The State Department’s report on Cuba casts left-wing and anti-war organisations as foreign-influenced threats, laying the groundwork for the criminalisation of dissent.
The Trump administration is laying the groundwork for blacklisting and criminalising all left-wing, progressive, anti-war and anti-imperialist dissent.
The State Department’s 100-page report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States”, along with Donald Trump’s assertion that “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure”, lays the groundwork for dictatorship.
Elections will be sabotaged in the name of “national security”. Left-wing dissent will be criminalised in the name of “combating terrorism”. Democracy will be snuffed out in the name of protecting “freedom”.
Trump, who has lately taken to issuing warnings about a communist plot to take over America, posits that an island of 9.6 million people – nearly 90 per cent of whom live in extreme poverty amid extended blackouts due to decades of US economic warfare – is an existential threat.
These accusations are not meant to be rational. They, like the charge that our elections are manipulated, are transparent excuses to go after institutions and individuals that are seen as threatening Trump and the Republican Party’s absolute grip on power. While Cuba has supposedly “carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history”, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure”.
Under the heading “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” the State Department report assembles a disparate collection of organisations belonging to Cuba’s “ideological network”.
For example, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), founded as a ecumenical social justice organisation by the Presbyterian Church, is described as part of a Cuba “solidarity network” which “facilitates radical agitation within the United States”. I am an ordained Presbyterian minister. I can assure you the Presbyterian Church is not facilitating “radical agitation”.
The report lists a wide variety of organisations on whose behalf IFCO has acted as an intermediary – perfectly legally – facilitating tax-exempt donations and handling grant management, compliance and reporting.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are castigated in the same chapter. The NLG “is one of the most persistently relevant – and insidious – organisations in Cuba’s US network”. The NLG is labelled a foreign influence operation because it provides assistance to activists, whose right to legal representation is constitutionally enshrined.
In 2025, the Trump administration conditioned federal funding to Harvard University on defunding and dissolving the law school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (HLS NLG), which provided legal assistance to individuals and student groups that opposed the genocide.
A subsection in the report is dedicated to the anti-war activists at CODEPINK and their co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans. It notes Evans’ marriage to the wealthy software entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham was attended by a “Who’s Who’ of progressivism” including co-host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman; Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen and the playwright V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) who wrote The Vagina Monologues. Naming guests at a wedding is one of the more bizarre passages.
The report grossly exaggerates the influence of Singham’s support for left-wing organisations – described as “far-left” – while ignoring the massive sums supplied by US corporations, millionaires and billionaires, as well as the Israel lobby, to both major political parties, super PACs, think tanks and advocacy networks. Israel has a far more insidious influence on US politics and foreign policy than Cuba, Russia and China combined.
The State Department draws on documents that are often decades old and infused with Cold War paranoia. These include a 1966 Senate report claiming there is “overwhelming evidence that the machinery of the Cuban Government has been progressively organised over the years, to carry out its number one task – the export of Communist subversion.”
It ignores more thoughtful assessments, including a 1981 CIA estimate that acknowledged “[m]uch of the turmoil around the world is rooted in regional and local disputes of a political, social, or religious nature and has nothing to do with Communism”.
In a chapter titled “Revolutionary Tourism,” the Venceremos (We Shall Overcome) Brigade is characterised as one of the most “extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States”. This assertion libels thousands of individuals and organisations as Cuban assets, offering nothing more than innuendo.
Transporting humanitarian goods to Cuba is not a crime. Although the Justice Department’s extradition request from Spain of philanthropist Fergie Chambers, who provided funds to humanitarian organisations in Gaza, may see the criminalisation of any person or any group that assists those suffering under sanctions and a blockade.
The report attacks members of the March 2026 “Nuestra América Convoy”, which transported goods to Cuba “in defiance of US sanctions”. It notes that 120 organisations “from across 33 countries joined the caravan” with “a suite of influential progressives”, including Isra Hirsi – daughter of US Rep. Ilhan Omar, video game live streamer and commentator Hasan Piker – with whom I discussed my book A Genocide Foretold last year – former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and “several other current and former members of European Parliament”. Even the Gaza flotilla activist Thiago Avila gets a mention.
Those listed in the report did not become “radicals” because of Cuban indoctrination. Their politics are homegrown, formed in opposition to racism, genocide, police violence, the terrorising and killing of immigrants and US citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs and neoliberalism, along with the crimes of US imperialism and militarism.
The report makes passing reference to a wide range of people on grounds so tenuous that it has to be read to be believed. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is mentioned for refusing “to denounce” a “tribute to [Assata] Shakur”, who was almost certainly framed for murder and who fled to Cuba after escaping from a US prison in 1979.
It dedicates two paragraphs to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for her “friendliness towards the communist regime”. The evidence provided is her participation in a congressional delegation that joined then President Barack Obama on a visit to the island.
Cuban agents, it charges, “maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organisations, 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.” Cuba has allegedly “infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists [and] backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism [my emphasis] on American soil”.
Note the word terrorism. Note that it makes these individuals and organisations terrorists. Note that it makes them subject to draconian terrorism laws. And note that the Trump administration has committed itself to hunting down and rooting out the “radical left”.
The report charges that Cuba and its allies are mounting “a revolution against western civilisation itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance”. It accuses Havana of “gleeful support of the George Floyd uprisings”. It asserts that “the rise of antifa” and “the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses” can be “linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence”.
It characterises the DSA as serving “as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist radicalism”. It claims the organisation maintains a “fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime”. It alleges Cuba has built a “sprawling revolutionary network” that has “shaped America’s most famous and influential extremist movements” including the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and antifa. These networks include “powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organisations” in the US.
Cuba, the report concludes, “has sought to undermine, degrade and destabilise America with spies and soldiers, but also with students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells, but also with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks with intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover”.
The broadside is chilling. It is worse than McCarthyism. It presages a savage purging of American society.
Those named in the report are condemned without evidence. They are denied due process. That the assertions in the report are distorted at best, and often fictitious, is irrelevant. Fascist propaganda is not rooted in truth. It is rooted in a hatred for liberal values, democracy and the left. It is rooted in the belief that once those condemned as human contaminants are removed, there will be a moral, spiritual and economic renaissance.
We have seen this fascist dance before. We know what comes next. It is not good.
Republished from The Chris Hedges Report
Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.