The State Department wants Americans to believe that an island of roughly ten million people—struggling with severe shortages of food, medicine, fuel, and electricity and going more than 100 days without a single imported shipment of oil because of escalating U.S. sanctions—is secretly running American politics. That is the claim at the center of Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, a 100-page report released last week by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s department. It names 43 Americans and organizations—mayors, congresswomen, a Ben & Jerry’s co-founder, a podcaster, and even Global Exchange—as evidence of a Cuban “influence network” supposedly powerful enough to have shaped the George Floyd protests, Antifa, and campus activism nationwide. The report goes further still, casting Black liberation movements as foreign-directed rather than what they are: the legitimate response of communities fighting racism and police violence.
We know this playbook. It is the one that jailed American writers and union organizers under McCarthy in the 1950s. It is also the one Washington exported: in Indonesia in 1965, a U.S.-endorsed anti-communist purge killed roughly half a million people in five months, many of them identified through nothing more rigorous than a list like this one. The report even praises the “effectiveness” of “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” at breaking the Communist Party USA.
Nobody is fooled, and nobody here is guilty of anything but believing that Americans and Cubans have a right to know each other.
That belief is the actual target. For decades, Global Exchange has organized people-to-people exchanges between Americans and Cubans—delegations, dialogue, and ordinary human connection—on the conviction that understanding, not blockade, is what opens the way to a more peaceful and respectful relationship between our two countries. That is precisely what this report seeks to criminalize: not espionage or violence, but dialogue itself.
Rather than reckon with the devastating human toll of the U.S. blockade, the Trump administration has chosen to portray those who advocate for dialogue, exchange, and humanitarian solidarity as threats to national security. There is nothing strong about that. It is smash-and-grab foreign policy dressed up as national security, and it is Washington, not Havana, that has turned a fragile but real thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations back into a nightmare.
That is the level of seriousness behind this “war on Cuban subversion”: manufacture a villain, then manufacture the crime to match. It would be funny if the people on that 43-name list weren’t real Americans now facing real exposure for holding an opinion. It would be funny if ten million Cubans weren’t living the life-threatening shortages this report never mentions.
We are not intimidated, and we are not stopping. Next week, Global Exchange returns to Cuba with a delegation, bringing humanitarian aid and carrying cancer medicine, building people-to-people connections, and standing in solidarity with the Cuban people as they endure the collective punishment of this horrific blockade. We will keep building the human ties between the United States and Cuba that no report—however cartoonish—will persuade us to abandon.
None of this happens without resources, and we’re asking you directly for help. For over three decades we’ve taken principled positions — on Cuba, on Iraq, on Iran, on Palestine — that plenty of people with deep pockets found inconvenient enough to walk away from. We don’t have corporate sponsors or a billionaire benefactor bankrolling this work. We have each other. That means when the State Department tries to make dissent expensive and frightening, the people who keep it possible are the ones reading this.