Analysis
The State Department published a 100-page report on July 20 accusing the Cuban regime of running a campaign of subversion against the United States for nearly seven decades, one it says produced much of the American radical left and continues to shape it.
Washington normally writes about Cuba in the language of the embargo, migration quotas and human rights findings. “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” instead makes an argument about American political history and identifies the Americans it holds responsible for carrying that history forward. Forty-three individuals and organizations appear in the document, among them New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., along with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, the People’s Forum and the National Network on Cuba.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X that “for more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States,” and that the department was “exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country.”
What the report argues
The report argues American policy has misread Cuba for 60 years by treating Havana as a Soviet dependency whose politics could be read off Moscow’s.
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The Soviet Union ran a great-power project preoccupied with holding its empire together, while Castro’s government built something closer to a missionary enterprise organized around a doctrine called “Third Worldism.” Under that doctrine, the decisive conflict set the colonized world against Western civilization itself, displacing the old struggle between workers and owners. The Cuban regime spent the 1960s making itself the headquarters of the idea, and its 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana drew more than 500 delegates from revolutionary movements across 82 countries.
The report builds its central claim on that distinction. What collapsed in 1991 was really Soviet Marxism but the Cuban variant survived this fall and kept spreading until its assumptions about race, colonialism and historical grievance became the ordinary vocabulary of left-wing politics across the West.
The espionage record
The chapter on Cuban penetration of the U.S. government is the report’s most heavily documented, citing evidence such as court records, sentencing transcripts and declassified files.
Victor Manuel Rocha, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to more than four decades as a Cuban agent, served over that span as director of inter-American affairs on the National Security Council, as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and as an adviser to the commander of U.S. Southern Command. Ana Montes passed intelligence to Havana for 17 years while rising to become senior Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, a post from which she briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Walter Kendall Myers, an intelligence analyst inside the State Department itself, received a life sentence in 2010 after three decades of work for Havana.
What set these cases apart was how the agents were recruited. For example, Russian and Chinese services generally “buy” their assets, but the Cubans instead look for genuine “believers”, identifying politically committed students at elite American universities and cultivating them for years before they hold anything worth stealing.
This is indicated by the fact that investigators found no evidence that Rocha, Montes or Myers ever took significant money. Former CIA counterintelligence chief James Olson, quoted in the document, has said the Cubans penetrated the U.S. government more successfully than the KGB ever did.
Ideological influence
The report concludes that the DSA was not created by nor is it under the control of Cuban intelligence, and that its support for Havana is purely ideological. It presents this as the measure of Cuba’s success, on the reasoning that a regime whose politics have become the default position of an American mass movement has no further need to explicitly place officers inside it.
Regardless, the report does document contact between the DSA and Havana. DSA delegations have traveled to Cuba since 2022, hosted by the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, the body the Castro government founded in 1960 to manage foreign activists. Members of a 2023 delegation spent two hours in a private meeting with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and sought formal channels of communication with Cuban ministries. The institute is run today by Fernando González Llort, a convicted member of the Wasp Network spy ring who served 15 years in a U.S. prison before returning to Havana.
Rubio had told the State Department’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism four days earlier that his department would soon designate additional left-wing groups in the United States as terrorist organizations.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller joined him at the event. The administration had already sanctioned the friendship institute, its travel company Amistur, and Díaz-Canel himself on June 4.
