Already a subscriber? Make sure to log into your account before viewing this content. You can access your account by hitting the “login” button on the top right corner. Still unable to see the content after signing in? Make sure your card on file is up-to-date.

The State Department has released a report claiming Cuba has spent decades building an espionage and influence network inside the US that has particularly targeted “left-wing movements.”

Getting into it: The report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” argues that Cuban agents and operatives work within “hundreds” of organizations and “collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” According to the report, Cuba built “a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to antifa,” one that “continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

It also claims 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.”

On the Floyd protests specifically, the report says that as demonstrations spread across the country in 2020, “Cuban state media and officials issued daily commentary portraying the United States as a systemically racist country morally unfit to criticize Cuba’s human rights record.” At the same time, it claims, Havana was “violently repressing and imprisoning Afro-Cuban dissident artists and others who had criticized police killings of Afro-Cubans.”

The document names American organizations directly, listing the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) under a section on “front groups and fellow travelers” and pointing to delegations the group has sent to Cuba since 2022 through channels tied to recently sanctioned entities. It stops short of saying the DSA is controlled by Cuban agents, instead describing what it calls a “deep and abiding devotion” to the regime. Other groups named include Code Pink, the People’s Forum, and the National Network on Cuba.

Notably, the DSA has backed prominent figures including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The group has not publicly responded to the report.

On the espionage side, the report argues Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence is “far more skilled and sophisticated” than the Soviet KGB “ever was,” citing known cases including Walter Kendall Myers and Victor Manuel Rocha, both former State Department officials, and Ana Belén Montes, who spent years as a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Myers fed Havana classified material for nearly 30 years and got life without parole. Montes memorized DIA secrets and typed them up for her handlers at night, burning four US undercover officers in Cuba before her arrest 10 days after 9/11. Rocha spent more than 40 years working for Cuban intelligence, including a stint on the National Security Council and two years as ambassador to Bolivia. Cuban intelligence “think[s] in decades,” according to the report, and leans on recruits who already believe in the cause rather than buying secrets outright.

The report lands amid a serious escalation of pressure on the island. Cuba has lived under a US economic embargo for six decades, and since January it has also faced expanded sanctions and a naval oil blockade that has deepened severe energy shortages and repeated blackouts.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents emigrated from Cuba, has campaigned against the Havana government since his Senate days. Last week, he told officials from more than 60 countries at a State Department event that Cuba’s “sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere.” Introducing the report, he posted that the “Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism.” Rep. Carlos Gimenez was blunter, posting simply: “Cuba is next!”

The release has fueled speculation that the administration is laying groundwork for regime change in Havana, following a January US military operation to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Trump’s comment last month that Cuba had “sort of collapsed” and that he’d “handle” it once the Iran war wraps.