The Trump administration has spent 100 pages trying to convince Americans that an island suffering daily blackouts poses the single greatest ideological threat to the United States since the Soviet Union.

"Cuba has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism."

--- Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, introducing the State Department's Cuba report on X

On Monday the State Department released a 100-page report titled "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism," a sprawling indictment that alleges Cuba is running the largest, most sophisticated foreign influence operation in modern American history. The document names left-wing organizations including the Democratic Socialists of America as "front groups and fellow travelers," invokes the memory of Assata Shakur, and traces a line from Cuban operations in the 1960s all the way to George Floyd protests, Antifa, and campus activism.

The report was authored under the direction of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents fled Cuba in the 1960s. It arrives just weeks after the United States cut off fuel shipments to the island through a newly installed Venezuelan government, plunging Cuba into a humanitarian energy crisis. President Trump has repeatedly suggested that once the ongoing war with Iran concludes, Cuba will be next.

At least one prominent member of Congress thinks so too. Republican Carlos Gimenez, who represents a South Florida district home to a large Cuban-American community, cited the report to call for regime change, writing on X: "Cuba is next."

A Cold War Fantasy for a Collapsing Nation

The report opens with sweeping historical claims about Cuba's role in supporting anti-colonial movements across the Global South during the 1960s and 1970s. It describes Cuba as the "connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition, a staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside our own borders."

Its most arresting passage is meant to sound like a warning from a defector who has seen behind the curtain: "To mistake Cuba's poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely. Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger. Its power was always ideological, subversive, and parasitic."

The problem is that the Cuba being described bears little resemblance to the country that exists today. Havana has been suffering rolling blackouts for months. The island experienced its third power grid collapse in 10 days in July alone. Food and medicine shortages are severe. The economy, already devastated by decades of sanctions, has been further crippled by the Trump administration's recent decision to pressure Venezuela to halt fuel shipments to Cuba.

Antoni Kapcia, an emeritus professor of Latin American history at the University of Nottingham, told Al Jazeera that the report's central claims are "complete nonsense." He noted that one of his own academic articles, published in the left-wing magazine Jacobin in February, was cited in the report to support the claim that Cuba pioneered a "decolonisation of Marxist thought." Kapcia said his actual argument was about how anti-colonial movements in the 1960s took a Marxist line in opposition to imperialism. "The principal imperialist they often saw was the United States. But that again is not subverting the United States," he said.

Orlando Perez, a professor of political science at the University of North Texas at Dallas who focuses on South America, wrote on X that "recasting a blacked-out, collapsing state as a hemispheric mastermind converts weakness into menace."

The "Shakur Strategy"

One of the most controversial sections of the report zeroes in on Assata Shakur, the Black liberation activist who was convicted of killing a police officer in New Jersey in 1973 before fleeing to Cuba in 1984, where she was granted asylum. Shakur always maintained her innocence and died in exile in Cuba in 2025 at the age of 78.

The State Department claims Cuba pursued a "Shakur strategy" to gain a foothold in left-wing circles and African-American advocacy groups, including the Black Lives Matter movement. The report cites politicians who praised Shakur when she died, including Representative Ayanna Pressley, who tweeted "Rest in Power" and shared a video of herself leading a crowd in call-and-response recitation of one of Shakur's slogans.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was singled out by name. The report noted that during the 2025 campaign trail, Mamdani "refused to denounce a Democratic Socialists of America tribute to Shakur." When asked about the controversy, Mamdani said he was focused on affordability and lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers.

The DSA, which has helped elect several progressive politicians to Congress, is the most prominent organization targeted in the report's "Front Groups and Fellow Travellers" section. The administration admits that the DSA is not a Cuban asset. But it argues that the group's rise demonstrates how "native and organic ideological commitments of the American far left now mirror the interests" of the Cuban government. The report describes the DSA as "a mass membership organisation operating openly in American electoral politics" with "a growing bench of elected officials, and real influence inside the Democratic Party coalition."

McCarthyism 2.0

The response from the organizations named in the report has been swift. Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told Al Jazeera that the accusations were a "flashback" to the McCarthy-era witch hunts of the 1950s. She noted that her organization was singled out because one of its donors is a US citizen who lives in China, and because Code Pink recently participated in a humanitarian delegation to Cuba.

"We are in an era of McCarthyism, where they're not only labelling groups like us communists and trying to position us as enemies of the state, but also combining that with the efforts to crack down on protests," Benjamin said. "So it's a scary time for people, but it's also a time that we can't allow them to stop us. We've got to just stand up to these bullies."

Benjamin went further, suggesting the report and other efforts to demonize Cuba are intended to justify the "demonic policy of starvation" that the US has imposed on the island. "I think they're getting ready for an invasion," she said. "I think they're laying the groundwork, and this is part of the plan, because starving the people is not achieving the ends that they want, which is obviously regime change."

Setting the Stage for War

The timing of the report is not lost on observers. Since January the United States has turned up the pressure on Cuba significantly. After US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, Washington ordered the new Venezuelan authorities to halt fuel shipments to Cuba. In May, US authorities issued a criminal indictment against 95-year-old former Cuban leader Raul Castro over the downing of two planes in 1996.

Experts are divided on whether the report is a genuine prelude to military action or merely rhetorical posturing. Kapcia said the report "looks as though it's just setting up an invasion or some sort of intervention. Most of the rest of the world is totally opposed to that." He added that due to Cuba's declining strategic importance and rising antiwar sentiment in the United States, Trump is unlikely to launch a military campaign. "It seems to be rhetoric, but that could be wishful thinking. We could be hoping it's rhetoric," he said. "I rule nothing out when it comes to Trump."

Foreign Policy noted that until very recently, Trump administration officials had not usually mentioned Cuba as a significant threat, frequently focusing instead on Russia, China, or Iran. The report represents a dramatic shift in framing, casting Cuba's actions not as a reaction to US operations that have sought to overturn its government through the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, assassination attempts, sanctions, and political pressure, but rather as part of a "revolution against Western civilization itself."

The 100-page document concludes with a sweeping claim that "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."

No evidence of direct coordination between Havana and any of these movements was provided.

Sources: The Intercept, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy. Additional reporting by the State Department's own Cuba report, available at state.gov.