MIAMI — The U.S. State Department released a 100-page report on Monday, describing a history of Cuba’s efforts against the U.S through left-wing activists, militant extremists, and allies going back to the 1960s.
The new report accused Cuba’s communists of operating as a “vector for Iran and Russia” and China; of using spies to infiltrate the “highest reaches” of the federal government; and of growing and supporting a “wave” of left-wing terrorism.
“For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a statement on X. “The State Department is exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country.”
President Donald Trump reinstated Cuba’s status as a state sponsor of terrorism in 2021 and again in 2025, both of which resulted in reinstating sanctions.
The new report described an alliance that included access to “attack drones,” as Cuban military officials “consulted with Iranian advisors on asymmetrical drone warfare for a potential conflict” with the U.S, and links between Cuba’s intelligence agency, the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI, and the “Islamist militant axis,” which includes Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
“The regime in Cuba exploits every opportunity to undermine America & any suggestion otherwise is a gross underestimation of their capability,” U.S. Rep. Carlos A. Giménez wrote on Monday about the report on X.
CUBA’S ‘SPRAWLING ECOSYSTEM’
While “overriding resentment and fundamental hatred,” Cuba influenced “a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements” to “turn America against itself,” according to the report.
The report cites the late Fidel Castro’s efforts to associate with “American Black radicals,” including Huey Percy Newton, the founder of the Marxist–Leninist Black Panther Party, which embraced armed self-defense, and JoAnne Deborah Byron, better known as Assata Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla.
The report also cites Castro’s idea that “the same racist Yankee imperialism victimizing Africa, Asia, and Latin America” was targeting minorities in the U.S. and describes the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos, or ICAP, as a Havana-based foreign intelligence operation that is connected to more than 2,000 “solidarity groups.”
The Cuban regime’s “sprawling ecosystem” has been using left-wing activists “less as a vehicle for the interests of ordinary Cubans – who are subject to brutal repression and often unable to freely work, assemble, speak, travel, or provide for their families” but as a part of a ”one-stop shop political service,” according to the report.
“Cuba has been oppressing its people, stifling freedom,” said U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody, who met with Cuban exiles on Monday at the Bay of Pigs Museum, also known as the Brigade 2506 Museum and Library, in Miami’s Little Havana.
The Ernesto “Che” Guevara Volunteer Work Brigade, a Havana-based state agency founded in 1993, and the Canadian Network on Cuba, or CNC, a Toronto-based organization, are ICAP collaborators, according to the report.
Baptist Rev. Lucius Walker Jr., the founder of the New York-based Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, who died in 2010, was part of the ICAP’s U.S. network and Castro’s ally, according to the report.
Other leaders Cuba used as allies, according to the report, included Robert F. Williams, who was born in North Carolina and died in 1996; Trinidadian-American Stokely Carmichael, who died in 1998; and Puerto Rican Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, who died in 2005.
Dominican-American Manolo De Los Santos, the founder of Manhattan-based nonprofit People’s Forum; Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles; and organizations Code Pink and the Democratic Socialists of America are allies of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel against, according to the report.
After George Floyd died during his arrest in Minneapolis and protests and riots followed, Díaz-Canel, who the U.S. accused of “repressing and imprisoning” Afro-Cuban dissident artists, delivered a speech in 2020 at the United Nations criticizing police brutality in the U.S.
‘UNCONVENTIONAL’ SPYCRAFT
For espionage purposes, the Cuban government recruited and “cultivated” students at elite U.S. universities to groom them into spies to infiltrate the U.S. government, according to the report.
The report cited the cases of Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia who admitted to acting as a secret agent for over 40 years, and Ana Montes, a former FBI analyst who admitted to passing U.S. secrets to Cuba.
The report alleged the ICAP had also infiltrated the National Lawyers Guild, an association of lawyers, law students, legal workers, and jailhouse lawyers, and NLG International, which advocated for the “Cuban Five” intelligence officers.
The report also cited The Wasp Network, which the FBI dismantled in 1998 after identifying several agents, including Juan Pablo Roque, a former Cuban MiG-23 pilot who was behind the Cuban Air Force’s fatal 1996 attack at sea of two planes from Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based nonprofit behind rescue flights.
The attack resulted in the recent U.S. Department of Justice’s indictment of Raúl Castro.
GUERRILLA WARFARE
The U.S. has accused Cuba of supporting Marxist-Leninist guerrillas such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC; the National Liberation Army, or ELN, in Colombia; the Ejercito Popular Revolucionario, or EPR, in Mexico; the Tupamaros in Uruguay; the Montoneros in Argentina; the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; the Ação Libertadora Nacional in Brazil; and the Maoist-aligned Shining Path in Peru.
Colombia’s outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla fighter known as “Aureliano,” shows that the “fingerprints of this era of Cuban-backed terror are still imprinted on Latin American politics today,” according to the report.
Andy Gomez, the former director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, said on Monday that the report didn’t establish any new connections.
“It keeps some of the members of the Cuban American community pointing the finger at Cuba and asking for regime change,” Gomez said about the likely strategic purpose of the report.
Related story: Read Gomez’s latest analysis on Cuba
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