As a rule, reports by Washington, D.C.’s various bureaucracies are often meant to be written, not read. Many are perfunctory. To the extent they contain revelations, they are often watered down or hidden in the worst type of bureaucratic prose.
But the State Department’s new report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” should be required reading. It shines a much-needed light on a long-standing menace to the American way of life.
At its publication, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading state sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States. The State Department is exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country.”
“The American people,” the secretary wrote, “deserve to know.”
For too long, the truth about the Cuban regime has been hidden while its horrors lie in plain sight. And they extend far beyond Cuban soil.
But many on the Left, firmly ensconced in American institutions, would have you think otherwise.
In March 2016, then-President Barack Obama made a historic visit to the island. The 44th president sought a détente with the Cuban regime, and he was willing to do whatever it took to get it.
In his bid to normalize relations, Obama reopened embassies in Washington, D.C., and Havana, authorized commercial flights to the country, and removed the State Department designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism that every administration, Republican and Democrat, had maintained since 1982.
When his plane approached Havana, Obama told his deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes: “That doesn’t look like a national security threat to me.” He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Cuba has allowed Russia and China to use their country as a base of operations for intelligence gathering against Americans. And American diplomats have been targeted, harassed, and grievously injured in the country. Nor is that all.
Less than five years after Obama’s infamous pronouncement, widespread rioting, infamously dubbed “mostly peaceful protests” by some in the media, would engulf the U.S. in the summer of 2020.
As the State Department’s report details, the origins of some of that violence, its ideological underpinnings, can be traced back to the Cuban regime itself.
“For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States.” That campaign began the moment that Fidel Castro and his followers seized power in 1959. From the beginning, Western intellectuals adored Castro and pinned their twisted hopes and dreams on the man.
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As early as 1957, the New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews lavished praise on Castro and painted him as a romantic freedom fighter. Castro was portrayed as fighting for democracy. In fact, he and his successors would spend decades quashing any semblance of it.
Matthews would be the first in a long line of members of the press, academia, and policymakers to provide camouflage and cover for the regime. Their institutionalized whitewashing goes far in explaining the durability of the Cuban dictatorship, which has continued to pose a threat more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
From the regime’s inception, leftists viewed it as the next best thing to attack the West. At the time, the Soviets, while infinitely more powerful economically and militarily, had settled into a sustained period of great-power competition with the U.S.
The more extreme left-wing adherents didn’t want detente. They wanted revolution, including in the U.S. itself. They sought to advance in their global fight against capitalism and America. A strategy of defense, instead of offense, was viewed with disdain.
Accordingly, the Cuban regime became the vanguard of the revolution, attempting to spread communism from Latin America to Africa and beyond.
Cuba trained, aided, and supplied Palestinian terrorist groups, even covertly deploying an armored brigade to Syria to fight against Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Cuba spearheaded the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere and Africa.
Cuba’s intelligence agency, the DI (previously the DGI), was at the forefront, punching way above its weight.
Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst, noted in his 2012 book Castro’s Secrets: “Many retired CIA officials stand in awe of how Cuba, a small island nation, could have built up such exceptional clandestine capabilities and run so many successful operations against American targets.”
Indeed, for nearly two decades, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s own top Cuba expert, Ana Belen Montes, was herself a Cuban spy. The Cubans, the former CIA Chief of Counterintelligence said in 2020, are “much better than the KGB ever was.”
The Cuban regime has played the long game against America and the West, and they have played it well.
As the State Department’s 99-page report makes clear, a central front in their war — perhaps the central front — has been their ability to create networks and cultivate activists to do their bidding, including in the U.S.
These networks run the gamut of U.S. society, from university campuses to the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies themselves.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba was a primary foreign supporter of the myriad of domestic terrorist groups that emerged, including the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and others. When they blew up the U.S. Capitol building, murdered police officers, or robbed banks, they did so with support from the Cuban regime.
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Cuba’s support for insurrectionist movements didn’t end when the Berlin Wall collapsed. Rather, it has continued to the present day. And thanks to Havana’s creation of various fronts, such as the Venceremos Brigade (whose alumni include current Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass), the regime has decades of “talent” and contacts to draw from. They’ve been organizing while the U.S. could charitably be described as being asleep at the wheel — until, one hopes, now.
For too long, the Left and the various institutions that it controls have soft-peddled the dangers of the Cuban regime while obfuscating Havana’s outsize role in fomenting havoc.
The State Department’s well-written report is not only a necessary corrective, but it’s an important, if belated, first step in confronting a menace whose efforts to undermine the U.S. have been both ceaseless and bloody.