It has been several months since President Trump suggested that he might turn his attention to Cuba once he was done dealing with Iran. But it appears his administration has not forgotten about Cuba. Yesterday, Sec. of State Rubio released a new report on Cuba's history of "espionage and subversion" inside the U.S. The report is 100 pages long and doesn't include an executive summary so let's walk through a bit of this. (You can download it yourself here,) This is from part 1:
For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.
The Cuban campaign against America is unique. It is irregular and covert – even at the peak of its military power, Havana never possessed the capacity to defeat the United States in a conventional armed conflict. Instead, the Cubans perfected a new model for a long war of attrition, organized around espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.
In contrast to every other aspect of Cuba’s failed state, this model has yielded remarkable success. For over half a century, this small island nation with a chronically failing economy has operated at the center of a vast hemispheric network. The Cubans trained and armed tens of thousands of left-wing guerillas, oversaw violent insurgencies that plunged multiple continents into chaos, and backed deadly extremist attacks across the United States. The island itself became the premier safe harbor for fugitive American terrorists – fleeing justice for bombings, armed robberies, and murders – as well as a forward operating base for a rotating cast of hostile foreign powers. Cuban agents infiltrated the top levels of the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon, operating undercover for decades without detection.
But the most successful and enduring sphere of Cuba’s campaign against America has taken place on the ideological battlefront. Since the 1960s, the regime has served as the beating heart of a new and distinct kind of Marxism, forged around an overriding resentment and fundamental hatred of the United States and the broader West. 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. 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 second chapter, titled "Birth of a New Left," is about how Cuban communism was different from Soviet communism and how it ultimately had a deep impact on anti-U.S. radicalism.
The wave of far-left terror that swept America in the second half of the twentieth century was not just inspired, but actively facilitated by Cuba. The infamous Weather Underground was shaped by its leadership’s direct contact with Cuban officials, and Cuban spies provided covert operational support to the far-left terrorist group during its bombings across the United States in the ensuing years. Delegations of American radicals traveled to Cuba to learn the tactics of urban terrorism and guerilla warfare. Cuban intelligence agents helped to found, train, and arm Puerto Rican communist groups that would prove to be among the most active and deadly terrorist groups in American history. And when Black Panther leaders sought to escape justice for their own crimes on American soil, it was Cuba where they found safe harbor...
Many of the specific New Left organizations of the 1960s-70s have disappeared. But Cuba’s influence went on to burrow much further into American institutions. Through its cultivation of American activists, its infiltration of American universities, its sprawling influence and espionage networks, and its position as the spiritual hub of the Third World revolution – becoming a pilgrimage destination for generations of New Left activists and intellectuals – Cuba has played an instrumental role in shaping America’s radical left from the 1960s through to today.
The third chapter portrays Cuba as the Iran of our hemisphere.) backing, training and funding individuals and groups seeking to launch attacks against U.S. targets.
By the mid-1980s, Latin America was the site of more acts of international terrorism against U.S. targets than any other region in the world, largely driven by at least two dozen Cuban-backed Marxist groups. Late-1980s estimates reported that Cuba had “worked quietly to train, build up, and unify” some 27 leftist guerilla groups across the region, totaling about “25,000 armed and trained members” in total. In 1986, Latin America accounted for about 55 percent of all incidents of terrorism involving U.S. targets. By 1989, it accounted for an estimated 64 percent.
The report goes on to describe a series of spies and how the island attracted U.S. extremists like the Weather Underground.
This was evident in July of 1969, when several top Weathermen traveled to Havana to meet with both the Cuban and communist North Vietnam regimes...Upon returning home, the Weathermen set about planning the infamous October “Days of Rage” riot, which they staged to coincide with the second anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, leading to the arrests of roughly 300 Weathermen and the permanent paralysis of a Chicago policeman.
Just six months after the meeting in Havana, the Weathermen went underground and launched their armed struggle against the United States. Reporting would later reveal that Cuban intelligence networks in North America were in “regular contact with the American revolutionaries” during the group’s period of active terrorism, and that Cuban officials helped several Weather Underground fugitives flee to Soviet Bloc countries to escape the FBI – and then later, to secretly reenter the United States. After dividing themselves into covert, clandestine terror cells – mirrored after the Cuban foco guerilla strategy – the Weathermen communicated through operatives working out of Cuban embassies in the United States and Canada in an effort “to blunt official surveillance,” utilizing the “Cuban diplomatic channels as a private communications network” to stay in touch with other cells.
Later, the report lists a bunch of current groups connected to Cuba, such as the DSA.
The DSA’s official delegations to Cuba began in 2022. (Beyond the group’s “official” delegations, substantial contingents of DSA members have also traveled as part of other larger convoys, such Nuestra America in 2026). As always, these undertakings were directly overseen by the Cuban state, and facilitated direct contact between the American leftists and Cuban officials. A 2023 DSA cadre trip – reportedly hosted by the Communist Party of Cuba itself – traveled to the island with the explicitly stated objective of “establish[ing] formal channels of communication between various Cuban organizations, ministries and the DSA,” as well as normaliz[ing] relations with representatives of the Cuban government.” Participants in the trip recounted a two-hour private meeting with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, on top of a suite of meetings with other senior military and intelligence officials and several convicted Cuban spies from the erstwhile Wasp Network. Delegates were hosted for five days at a five-star hotel, the Grand Aston Havana, which has since been added to the State Department’s Cuba Prohibited Accommodations List. Services for the tour were arranged and provided for through Amistur and ICAP.
From the conclusion to the report:
Today, Cuban agents and operatives maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, 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. 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...
Cuba's assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. That is the campaign Castro launched in 1959, and it is the campaign his heirs are waging still. And in the institutions of the modern American left – in its universities and its nonprofits, its street movements and its media – that campaign has enjoyed a success its founders could scarcely have imagined.
Why release this report now? I think it's obvious that Sec. Rubio is making the case that Cuba's revolutionary government must be destroyed as a long-time enemy to the United States. This report argues it's not enough to weaken and impoverish Cuba. Its communist, anti-American foundations need to be shaken to the ground.
Editor's Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
Help us report the truth about the Trump administration's decisive actions to keep Americans safe and bring peace to the world. Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member