multi-decade Cuban influence campaign in the United States has had “remarkable success” in infiltrating “the highest reaches of the U.S. government,” backing “left-wing terrorism on American soil” and turning “America against itself.”
The 100-page report, released by the State Department and titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” summarizes decades of Cold War-era subversion plots by the impoverished Caribbean island that coincided with years of unsuccessful covert U.S. efforts to decapitate its communist government.
The report also makes pointed claims against left-wing American groups, listing the Democratic Socialists of America, a rising activist organization that backs a number of Democratic lawmakers, under a section about “front groups and fellow travelers.” It suggests that Cuba has influenced recent political upheavals in the U.S., including “the George Floyd riots and the rise of Antifa,” referencing the protests that began after Floyd’s killing and a loosely knit movement of far-left activists who militantly oppose fascism.
The threat posed by Cuba is described in far more dire terms than those employed by U.S. intelligence officials and State Department diplomats over several decades, reviving speculation that the Trump administration is establishing a pretext for overthrowing the communist government in Havana, a longtime goal of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“From its earliest years in power, the Cuban regime has believed that its own survival and strategic interests were inextricably linked to the advance of the revolutionary left inside the United States,” the report says. “The Cubans trained and armed tens of thousands of left-wing guerrillas, oversaw violent insurgencies that plunged multiple continents into chaos, and backed deadly extremist attacks across the United States.”
The reference is apparently to Cuban support for left-wing revolutions in Latin America and Africa, largely in the 1970s and early 1980s. During that period, at the behest of the Soviet Union, then its primary backer, Havana sent its military forces to Angola and Ethiopia to support Moscow-favored Marxist groups.
The report’s publication drew support from some Republican lawmakers. Rubio has already emerged as the de facto head of U.S. policy toward Venezuela, another socialist Latin American state, after a U.S. military operation in January to arrest its president, President Nicolás Maduro.
“Cuba is next!” Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (R-Florida) wrote on X.
The ominous words of the report stand in contrast to the way President Donald Trump has talked about the economically devastated island, which has been under a 60-year U.S. economic embargo and a six-month-long U.S. naval oil blockade as its national electricity grid has repeatedly gone dark in this summer’s sweltering heat. Trump told reporters last month that Cuba had “sort of collapsed” and that he would “handle” it as soon as his government moves on from the war in Iran.
“As soon as that’s done, on our way back, we’ll just make a little brief stop,” he said, without spelling out a plan.
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While the State Department report acknowledges Cuba’s troubled economic situation, it attempts to bring modern-day relevance to its revolutionary origin story.
“The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to antifa,” the report says. “Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”
The report goes into great detail about the history of alleged Cuban plots against the U.S., often referring to now-defunct left-wing groups that saw their height of relevance more than 50 years ago.
It contains some new allegations, including what it describes as a plan by a Cuban activist group to target U.S. military sites and immigration detention facilities if the U.S. moves toward military conflict, citing a document that states the plan was to “make it politically and materially costly for the U.S. government to wage war on Cuba.”
The State Department said the activist group, the National Network on Cuba, is a key counterpart of the Havana-based Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) — an “international solidarity” group founded in 1960. The U.S. government announced sanctions on 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 that has seen such members as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani assume positions of influence in the Democratic Party. The report states that while the democratic socialists are an organic group, they have traveled to Cuba in delegations that were linked to ICAP and other groups recently sanctioned by the State Department.
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants to the U.S. who left before the 1958 revolution, has campaigned against the communist government in Havana since his time as a senator. Since becoming leader of the State Department last year, he has overseen an expansion of the sanctions policy targeting Cuba, a move that critics said would worsen the island’s economic crisis.
Rubio last week hosted a ministerial event at the State Department during which he sought to rally support for what he described a resurgence of “far-left political terrorism.” At that event, he told the assembled foreign officials that Cuba’s “sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere.”
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