On Monday, the State Department released a 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” introduced by Secretary Marco Rubio with the declaration that the American people deserve to know the full story of Cuban espionage and subversion. The headline the document is designed to generate—and the only part most will ever see—is that Havana is behind the American left: behind Black Lives Matter, the Democratic Socialists of America, Antifa, the George Floyd protests, and student activism. That headline is not what the report proves. It is what the report implies, through a rhetorical architecture worth dissecting precisely because so few of its readers will open the document long enough to see it.
The report is actually two stapled documents. The first is a genuinely documented history: Ana Belén Montes at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Víctor Manuel Rocha’s half-century as a Cuban agent within the foreign policy apparatus, Kendall Myers at the State Department itself, the trips of the Venceremos Brigade to the island since 1969, Cuban guerrilla training during the Cold War and its asylum of American fugitives, Assata Shakur the most famous among them. Almost none of this is new; almost all of it was settled in courts, congressional hearings, and declassified files decades ago, and the report’s notes refer to 1973 hearing transcripts and published journalism, not new intelligence. The second document is a set of assertions about the present: that today’s progressive organizations constitute “one of the largest, most sophisticated, and most dangerous vectors of hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Stapling is the whole method: the probative weight of the first document must be felt — without ever being transferred — under the second.
The stapling is observed in a single sentence, which will be quoted everywhere and examined nowhere:
Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history — from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa and the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on college campuses — can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.
Read this slowly. “To be linked, in some way, form, or manner” is not a discovery; it’s an insurance policy. Such a carefully guarded statement cannot be false because it cannot be tested. By the same logic, the American Revolution can be linked, in some way, form, or manner, to French influence, and the American right wing of the Cold War to the anti-communism of European émigrés. Intellectual genealogy is real—ideas travel, and Havana dedicated decades to cultivating precisely that traffic—but genealogy is not an operation, and influence is not control.
The report itself concedes the point in the section dedicated to its most politically useful target. The Democratic Socialists of America, it acknowledges, were not founded as a front for Cuban intelligence nor are they controlled by Cuban agents “per se”; their crime is that their convictions now coincide with Havana’s interests “of their own volition.” Stripped of the ominous undertone, this remains: an openly affiliated U.S. organization holds a political position—normalization, the end of the embargo—that a foreign government also holds, publicly announces its delegations, and meets openly with officials of a state with which the United States has grievances. The report treats transparency itself as something sinister, and lingers in five-star hotels and fine restaurants as if the quality of the accommodations were the quality of the evidence. But opposition to the embargo is not a fringe position imported from abroad; it has been the position of overwhelming majorities in the UN General Assembly for three decades and of consistent majorities among the American public in polls. When conformity with the stated preference of a foreign government becomes the standard of proof for subversion, that standard incriminates half of any democracy at any time.
The passage on Black Lives Matter operates the same distortion. The report claims that the movement’s leaders firmly sided with the Cuban government and against the protesters during the July 2021 demonstrations. What the organization actually released was a statement blaming U.S. policy for the island’s economic hardship and praising Cuba’s historical solidarity with Black liberation struggles—a statement legitimately criticized at the time, including by the left, for its silence regarding the state repression of predominantly Afro-Cuban protesters. A biased statement is a political failing; it is not coordination with a foreign intelligence service. The report’s methodology deliberately blurs that distinction, because the distinction is precisely what separates ill-intentioned opinions, which a free society processes, from foreign agency, against which a state can legally act.
There is also a structural contradiction that the report cannot resolve because it needs both sides. Cuba is described, in the same document, as a chronically failed state whose economy teeters on the brink of collapse—and as the ideological capital of a hemispheric network so powerful that it directs the most significant upheavals in American political life. The island now suffers continuous blackouts, fuel rationing, and the exodus of roughly a quarter of its population since 2021; its main backer was decapitated by U.S. forces in January, and its oil imports have been strangled by a blockade ever since. A regime this prostrate cannot simultaneously be the puppet master of American civil society. The contradiction is not an oversight. The paranoid style always demands an enemy weak enough to be overthrown and omnipotent enough to justify the overthrow, and the report supplies both on demand.
Which brings us to the moment of publication, the document’s least undeniable fact. It comes seven months into a pressure campaign that has included the capture of Nicolás Maduro, a naval blockade of Cuban oil supplies, a declared national emergency designating the island as an extraordinary threat, more than two hundred sanctions, and the president’s public warnings: “Make a deal, before it’s too late” in January, and last week, on Fox News, that “a lot of things are going to happen in Cuba in the coming months.” Governments preparing coercive actions produce documents like this; it’s a genre with its own lineage, from the 1981 White Paper on El Salvador to the 2002 dossiers. The genre’s function is not to inform but to pave the way: to leave a record, before the action, of a document that can later be cited as justification.
And the report serves a second, domestic, and unprecedentedly frank purpose: it is a State Department publication that names the political adversaries of the current administration—the DSA, whose members include the mayor of New York City; BLM; anti-ICE organizers; the National Lawyers Guild; Code Pink—as nodes of hostile foreign influence. Whatever one may think of any of these organizations, the maneuver itself must be recognized for what it is. Designating domestic dissent as an instrument of a foreign enemy is among the oldest reflexes of state power, and the United States has its own history of this, from the Palmer Raids to COINTELPRO. A foreign policy document that also functions as a list of domestic enemies is not describing subversion. It is practicing a policy for which subversion is the safe-conduct.
None of this requires pretending that the Cuban state is innocent of its history or benevolent toward its people. The espionage was real; the asylum granted to fugitives was real; the repression of the 2021 protesters was real and continues. But the report’s conclusion does not follow from its evidence, and its authors seem to know this: the evasive clause at its core is a confession. For the reader who will only see the headline, the distillation is this: a government preparing to act against Cuba has published one hundred pages in which everything verified is old and everything new is unverifiable, and has asked the phrase “in some way, form, or manner” to provide what the evidence refuses to demonstrate. The result is not a national security assessment, but the pre-established framework for justifying coercion abroad and delegitimizing dissent at home.
Sources: U.S. State Department, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” (July 20, 2026); Reuters; CNBC; Al Jazeera; PBS NewsHour; Foreign Policy; Fox News (January–July 2026).