Cuba’s leader Miguel Diaz-Canel raises his fist next to Progressive International’s general coordinator, David Adler, during an event at the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples in Havana, on March 21, 2026.
POOL/AFP via Getty Images
The State Department is publishing a report Monday accusing Cuba of fomenting left-wing extremism in the United States and building a sophisticated espionage and influence network focused on penetrating and undermining U.S. interests.
“The report finds that for nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has played an indispensable role in nearly every notable far-left insurgency, revolution and militant movement across and beyond the Western Hemisphere,” a State Department official said.
In a meeting Wednesday about far-left extremism with officials from more than 60 countries, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made a similar point.
“The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological networks helped build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere,” he said,“ and it remains inextricably linked to far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.”
The State Department is publishing the report at a time the administration is ramping up pressure on the Cuban government to make economic and political reforms. In an executive order expanding sanctions on the Cuban government in May, President Donald Trump said Cuba poses an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. Cuban officials have vehemently insisted Cuba poses no threat to the United States.
The report makes the case that Cuba’s “failed state” economy masks one of the most effective foreign intelligence and influence operations in modern history. Though comprehensive, the report uses public sources and does not make any new disclosures about such activities.
The 64-page document obtained by the Miami Herald goes through a historical account of Cuba’s efforts to export guerrilla movements and its own version of Marxism, “forged around… a fundamental hatred of the United States,” to bring about a hemispheric Marxist revolution, “a revolution against the West itself.” And it discusses at length how Cuba has built alliances with far-left organizations as part of a long-term “war of attrition” to “erase the United States from the Earth.”
What makes Cuba’s threat unique and difficult to understand, the report argues, is that Cuba blends espionage and “soft” influence into the effort.
“Other hostile regimes have stolen American secrets, financed terrorism, armed proxies, spread propaganda, or sought to cultivate political influence inside the United States,” the document says. “Cuba did — and does — all these things and more; but the Cuban regime has never recognized the neat distinctions that so often structure the American government’s understanding of foreign threats.”
Though the report highlights Cuba’s sophisticated espionage operations, it stresses Cuba’s campaign had been more successful on the ideological battlefront.
The State Department’s report places Cuba at the center of a broader anti-American coalition, which includes Russia, China, Iran and domestic far-left organizations, and Havana as “the ideological capital of the modern radical left.
“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,” the report adds.
It details Cuba’s historical courtship of Black radical activists as well as trips to Cuba, ideological alignment and cozy institutional relationships of several U.S. far-left groups such as Code Pink, the People’s Forum, the National Network on Cuba and Democratic Socialists of America with the Cuban government.
Those organizations have also been active in the pro-Palestinian and anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests, which the State Department sees as a sign of Cuba’s influence in destabilizing U.S. politics. In particular, the report highlights a document put together by the National Network on Cuba called National Rapid Response Plan outlining coordinated nationwide protests against federal buildings, military bases and ICE facilities if the U.S. takes military action against Cuba.
That plan states that the goal of protesting outside ICE facilities is connecting “Cuba solidarity to anti-ICE/immigrant defense work happening nationwide.”
The U.S. government report also mentions a March trip several American and international far left organizations and influencers took to Cuba, publicized as the “Nuestra America flotilla.” The flotilla has garnered scrutiny over its coordination with Cuban authorities, in particular with the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples and its travel agency Amistur, which was in charge of the logistics. The institute is headed by a convicted Cuban spy, Fernando Gonzalez Llort, who served 15 years in U.S. prison for his role in the Wasp Network in the 1990s.
Last month, the State Department sanctioned the institute and Amistur for supporting Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence activities. It also terminated the legal status of Carlos Antonio Lloga Dominguez, a former official at the institute whom the agency accused of maintaining ties to the institution and its “transnational communist subversion network,” the State Department said in a statement at the time. Lloga Dominguez and his family were detained in New York on June 26 of this year.
The statement says the institute “maintains an outsized footprint across the United States, trafficking in vile anti-American propaganda, cultivating pro-Havana regime activists and politicians, and lobbying federal, state and local politicians on behalf of the Cuban dictatorship.”
The report also highlights Cuba’s longstanding efforts to penetrate the U.S. government, citing some of the most well-known Cuba moles caught by U.S. intelligence services, including former U.S. Ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior analyst Ana Belén Montes and former State Department analyst Walter Kendall Myers.
“Cuba created one of the most sophisticated and adept espionage and subversion operations in the world – almost singularly focused on penetrating and undermining the United States,” the report says.
The report argues that Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence is “far more skilled and sophisticated” than the Soviet KGB “ever was” and has targeted the United States not just due to political reasons but to be able to pass the intelligence to U.S. adversaries like Russia, China and Iran.
Cuba’s intelligence services “think in decades” and usually recruit Americans who ideologically support the Cuban government instead of paying for stolen secrets, the report says. Cuban spy agency targets “promising students and activists before they possess access, develops them patiently, and steers them into universities, government agencies, diplomatic careers, intelligence posts, or influential civil-society institutions.”
“That integrated approach,” the report adds, “is the bridge between Cuba’s spy service and its much wider political network.”
Nora Gámez Torres
el Nuevo Herald
Nora Gámez Torres is the Cuba/U.S.-Latin American policy reporter for el Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald. She studied journalism and media and communications in Havana and London. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from City, University of London. Her work has won awards by the Florida Society of News Editors and the Society for Professional Journalists. For her “fair, accurate and groundbreaking journalism,” she was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2025 — the most prestigious award for coverage of the Americas.//Nora Gámez Torres estudió periodismo y comunicación en La Habana y Londres. Tiene un doctorado en sociología y desde el 2014 cubre temas cubanos para el Nuevo Herald y el Miami Herald. También reporta sobre la política de Estados Unidos hacia América Latina. Su trabajo ha sido reconocido con premios de Florida Society of News Editors y Society for Profesional Journalists. Por su “periodismo justo, certero e innovador”, fue galardonada con el Premio Maria Moors Cabot en 2025 —el premio más prestigioso a la cobertura de las Américas.
