Cuba and the Mass-Manufacture of Enemies

The State Department’s 100-page opus, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, is less a sober intelligence assessment than a gothic novel in which a destitute Caribbean island of fewer than ten million people—crippled by chronic blackouts, food rationing, and the longest economic siege in modern history—somehow functions as the omniscient puppet-master of American radicalism.

It begins with the full-throated assertion that “for nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.” Havana, we are informed, “perfected a new model for a long war of attrition, organized around espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.” The island “became the premier safe harbor for fugitive American terrorists” and “the beating heart of a new and distinct kind of Marxism, forged around an overriding resentment and fundamental hatred of the United States and the broader West.” Its network, the report claims, “shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa,” and today still “maintains ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

The authors appear to believe that every campus teach-in, every legal-observer neon hat, every caravan of medical supplies, and every DSA chapter meeting is a carefully calibrated node in Castro’s still-living brain. The sheer scale of the fantasy is impressive. A regime that cannot reliably keep the lights on in Havana is simultaneously credited with engineering the ideological DNA of the modern American left, from 1960s bombings to 2020s street protests.

Under the heading “Front Groups & Fellow Travelers,” the report assembles a gallery of suspects whose crime is, in essence, political disagreement. The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization—an ecumenical body with deep roots in the Presbyterian Church—is portrayed as a conduit for “radical agitation within the United States.” The National Lawyers Guild is elevated to “one of the most persistently relevant—and insidious—organizations in Cuba’s U.S. network,” an “association of extreme-left lawyers and radical street activists” that has allegedly “played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today.” Its historical sin? Defending people the state preferred undefended. Its contemporary sin? Deploying legal observers at protests and providing counsel to those arrested. The report treats constitutionally protected legal representation as a form of operational support for terrorism, stretching from the Weather Underground to “violent BLM militants and Antifa terror cells of today.”

CODEPINK and its co-founders receive the full treatment, complete with an oddly detailed inventory of guests at a private wedding. The People’s Forum is labeled “a major activist group in Cuba’s U.S. ideological network.” The Democratic Socialists of America is held up as proof of “the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist radicalism,” a mass organization that “maintains a fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime.” Even elected officials are not spared: New York’s mayor is noted for declining to denounce a tribute to Assata Shakur; Los Angeles’s mayor for the unforgivable act of joining a congressional delegation that traveled to the island with President Obama. The Venceremos Brigade—thousands of Americans who traveled to cut cane or deliver medicine—is reinvented as “one of the most extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States.”

The conclusion gathers these threads into a single grand conspiracy: Cuban agents “maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” The George Floyd protests, the rise of Antifa, campus activism—all “can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.” Castro’s 1958 private letter promising a “much wider and bigger war” against the United States is treated as the origin myth of every progressive nonprofit that ever filed a tax return.

What the document never confronts is the elementary fact that America has no enemies except those it chooses to make. Cuba did not invent the embargo that has strangled its economy for more than sixty years. It did not invent the repeated attempts at invasion, assassination, and isolation. It did not invent the decision to treat a small, impoverished nation ninety miles from Florida as a permanent existential threat long after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. The regime in Havana is authoritarian, repressive, and economically incompetent—facts that require no embellishment. But the report’s portrait of it as the secret architect of American dissent is a classic case of projection: having spent decades manufacturing a hostile relationship, Washington now points to the resulting hostility as proof of Cuban malevolence.

The report leans on 1960s Senate studies and Cold War memos while discarding more measured later assessments that local grievances, not Havana’s master plan, explained most regional unrest. It magnifies the influence of one progressive donor network while remaining silent about the far larger rivers of money that actually shape American politics—corporate PACs, billionaire foundations, and foreign lobbies with vastly greater access and impact. It collapses the distinction between open political advocacy, humanitarian solidarity, and clandestine espionage, the better to place ordinary dissent under the elastic category of “national security.”

Documents of this kind do not exist in a vacuum. They prepare the ground. Once a domestic political tendency has been reclassified as a foreign intelligence network, the legal and political machinery for blacklisting, surveillance, funding freezes, and selective prosecution becomes available. The same logic that once justified McCarthy’s lists is here updated with the language of counterterrorism and “hostile foreign influence.” The report’s repeated invocation of “terrorism,” “infiltration,” and “revolutionary network” is not descriptive; it is preparatory.

Should that logic be pursued to its military conclusion, an American invasion of Cuba would be almost as great a disaster as the attack on Iran. It would not topple a coherent revolutionary project so much as shatter an already fractured society, produce a humanitarian catastrophe on America’s doorstep, generate a new generation of refugees and insurgents, and hand every remaining adversary a huge propaganda gift. The United States would once again demonstrate that it prefers to create the enemies it then claims it must destroy—at enormous cost in lives, credibility, and strategic position.

The report’s authors have produced a document that tells us far more about the state of the American political imagination in 2026 than it does about the exhausted island ninety miles to the south. It is a mirror held up to a country that has forgotten how to distinguish between genuine threats and the convenient ones it manufactures for domestic convenience. The document is not analysis. It is a prosecutorial brief against an entire political tendency, written in the language of counterintelligence so that ordinary activism can be recast as foreign subversion. McCarthy at least had the honesty to wave a list. This report waves an entire island.