The State Department on Monday released a report that charged communist Cuba with helping America’s enemies spread their influence through the Western Hemisphere, including Iran, Hamas, and other jihadi groups.
The report, titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, indicted Cuba for covertly supporting just about every threat to American stability it could find, including domestic terrorists and left-wing extremists – every group or individual that might help to “turn America against itself.”
The Cuban regime also helped malevolent foreign powers spread their influence across Latin America, and not just Communists or ideological fellow travelers. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba expanded its horizons from helping Marxist revolutionary groups to form alliances with a range of hostile nation-states and terrorist groups.
“Rather than spying on America on behalf of the Soviet bloc, modern Cuba funnels the information and intelligence its agents collect in the United States to adversarial states such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” the report said.
Cuba might be small and impoverished, and it lost a great deal of its financial and material support when the Soviet Union collapsed, but it remained highly skilled at spycraft, it retained well-established espionage networks on American soil, and it had a prime location off the U.S. coast. Cuban intelligence was much more effective at recruiting ideologically sympathetic agents and subverting student groups than any jihadi group after 9/11.
“The regime continues to act as a force multiplier for a much broader anti-American coalition, positioning itself as a staging ground for a wide range of foreign adversaries to conduct operations against the United States,” the report said.
“At the same time, Cuba operates as a kind of concierge service for anti-American actors, providing them with access to domestic influence and intelligence within the United States and facilitating contacts with American groups and movements. Cuba’s hemispheric networks offer a similar value proposition — serving as a vector for Iran, Russia, and numerous other regimes to project influence across the region,” it added.
The hundred-page report devotes a chapter to Cuba’s partnerships with Iran and its “Axis of Resistance” — Iran’s network of terrorist proxies across the Middle East, including “non-state actors” such as Hamas.
The report noted that Cuba developed enduring ties with Palestinian terrorist organizations as far back as the 1960s and offered military training to their fighters in the 70s and 80s. Groups like the PLO in turn used Cuba as a gateway to develop partnerships with Latin American militants.
The State Department pointed out that some of these terrorist groups have Marxist-Leninist ideologies in addition to their Islamic fundamentalism, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), both of which participated in the October 7, 2023, atrocities against Israeli civilians. Some of the fighters in those groups were trained by Cuban operatives. The PFLP has an office in Havana to this day.
With Cuba’s help, groups like Hamas and the PFLP have built an influence network that spans over 86 countries around the world, including the United States, according to the resport. A grim synergy is at work, as these networks sometimes use antisemitism as the lure to draw young people into radical leftism, while other times they use radical leftism as the lure to indoctrinate students into jihadi ideology.
“Western governments should not underestimate the convergence of Cuba’s revolutionary solidarity networks and Islamist radicals,” the State Department report warned. “Over the years, Cuban ambassadors have frequently met with delegations from Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, including a highly visible meeting between Hamas officials and the Cuban ambassador to Lebanon just eight months before the October 7th attacks.”
“Even as its economy teeters on the brink of collapse in the wake of decades of corrupt communist rule, the Cuban regime’s fundamental objective remains the same as it was when Castro first marched into Havana in 1959: a hemispheric Marxist revolution that erases the United States from the earth,” the report concluded.
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