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The administration of United States President Donald Trump has released a ۱۰۰-page report tying left-wing advocacy groups in the US to Cuba – often relying on circumstantial and ideological links, rather than direct connections.
The document, released by the State Department on Monday, portrays the beleaguered Caribbean nation as an ideological threat to the US and its interests, frequently using language and concepts harkening back to the Cold War. It argues that Cuba, which is led by a communist government, is trying to subvert the US from within.
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“While Soviet communism was frequently driven by more practical great-power concerns – the preservation of the Soviet empire and the defence of its material interests around the globe – its Cuban successor was built around a near-singular obsession with the ‘liberation’ of the Global South from its Western colonial oppressors,” it reads.
“In the minds of the Cubans, there was only one path to this goal: the destruction of the Yankee imperialist regime.”
Left-wing activists have rejected the accusations that they have links to Cuba, saying the claims made in the report aim to increase pressure on Havana while intensifying the crackdown on dissent inside the US.
Here are five key takeaways from the report:
Left-wing groups accused of ties to Cuba
In a section titled “Front Groups and Fellow Travellers”, the State Department attempts to draw a link between left-wing groups in the US and across the world and Havana.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has helped elect several progressive politicians to Congress, is the most prominent group on the list.
The Trump administration admits that the DSA is not a Cuban asset, but it says the group’s rise shows how “native and organic ideological commitments of the American far left now mirror the interests” of the Cuban government.
The DSA is an activist organisation whose stated mission is to support workers gaining power through democratic means.
The report hyped the DSA’s influence, calling it “a mass membership organisation operating openly in American electoral politics … a growing bench of elected officials, and real influence inside the Democratic Party coalition”.
“The DSA has built a national infrastructure dedicated to moving extreme-left politics from the margins into the mainstream – and with it, a deep and abiding devotion to the Cuban regime,” it said.
The Trump administration also singled out the antiwar group Code Pink, underscoring that one of the group’s donors is a US citizen who lives in China.
Code Pink was recently part of a humanitarian delegation to Cuba.
The group’s cofounder, Medea Benjamin, told Al Jazeera that the organisation “will not be intimidated” by the Trump administration.
She said the approach of labelling activists as communists is a “flashback” to the ۱۹۵۰s at the height of the Cold War.
“We are in an era of McCarthyism, where they’re not only labelling groups like us communists and trying to position us as enemies of the state, but also combining that with the efforts to crack down on protests,” Benjamin told Al Jazeera.
“So it’s a scary time for people, but it’s also a time that we can’t allow them to stop us. We’ve got to just stand up to these bullies.”
State Department invokes Zohran Mamdani
The document mentioned the New York mayor by name as it zeroed in on the case of Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who was convicted of killing a police officer in ۱۹۷۳ in New Jersey before fleeing to Cuba, where she was given asylum status. Shakur always insisted that she was innocent.
The State Department, led by Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban descent, said that Cuba pursued a “Shakur strategy” to gain a foothold in left-wing circles and African-American advocacy groups, including the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Figures like Shakur – and with them, Cuban influence – remain extraordinarily influential over left-wing politics in the United States today,” the report said.
It went on to cite US politicians who praised Shakur when she died in exile last year.
“Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley tweeted ‘Rest in Power,’ and shared a video of herself leading a crowd in call-and-response recitation of one of Shakur’s slogans,” the State Department said.
“On the campaign trail in ۲۰۲۵, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani refused to denounce a Democratic Socialists of America tribute to Shakur.”
When Mamdani was asked about the DSA statement on Shakur, he said he was focused on affordability and lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers.
‘It’s complete nonsense,’ expert says
Antoni Kapcia, emeritus professor of Latin American history at the University of Nottingham, was surprised to see that an article he wrote in February for the left-wing magazine Jacobin was cited in Rubio’s report.
“The principal antagonist of world history was no longer ‘capital,’ but Western civilisation itself,” the report read.
“As the socialist magazine Jacobin approvingly recounted earlier this year, it was Cuba that ‘was seen by many in the Third World as the ideal site for radically rethinking anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonisation.’ What Cuba was proposing, Jacobin writes, ‘was essentially a decolonisation of Marxist thought.’”
Kapcia stressed that his argument was that anti-colonialist movements in the Global South in the mid-۱۹۶۰s were taking a Marxist line in opposition to imperialism.
“The principal imperialist they often saw was the United States. But that again is not subverting the United States,” Kapcia told Al Jazeera in a phone interview.
He added that Cuba’s support for left-wing groups across the world has not been a consistent strategy; rather, it was a policy of the ۱۹۶۰s, when the island was under severe isolation imposed by the US.
“It’s complete nonsense,” Kapcia said of the claim that Cuba is sponsoring left-wing groups in the US.
Prelude to an invasion?
The report is the latest move by the Trump administration against Cuba.
After US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, Washington ordered the new authorities in Caracas to halt fuel shipments to Cuba, plunging the country into a humanitarian crisis.
In May, US authorities issued a criminal indictment against ۹۵-year-old former Cuban politician Raul Castro over the downing of two planes in ۱۹۹۶ that killed four people, which Havana says crossed into the island’s airspace without authorisation.
“It looks as though it’s just setting up an invasion or some sort of intervention. Most of the rest of the world is totally opposed to that,” Kapcia said.
He added, however, that due to Cuba’s receding strategic importance and national resources and the rising antiwar sentiment in the US, Trump is unlikely to launch a military campaign against the island.
“It seems to be rhetoric, but that could be wishful thinking. We could be hoping it’s rhetoric,” Kapcia told Al Jazeera. “I rule nothing out when it comes to Trump.”
Code Pink’s Benjamin said the report and other statements demonising Cuba aim to justify the “demonic policy of starvation”, referring to the US siege on the island.
“I think they’re getting ready for an invasion,” she told Al Jazeera. “I think they’re laying the groundwork, and this is part of the plan – because starving the people is not achieving the ends that they want, which is obviously regime change.”
Republican Congressman Carlos Gimenez, who represents a South Florida district home to a large Cuban-American community, cited the report to call for regime change in Cuba.
“Cuba is next,” he wrote on X.
Cuba is poor but harmful, report says
Both Benjamin and Kapcia ridiculed the idea that Cuba, an impoverished nation experiencing shortages and blackouts under US siege, is a threat to the US.
The report described Cuba as the “connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition, a staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside our own borders”.
“To mistake Cuba’s poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely,” it said.
“Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger. Its power was always ideological, subversive, and parasitic – and it has proven remarkably durable, outlasting the Soviet empire that helped build it and grafting itself onto every new enemy of the United States that has arisen since.”
Benjamin told Al Jazeera the US administration “is painting a picture that doesn’t exist” about Cuba.
“To call Cuba a threat is just so absurd,” she said.
