Between watching the news and perusing the comments of our readers, I know what you’re thinking. Jazz… even with the situations in Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Israel and Ukraine, we still don’t have enough to worry about. Don’t you have anything else?

Fair enough. How about Cuba? A new report in the Washington Free Beacon reveals that Cuban intelligence services are actively looking to recruit spies to gather information in the United States. But where could they find them? Disgruntled staffers inside the Beltway? The cleaning staff at the United Nations? Dissatisfied Border Patrol agents? Nope. Your best bet is clearly at our fine system of universities.

Cuba’s communist-led intelligence services are aggressively recruiting leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents, according to an internal FBI report published this week.

Cuban intelligence services “have perfected the work of placing agents, that includes aggressively targeting U.S. universities under the assumption that a percentage of students will eventually move on to positions within the U.S. government that can provide access to information of use to the [Cuban intelligence service],” the five-page unclassified FBI report says. It notes that the Cubans “devote a significant amount of resources to targeting and exploiting U.S. academia.”

Rick Moran finds an explanation for this phenomenon, which I’m sure took you all by surprise.

Why should Cuban intel target colleges? Because that’s where the communists are…

While the left generally romanticizes the Castros and Cuban communism, the hard-core Marxists on college campuses see the regime as on the frontlines of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism. They are dead serious about the regime’s survival and would no doubt betray their own country to facilitate that goal.

The fact that being a Marxist professor is not a detriment to one’s career means that Cuban intelligence operatives on a recruiting mission don’t have to try very hard to find likely targets. More difficult, one would think, would be to recruit the fellow travelers who might be in a better position to supply usable intelligence. Those academics who move easily between the ivory tower and Washington, D.C., would be prime candidates for recruitment. They would also be likely targets of honey traps and other methods to compromise potential recruits.

It’s often a running joke to talk about the student body at many of our universities and reference hippies, commies or socialists, but such enduring themes generally are rooted in some form of truth. How about Campus Reform? They seem to be fairly busy at Columbia. And it’s not just the students. Apparently it’s a pretty good elitist calling card to be a socialist when you’re part of the tenured staff.

I suppose the real question is, what do the Cubans plan on doing with this intelligence data? (Aside from giving / selling it to other countries who could actually profit from it that is.) Cuba is still kind of a mess and I’m not sure how much trouble they could get up to these days without massive help from the outside. Still, it must be refreshing to know that they are so active on campus as many of you send your kids back to school with those big, fat tuition checks this fall.