President Donald Trump’s administration released a 100-page report linking left-wing advocacy groups in the United States to Cuba, but the report often relies on circumstantial and ideological connections rather than direct connections.
The document, released by the State Department on Monday, frequently uses language and concepts reminiscent of the Cold War and depicts the beleaguered Caribbean nation as an ideological threat to the United States and its interests. They claim that Cuba, led by a communist regime, is trying to overthrow the United States from within.
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“While Soviet communism was often driven by more pragmatic great power interests, such as preserving the Soviet empire and defending material interests around the world, its successor, Cuba, was built around an almost singular obsession with the ‘liberation’ of the Global South from its Western colonial oppressors.”
“In the Cuban mind, there was only one path to this goal: the destruction of the Yankee imperialist system.”
Left-wing activists deny accusations of links to Cuba, saying the report’s claims are aimed at increasing pressure on Havana while cracking down on dissent in the United States.
Here are five key takeaways from this report.
Left-wing groups criticized for ties to Cuba
In a section titled “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” the State Department attempts to draw connections between Havana and left-wing groups in the United States and around the world.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has helped elect several progressive politicians to Congress and is the most prominent group on the list.
The Trump administration acknowledges that DSA is not a Cuban asset, but says the group’s rise shows that the “inherent and organic ideological commitment of the American far left now reflects the interests of the Cuban government.”
DSA is an activist organization whose mission is to support workers in gaining power through democratic means.
The report touted the DSA’s influence, calling it “a mass membership organization that is openly active in American electoral politics, has a growing bench of elected officials, and has substantial influence within the Democratic coalition.”
“DSA has built a national infrastructure dedicated to moving far-left politics from the fringes to the mainstream, and with it a deep and enduring commitment to the Cuban regime.”
The Trump administration also singled out the anti-war group Code Pink and emphasized that one of its donors was an American citizen living in China.
Code Pink recently participated as part of a humanitarian delegation to Cuba.
Medea Benjamin, the group’s co-founder, told Al Jazeera that the group “will not be intimidated” by the Trump administration.
She said the practice of labeling activists as communists was a “flashback” to the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War.
“We are in an era of McCarthyism, where they not only try to label groups like us as communists and position us as enemies of the state, but also combine that with efforts to suppress protests,” Benjamin told Al Jazeera.
“So this is a scary time for people, but it’s also a time where nothing can stop us. We have no choice but to stand up to these bullies.”
State Department summons Zoran Mamdani
The document focused on the case of black liberation activist Assata Shakur, who was convicted of killing a police officer in New Jersey in 1973 and fled to Cuba, where he was granted asylum, and named the mayor of New York. Shakur has always maintained that he is innocent.
The State Department, led by Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban descent, said Cuba was pursuing a “Shakur strategy” to gain a foothold in left-wing groups and African-American advocacy groups, including the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Figures like Shakur, and with them Cuban influence, continue to have extraordinary influence on left-wing politics in the United States today,” the report said.
He also cited American politicians who praised Shakur when he died in exile last year.
“Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley tweeted ‘Rest in Power,’ and shared a video of her leading a crowd in a call-and-response recitation of one of Shakur’s slogans,” the State Department said in a statement.
“During the 2025 election campaign, New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani refused to condemn the Democratic Socialists of America’s tribute to Shakur.”
When asked about the DSA’s statement on Shakur, Mamdani said it is focused on affordability and lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers.
Expert: “Complete nonsense”
Antoni Capsia, emeritus professor of Latin American history at the University of Nottingham, was surprised to see that Rubio’s report cited an article he wrote in the left-wing magazine Jacobin in February.
“The main antagonist in world history was no longer ‘capital’ but Western civilization itself,” the report says.
As the socialist magazine Jacobin fondly detailed earlier this year, it was Cuba that “many in the Third World saw as the ideal place to radically rethink anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonization.” What Cuba was proposing, Jacobin wrote, “was essentially a decolonization of Marxist thought.”
Capsia emphasized that his point was that anti-colonial movements in the Global South in the mid-1960s followed a Marxist line against imperialism.
“The main imperialist that they often looked at was the United States. But again, this is not about subverting the United States,” Kapusia told Al Jazeera in a phone interview.
He added that Cuba’s support for left-wing groups around the world is not a consistent strategy. Rather, it was a policy in the 1960s when the island was under strict segregation imposed by the United States.
Mr. Capusia said the claim that Cuba supports left-wing groups in the United States is “absolute nonsense.”
A sign of invasion?
The report is the latest move by the Trump administration toward Cuba.
After U.S. forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, Washington ordered new authorities in Caracas to halt fuel shipments to Cuba, plunging the country into a humanitarian crisis.
In May, U.S. authorities filed criminal charges against 95-year-old former Cuban politician Raul Castro over the 1996 shooting down of two planes that killed four people, but Havana insists the planes crossed its airspace without authorization.
“It’s like we’re just setting up an invasion or some kind of intervention, and most of the rest of the world is totally opposed to that,” Capusia said.
However, he added that President Trump is unlikely to launch a military operation against Cuba, citing Cuba’s strategic importance, retreating national resources, and growing anti-war sentiment in the United States.
“It looks like rhetoric, but it may be wishful thinking. We may be expecting it to be rhetoric,” Kapusia told Al Jazeera. “When it comes to Trump, I’m not ruling anything out.”
Code Pink’s Benjamin said the report and other statements demonizing Cuba were aimed at justifying a “diabolical starvation policy” by referring to the U.S. siege of Cuba.
“I think they are preparing for an invasion,” she told Al Jazeera. “I think they are laying the groundwork, and this is part of the plan, because starving the population will not achieve the objectives they want. This is clearly regime change.”
Republican Congressman Carlos Jimenez, who represents a South Florida district that is home to a large Cuban-American community, cited the report in calling for regime change in Cuba.
“Next up is Cuba,” he wrote to X.
Cuba is poor but toxic, report says
Both Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Capsia scoffed at the idea that Cuba, an impoverished country under siege and suffering shortages and power outages, is a threat to the United States.
The report describes Cuba as “the connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition, a hub where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with extremist movements operating within our own borders.”
“To mistake Cuba’s poverty as harmless is to completely misunderstand the threat,” the paper said.
“Its material weakness was never a measure of its danger; its power was always ideological, destructive, and parasitic. And it proved surprisingly durable, lasting beyond the Soviet empire it helped build and grafting onto every new enemy of the United States that has emerged since.”
Benjamin told Al Jazeera that the U.S. government is “painting a picture that doesn’t exist” about Cuba.
“Calling Cuba a threat is completely ridiculous,” she said.
