A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.
Cuba’s communist regime has been engaged in a long-term campaign of subversion in the United States through espionage and support for radicals and leftists, including black-clad Antifa street thugs and the organizers of riots in the wake of the death of George Floyd, according to a State Department report.
“For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” the 100-page report states.
Cuban intelligence “infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history,” the report states.
According to the report, which is based on secret intelligence and open sources of information, Cuban operatives today are inside hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers and ideological non-government and nonprofit networks.
“These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history,” the report said.
The report said Cuba’s intelligence service continues to have “scores of still-unidentified agents” inside the U.S. government.
The report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” takes a deep dive into how the communist country has run a decades-long subversion campaign against the U.S., tying the Cuban government to a wide range of American left-wing groups and historical figures.
Cuba has been supporting and influencing many of the most significant upheavals in recent U.S. political history. They include the George Floyd riots in 2020, the frequent violence by Antifa street thugs and the “explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses,” the report said.
“The danger of this intelligence penetration is only compounded by Cuba’s new alliances, as the island hosts a growing number of foreign military, intelligence and terrorist installations on its own soil — posing a unique threat to American homeland security,” the report said.
“Amid all this, the Cuban people themselves continue to suffer in hunger and darkness, forced to live in something akin to modern slavery under the occupying regime, held hostage by their own state,” the report said.
The anti-U.S. “assault” by Cuba is not about economic policy or sovereignty or ownership of territory. It is an attack on the United States “from within” that seeks to turn Americans into instruments of the nation’s demise, the report said.
Cuba’s “power was always ideological, subversive and parasitic” and has endured the collapse of its main sponsor, the Soviet Union.
“Today it serves 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,” the report said.
The new report was published Monday and appears to be part of a Trump administration pressure campaign against the communist government in Havana.
Both President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American, have said the Cuban system is a failure and should be replaced with a non-communist government.
Mr. Trump predicted in March that the regime in Havana would fall “pretty soon.”
After the Justice Department filed criminal charges against former Cuban leader Raul Castro, Mr. Trump raised the prospect of military intervention to end the regime.
Mr. Rubio said in March that Cuba “has to get new people in charge,” and commented on what he called “incompetent communists.”
The report is the first time in decades that the U.S. government has singled out the Cuban regime for its role in conducting large-scale overt and covert intelligence and influence operations targeting the United States.
The new study details how Cubans have waged “a long war of attrition” involving espionage, spy penetrations of U.S. organizations, the use of proxies and a “revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.”
Cuban espionage was so successful that in 1987, a high-ranking Cuban intelligence agency defector, Maj. Florentino Aspillaga, revealed that “virtually every spy the CIA had recruited inside Cuba since the Bay of Pigs in 1961 had actually been a double agent working for Havana,” the report said.
The doubling of the CIA’s agent network led to the Havana government supplying disinformation about Cuba for more than 20 years, the report said.
Cuba also became a safe haven for fugitive American terrorists who fled prosecutions for bombings, armed robberies and murders, and as an operating base for Soviet and Russian electronic intelligence gathering and more recently Chinese electronic signals spying, the report said.
Cuban agents operated for decades undetected after infiltrating into the highest ranks of the U.S. government, including at the State Department, inside the White House National Security Council and the Pentagon.
According to the report, Cuba’s Direccion de Inteligencia (DI) has run one of history’s most effective espionage operations against the U.S. government for more than 60 years. Former CIA counterintelligence chief James Olson has called the Cuban operation more effective than the former Soviet Union’s KGB.
During those six decades, the DI has played a central role in a “dazzling array of operations,” the report said, including infiltrating universities, organizing revolutionary movements in the U.S. and training Palestinian terrorists in South Yemen.
Ideological warfare against the United States, however, is detailed in the report as the most successful and enduring campaign against America.
The U.S. groups that received Cuban ideological backing, including the 1960s radicals of the Black Panthers and the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground, including more recent backing of Antifa, a communist group organized around the idea of anti-fascism, the report said.
Today, Cuban government agents are linked to a network of leftist nonprofit organizations, anti-ICE collectives, socialist organizations and Marxist militants in the United States.
Cuban communism operates under the idea that Marxism must advance the “liberation” of the Global South from Western colonialism.
“In the minds of the Cubans, there was only one path to this goal: the destruction of the Yankee imperialist regime,” the report said, noting that “Castro’s ideological project now enjoys something approaching ideological hegemony in leftist circles both within and beyond the West.”
Cuba’s main organization for the entire intelligence and influence network is a group called the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples.
That group has worked with the Democratic Socialists of America, the socialist group that saw a key member New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani elected and is now moving aggressively to elect political candidates around the country.
The DSA is described in a section of the report on Cuban “front groups and fellow travelers” as one of the several groups supporting Havana’s subversion.
“The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) serves as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist radicalism,” the report said.
“The DSA was not founded as a Cuban intelligence or influence front; it was born in 1982 as a fusion of socialist organizations and movements from both the Old Left and New Left factions, including veterans of [Communist Party USA] and [Students for a Democratic Society].”
The DSA today “maintains a fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime” as part of the “orthodoxy on the American far left,” the report said.
Cuba also backed the more recent Black Lives Matter movement and supported the George Floyd uprisings in the summer of 2020, the report said.
Several high-ranking American intelligence professionals who worked against the DI have been outspoken about the threat the Cuban intelligence agency continues to pose to the U.S
Chris Simmons, a retired Pentagon expert on Cuban intelligence who helped unmask Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes — a senior analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency who was arrested in 2001 and released in 2023 — estimated in a 2009 interview with the Miami Herald that Havana maintains about 250 agents and their handlers in the U.S.
Based on past Cuban “tactics, techniques and procedures,” Mr. Simmons said, that figure would include six to nine senior agents within the U.S. government comparable to Montes, more than a dozen in academia, and 30 to 36 operating under diplomatic cover at Cuban missions in Washington and New York. An additional 135, he noted, are likely focused on monitoring Cuban Americans, largely in South Florida.
The report also examines the Venceremos Brigade, which has brought roughly 10,000 American activists to Cuba since 1969. It describes the brigade as a vehicle for propaganda and intelligence collection, linking its founding generation to the creation of the Weather Underground, the domestic militant extremist group. The report cites FBI reporting alleging Cuban officials assisted Weather Underground members in evading capture.
Numerous brigade alumni have gone on to hold significant positions in American public life, the report notes, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who organized for the brigade in the 1970s and publicly expressed condolences over Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s death in 2016.
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.