In the early to mid-20th century, many hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, and supporters of Jim Crow laws would associate everything they hated with communism, including integration and giving nonwhite people equal rights. Nearly a century later, not much has changed. A new report from the U.S. Department of State that labels nearly all the progress the U.S. has seen since the abolition of slavery as a devious communist plot operating from Cuba. The report serves as a perfect example of how ingrained this racist ideology is.
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The report not only diminishes the rights Black people fought for, but it posits that those civil rights movements weren’t justified. That, without Cuba’s influence, Black people, Indigenous people, other nonwhite people, women, and other marginalized groups would have accepted their fate of being treated as lesser when it came to participation in the governance of the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio expecting to be taken seriously while acting as if an island of just 10 million people has so much influence in the world is a serious delusion.
“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,” reads the Department of State report. “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 also went so far as to vilify some of the most prominent voices in the Civil Rights movement, such as Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and Robert Williams, among others, as nothing more than communist sympathizers, thus diminishing their work. While some were communists, their work was simply humanitarian, as noted by their successes. Efforts to disassociate the named activists from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. should also be noted. The State Department portraying them as outsiders who were influenced by Cuba, in a movement that represented a broad coalition of voices, including liberals and conservatives, is a disingenuous rewriting of history.
“Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history – from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses – can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the report reads.
It should also be noted that Latino movements, such as the Young Lords Party and United Farmworkers movement, were not mentioned by name. The Young Lords were referred to only as “the Puerto Rico militant.” This omission exposes an overall anti-Black narrative of the report, seemingly trying to build on a divide between some Latinos and Black voters. It harkens back to the days of the aforementioned Ku Klux Klan opposing equal rights and dishonestly associating the Black struggle with communism to reach a broader U.S. audience.
The report then talked about terrorist attacks “across the hemisphere,” including in the U.S., that were “connected, in some way,” to Cuba. It ignores that the attacks in the U.S. were committed by disgruntled CIA-trained, anti-Castro operatives who had been excommunicated for going against the U.S.’s wishes and conducting operations after being told to stand down. The attacks targeted Cuban Americans who spoke out in favor of diplomacy with the island instead of war, violence, or suffering imposed by brutal U.S. sanctions. The report also omits the deep history of U.S.-backed terrorist attacks on Cuba, including the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976.
“But Cuba’s plans for the United States were far more ambitious than periodic bouts of urban unrest. Over the next two decades, violent guerrilla insurgencies and deadly terrorist campaigns would sweep across the Western Hemisphere,” reads the State Department Report. “Almost all of them were connected, in some way, to a small island nation 90 miles south of the Florida coast.”
Also named are various U.S. lawmakers, social media influencers, individuals. and non-profits that are critical of U.S. foreign policy. Like the humanity expressed for Palestinians being used as a weapon against people, the report applies a similar strategy against anyone refusing to accept the imposition of suffering and starvation on millions of Cubans. Essentially, the report, in conjunction with National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), says that anyone can be considered an enemy if they’re not a U.S. President Donald Trump sycophant.
The report mentions popular uprisings in places such as Uruguay, Argentina, and Nicaragua that Cuba backed, but it left out why those revolutions were so popular. In Uruguay, for example, the U.S.-backed president was a participant in Operation Condor, a U.S.-funded campaign of political repression by right-wing dictatorships in South America. The uprisings in Uruguay, while ultimately crushed, were motivated by this brutal repression. The campaign resulted in hundreds of opposition voices being disappeared through cross-border agreements among governments.
Similarly, after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, the United States immediately got involved to try to undermine the popular movement there, as it has in various countries in the region. This led to then-President Ronald Reagan launching a counterinsurgency known as “the Contras,” which became the subject of a vast conspiracy known as the “Iran-Contra Scandal.” The scandal included flooding U.S. streets with drugs and secretly funneling weapons to Iran to help fund the counterrevolution in Nicaragua.
Enter “Third Worldism,” a phrase from the 1960s that was a legitimate movement focused on anti-imperialism and sovereign development, allowing for the distribution of wealth to the Global South rather than to already wealthy nations. The term has not been used in a broader sense in decades, highlighting how the State Department has to go back half a century to make its argument, using publicly available information that hasn’t been relevant since.
As legacy media jumps all over this report as if it isn’t yet another pretext for war, the United States is currently weighing its military options to attack Cuba, on what is rumored to be July 26, Cuba’s National Rebellion Day. The day signifies a turning point in the Revolution, celebrating the day Fidel Castro led an attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953. While the military attack failed and most of the 130 rebels were either jailed or killed, the raid solidified widespread public resistance to U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista’s regime.
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Meanwhile, as the Trump administration builds on its campaign to silence so-called “leftists,” and since so many centrist liberals are also on the attack against progressives, the silence from the broader Democratic Party must be noted. While the consultant class of the party has lawmakers and candidates focused on people like Hasan Piker, they seem to be willingly joining forces with the white Christian nationalists bulldozing fascism across the country, rather than listening to voters and offering popular policy ideas like the progressives they’re attacking have done.
A report about Cuba that attempts to link communism to all the progress the United States has seen since the abolition of slavery and mentions Black people and Black liberation movements – that is, the Civil Rights we all benefit from – 118 times in just 99 pages is telling. Cuban American hardliners promoting this as a legitimate report is not surprising; just as Rubio bringing white nationalism to the State Department wasn’t. However, this move highlights how domestic and foreign policy intersect. This narrative isn’t new. It’s being rehashed to justify war with Cuba.
As the white Christian nationalists in the White House target a major portion of the country and label them as the enemy, support for all of this seems bipartisan, with very few exceptions. The claims made in the report use dubious hyperbolic connections that are not corroborated by any of the references provided. Instead, they are made using far-fetched ideas built off of 67 years of U.S. propaganda that doesn’t make any sense.
If the goal was to make Cuba look like the good guy out of the two countries, the report did that.
Arturo is an independent freelance journalist. He has written hundreds of articles on policing, immigration, race, and Latin America. His work has been featured in outlets such as Unicorn Riot, The Antagonist Magazine, Latino Rebels, The Wire, and more. Arturo is also on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads. To support his work, become a paid subscriber or donate via Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App.
When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio writes: “The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition..." It is hard to believe that Cuba, a country that has difficulty feeding and fueling its people, spends money building a global coalition. Mr Rubio seems to be gaslighting
Civil rights and anti-war movements on one side, and the KUBARK system and CIA - Mafia plots on the other, and we're supposed to be cheering for who, now?