This was certainly an occasion when the mouse roared.  At least the threatened lion thought so, if the latest hysteria-streaked US State Department report on Cuba is anything to go by.  Reading this travesty of an assessment – shrill, stale, markedly undergraduate – was telling in one respect: The Trump administration is more eager than ever to oust the communist regime that seized power in 1959 from the blood-drenched hands of the demented Fulgencio Batista, whose pimping for Washington’s power interests was most appreciated as long as it lasted.

The unnamed authors are off to a sterling start with the report’s title: Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.  Easy to forget the People’s Republic of China, or even the Democratic Republic of North Korea.   But the intention of the document is not information but allegation and inference, tying in Cuban activities to domestic movements in the United States that were as much engendered by domestic ferment as external factors of the revolutionary milieu.  The central theme here is a double accusation: the role of Havana as Svengali, ideological seducer, and the Americans of the left persuasion, who seemingly want to soil the Stars and Stripes at any given opportunity, romancing the Red Hope.  “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,” the authors assert with astounding ignorance.  “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.”  And what an inheritance.

The following line captures the desperately poor nature of the report, a nice summary of doltish analysis and spurious threading. “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.”  One would think the Soviet Union was still lurking around the corner with molten, industrial promise, with Mao Zedong taking his heroic dips in the Yangtze, and steroid-pumped East German athletes winning gold at the Olympics.  But let’s not get distracted.

The report delves into historical actors and activities with episodic confusion.  Instances of violent activity are blended with cultural exchanges.  Non sequiturs become bridges; causation is inferred.  The Weather Underground faction, split from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which maintained soon after 1969 “a close relationship with the Cubans,” warrants special mention.  In July 1969, “several top Weathermen” journeyed to Havana to meet Cuban and communist North Vietnamese officials.  The sordid topics under discussion: mass organisation, guerrilla warfare, “anti-imperialist efforts”.  The bombing campaign of the Weathermen against targets associated with the US Senate, the State Department and the Pentagon, and its activities in alliance with “militant communist and black extremist groups to bomb US military bases, execute prison breaks, and assassinate police officers” is clumsily linked to Cuban revolutionary violence.  This is Havana, epicentre of influence, puppeteer of young American minds.

A more modern iteration of activism that comes in for reprobation is the Black Lives Matter movement.  Instead of being patriotic and venerating the great US republic with its noble police officers, the BLM movement was protesting against police brutality following the very public snuffing by a white police officer of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.  This, the report dubbed, was Cuba’s “Shakur strategy”, named after Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who, in 1979, escaped a US prison where she was serving a life sentence for killing New Jersey State Police trooper Werner Foerster in May 1973.  After a lengthy hiatus, she emerged in 1984 on the Caribbean island, where Fidel Castro had granted her asylum.  The report tries achingly to link the sympathy of the BLM movement for infractions against the rights of blacks in the US to the broader revolutionary ardour of Shakur, who remained on the island till her death in 2025.  “Shakur’s influence has always been infused into BLM’s public language,” the authors reveal, as if startled.  That the BLM website would quote the words “it is our duty to fight for freedom” – words used by Shakur and hardly unique in the canon of liberation activism – is taken as damning.  Cuba’s Shakur strategy was part of Havana’s “distinctive genre of Third World leftism”, seemingly a virus that had moved “from the fringes of the 1960s into the mainstream.”  This merely serves to show the pitiful effort to create mountains out of lowly cow pats, all the time missing the genuine breaches and violations that take place on home soil.

A host of groups and individuals too numerous to mention also come in for mention, always making sure that the enemy within Freedom’s Land is noted and shamed.  The People’s Forum is a body of fascination (“intimately linked to the Cuban regime”), with its sponsorship of such entities as the Venceremos Brigade, the SDS-Cuban solidarity project begun in 1969.  Its founding director, Manolo De Los Santos, might have been “raised in the Bronx” but dared travel to Cuba in 2006 “through the IFCO/Pastors for Peace.  He proceeded to develop “relationships at the most senior levels of the Cuban regime.”  There are links to Neville Roy Singham, whose sin as “the Shanghai-based American technology magnate” is to give to “far-left groups and causes” and come close in terms of influence to George Soros. “Singham, a former Marxist militant organizer with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, is reportedly a long-time admirer of Maoism who maintains close links to the Chinese Communist Party.”  Evidently a lynching offence.

Given their political gains of late – most prominently, the winning of the New York mayoral election in November 2025 by Zohran Mamdani – the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are also an inviting target.  It is almost with sorrow that the authors concede that the DSA was not a creature of Cuban intelligence or even an “influence front”.  This is no intellectual, or empirical impediment: being a fusion of various socialist groups and movements was enough to bring the DSA within a Cuban orbit.  “Today, it maintains a fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime – not because the group is controlled by Cuban agents per se, but because that commitment is now simply the de facto policy orthodoxy on the American far left.”  This is so emetic as to make you reach for the bucket.

When making a case against a weaker adversary, exaggeration, inflation, and embellishment is called for.  We end up seeing an ostrich capable of flying, a whale able to walk on land, a duck capable of fluent conversation.  The Dirección de Inteligencia (DI), Cuba’s main foreign intelligence agency, comes in for some considerably flashy treatment.  The Venceremos Brigade is gilded with the highest standing, as agents from Cuban intelligence supposedly used it “to arrange for some young Americans to receive on-land weapons training from Cuban military officers”.  There are scavenged quotes gathered from – yes, podcasts – by such figures as CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James Olsen, heavy in (and on) the sauce of danger and potency.  “They are a very formidable adversary,” he babbled in 2020.  “They were very professional.  They are very disciplined, and they had a vendetta against the United States.  Castro focused all of his efforts on national security to bring down his Yankee neighbor, to attack us.”  Hard to believe how the American republic did not become Castro’s playground and protectorate.

Given the execrable contents of this untutored report, it is impossible to believe that Cuba is a country increasingly on its knees, its sovereignty and independence more threatened than ever.  The ongoing oil blockade, power shortages, lethal disruptions to the health system, sanitation issues and the depleting effects of Hurricane Melissa have made the survival of the regime shaky.  The cloddish semi-literates behind the document, however, want us to forget that Cuba is impoverished.  “Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger.  Its power was always ideological, subversive, and parasitic”.  What power!  What potency!

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com