In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.
The histories and present realities of Cuba and the United States are so intricately interwoven that the State Department’s recent Cuba report is really about how, for 67 years, the island’s regime has tailored its peculiar form of Marxism to shape American politics.
Recommended Stories
In an age when communists in their 20s are successfully eating one of America’s two major parties alive, this groundbreaking report about a foreign country and its corrupt and tyrannical government should be seen as a tool kit for how to protect the homeland from its own internal enemies.
This is because the Marxist groups that have gained traction in the U.S. receive ideological and/or financial sustenance from Havana. In effect, they form part of a Cuban proxy network. Not for nothing does the report mention the Democratic Socialists of America no fewer than 31 times, Black Lives Matter 16 times, and antifa 10 times, in its 99 pages.
Indeed, last week, just one day after the State Department produced its report, the powerful House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed three nonprofit Marxist organizations that promote Cuba’s regime: The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental.
The People’s Forum is run by Manolo De Los Santos, who has lived and trained in Cuba. The group was, according to the State Department report, “a core organizer of the March 2026 Nuestra America Convoy,” which brought Code Pink and influencers such as Hasan Piker and Isra Hirsi, daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), to Havana, “and frequently supports other delegations to the island.”
The congressional subpoena is part of an investigation into close to $40 million they have received from Neville Roy Singham, a shadowy tech tycoon who lives in Shanghai and has close contacts with the Chinese Communist Party.
The committee is probing whether Congress needs to change the laws regarding tax-exempt organizations to adequately defend Americans against foreign influence.
The links established by the report between Cuba’s totalitarian regime and U.S. groups and individuals who seek to transform America give new urgency to the Trump administration’s campaign to help Cubans free themselves by denying the regime free oil from Venezuela.
It also explains why so many of these Marxist groups and individuals have rallied to the cause of Cuba’s regime with such ardor.
The State Department report lays out in rich detail why we should be concerned.
“For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” opens the report, which cites from my paper from January, The House of Terror: How Cuba Has Exported Death and Chaos for Six Decades.
As the report explains, since Cuba’s communist regime began with the takeover of Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959, it has developed a distinctive form of Marxism based on resentment of the West, primarily the U.S.; advocating the “liberation” of the Global South, a geopolitical concept that Cuba’s Fidel Castro helped forge, which leads to the export of revolution in concentric circles with the U.S. at its epicenter; and the evolution of Marxism from economic material forces to racially based grievances.
“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 report reads.
One of its key features is its discussion of Cuba’s contribution to the evolution of Marxism, away from economic material forces and toward locating the locus of revolution on race.
“Cuban communism helped shape a distinct and uniquely dangerous form of revolutionary leftism — built around racial, social and even civilizational grievances rather than economic class conflict — which would go on to instantiate itself as the dominant genre of left-wing radicalism around the globe,” the report reads.
Havana thus played a key role in “forming this militant Third Worldist consciousness among black radicals,” as both became interchangeable. One key prong in this strategy was to give sanctuary to U.S. fugitives. The most important of these was cop-killer Assata Shakur.
The Cuban communists “aggressively leveraged Shakur as a propaganda mechanism, and to great effect. Shakur became the globally recognized face of the themes Havana had sought to push for decades — U.S. racism, black internationalism, anti-imperialism, and Cuba as the spiritual center of the Third World struggle.”
One of the successes of this “Shakur Strategy” was the founding of BLM and its near attainment of wholesale societal transformation in 2020.
“Nowhere has Cuba’s ‘Shakur strategy’ been more pronounced than the modern Black Lives Matter movement,” the report reads.
At Shakur’s death last year, Black Lives Matter at School, whose educational material the Smithsonian distributes to schools, hailed Shakur as “the blueprint of what the power of a Black woman looks like” and celebrated that she “was able to die a free woman in Havana.” Black Lives Matter Grassroots, the most important BLM group today, published upon Shakur’s death a statement honoring “Mama Assata.”
The report touches on many elements — Cuba’s subversion of Latin America and the penetration of its intelligence network in key American government agencies. But it is really at its best in probing Cuba’s successful manipulation of America’s far-leftist network.
The central nexus of the entire Cuban intelligence and influence apparatus is the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples. ICAP organizes logistics for such Marxist groups as the Venceremos Brigades, whose most famous alumna is Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. The People’s Forum is the fiscal sponsor of the Venceremos Brigades.
ICAP partners with the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of more than 60 U.S. groups that includes the Democratic Socialists of America, the National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, and the Communist Party USA. This coalition, per the report, is another “key node for coordination between the Cuban regime and the American far left.”
This year, the NNOC has begun distributing a “National Rapid Response Plan” that so imperils national security that it’s a wonder the group hasn’t run afoul of the law yet. It calls for launching “coordinated nationwide actions” against U.S. institutions, including U.S. military bases, within 24 hours of U.S. military action against Cuba or even the imminent threat of it.
Another NNOC member, the Alliance for Global Justice, is the fiscal sponsor of many BLM and far-leftist groups, including Assata’s Daughters, a Chicago-based BLM offshoot that advocates abolishing the police.
A third node in the nexus is the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, which is now primarily centered on Cuba.
“The foundation serves as ‘fiscal sponsor’ for a suite of far-left domestic activist groups,” including such BLM groups as Equality for Flatbush, according to the report. De Los Santos served on the IFCO’s board, and Claudia de la Cruz is the IFCO’s executive director. It was the IFCO, in fact, that first brought De Los Santos to Cuba in 2006.
WASHINGTON’S REGIME-CHANGE PLAYBOOK MIGHT STALL IN HAVANA
As for the DSA, the report makes clear that its “fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime” does not come from being founded by Cuba. The slavish support testifies to the extent that the “ideological commitments of the American far left now mirror the interests of the Cuban regime.”
The Castros made Havana the Mecca of Marxist Third Worldism. It is now the epicenter of the Marxist organizations that disrupt our peace and will enter Congress in force next year.
