How a 99-page State Department report reveals the empire’s unending war against a small island’s sovereignty
On July 20, 2026, four days after Marco Rubio convened his “Far Left Terrorism” conference in Washington, the State Department released a 99-page report titled, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” For a report that claims to be analysis, it spends 99 pages doing nothing but justifying a blockade, the sanctions, and 67 years of war against a small island. No document better reveals the ideological character of this crusade.
Rubio has built a career on hating Cuba—an island his parents left in 1956, three years before the Revolution. They were not exiles. They were working-class immigrants who built a life in the United States. Rubio invented the exile story anyway, for cheap political gain—a social climber’s success story, now architect of U.S. imperialist counterinsurgency. As Secretary of State, he spearheaded the designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. The report mirrors the man: it presents itself as rigorous research, but it is counterinsurgency—terror by another name. Rubio and the report are the same impulse dressed in different clothes: delegitimize the Cuban Revolution, criminalize its solidarity with the oppressed, and justify the siege.
The State Department’s narrative: a study in imperial paranoia
The State Department report is a revealing document. Running more than 99 pages, it frames Cuba not as a sovereign nation with legitimate grievances against its powerful neighbor, but as a “campaign against America”—a “revolutionary state” whose “raison d’etre” is “the violent export of communism abroad” and whose “true target…has always been the United States.”
The report’s prose is lurid. It speaks of Cuba’s “sustained campaign of subversion,” its “infiltration” of the U.S. government, its “backing” of “left-wing terrorism on American soil,” and “one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.” It describes Cuba as a “failed state” with a “chronically failing economy” that nonetheless has “operated at the center of a vast hemispheric network,” training and arming “tens of thousands of left-wing guerillas” and serving as “the premier safe harbor for fugitive American terrorists.”
This is the language of a state intelligence apparatus that has never accepted the legitimacy of the Cuban Revolution. It is the language of the Bay of Pigs, of Operation Mongoose, of the Cuban Missile Crisis, of the Helms-Burton Act, of the blockade, of the 638 assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. It is the language of an empire that cannot tolerate a small island 90 miles from its shores insisting on its own sovereignty.
Guilt by association: the report’s method
The State Department report’s analytical method is guilt by association. It traces the genealogy of left-wing movements in the United States—the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the Venceremos Brigade, the National Lawyers Guild, the Democratic Socialists of America—and attempts to link them all, directly or indirectly, to Cuban influence.
The report’s narrative is that Cuba built a network of “front groups” and “fellow travelers” that have “infiltrated” American institutions, from universities to labor unions to the Democratic Party itself. The Venceremos Brigade, which has brought some 10,000 American activists to Cuba since 1969, is described as “among the most extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States.” The report claims that Cuban intelligence agents “strategically placed” themselves alongside American activists in Cuba, and that the Brigade “served as a screen and tool of the Cuban intelligence apparatus.”
There is, to be sure, a kernel of historical truth here. Cuba did support anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements around the world. It did provide sanctuary to American radicals fleeing prosecution. It did offer training and ideological support to movements that sought to challenge U.S. power—in Palestine, in Latin America, and elsewhere. The Cuban Revolution was not neutral in the Cold War; it was a revolutionary state that saw itself as part of a global struggle against imperialism.
But the State Department report does not present this history as a clash between imperialism and anti-imperialism—which is what it has always been. It presents it as a conspiracy of “subversion,” “infiltration,” and “espionage.” The report’s framing treats Cuban sovereignty as inherently illegitimate. It treats Cuban solidarity with oppressed peoples as inherently threatening. It treats the Cuban people’s right to determine their own political future as a problem to be solved rather than a right to be respected.
What the report cannot say
What the State Department report cannot say—what it must not say—is that Cuba’s foreign policy was a response to U.S. aggression. It cannot acknowledge that Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union was a defensive reaction to the U.S. embargo, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the constant threat of military intervention. It cannot admit that Cuba’s support for anti-colonial movements was a reflection of its own experience of colonial domination—first under Spain, then under the United States.
The report cannot say that the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship, which Castro overthrew in 1959, was a brutal, corrupt, and murderous regime that crushed Cuban democracy and subordinated Cuban interests to American corporations. It cannot acknowledge that the Platt Amendment, which the United States forced on Cuba in 1901, granted Washington the “right to intervene militarily on the Island” and established the permanent occupation of Guantánamo Bay. It cannot admit that Cuba’s “subversion” of U.S. allies was, in many cases, a matter of supporting national liberation movements against colonial and neocolonial domination.
The occupation of Guantánamo Bay—a U.S. naval base on Cuban territory, maintained against the will of the Cuban people for over 120 years—is the physical embodiment of this imperial mindset. Every Cuban child grows up knowing that their country’s soil is occupied. Every Cuban family understands that the United States has never accepted Cuba’s right to be free.
The report itself is founded on these omissions. If the United States were forced to acknowledge its own long history of aggression against Cuba—the invasion, the assassination attempts, the economic warfare, the occupation of Guantánamo—the report’s narrative of Cuban “subversion” would collapse. The aggressor would be revealed as the victim, and the victim as the aggressor.
Cuba’s true crime: sovereignty and solidarity
The State Department accuses Cuba of terrorism, espionage, and subversion. But the real offense, in its eyes, is something deeper: sovereignty and solidarity. It is the simple, unforgivable act of insisting on its own sovereignty and extending solidarity to others who do the same.
From its earliest days, the Cuban Revolution was about genuine independence. When Cubans fought alongside the United States to defeat Spain in 1898, they did so believing they were fighting for their own liberation. The United States refused to recognize the Cuban Liberation Army, forced the Platt Amendment on the Cuban Constitutional Convention, and transformed Cuba into a de facto U.S. protectorate. As the great independence general Máximo Gómez declared: the revolutionaries were sent “to their devastated homes and barren fields without a penny in their pockets.”
The 1959 Revolution was a second independence—a reclamation of a sovereignty that had been stolen by imperialism. The revolutionary government nationalized foreign-owned properties, implemented land reform, and asserted control over Cuba’s resources. This was the crime: a small nation, armed only with revolutionary conviction, refusing to accept its subordinate position in the empire.
And from that commitment to sovereignty flowed Cuba’s internationalist vocation. Cuban doctors went to Algeria in 1963. Cuban soldiers went to Angola in 1975. Cuban medical brigades fought Ebola and COVID-19. Cuba stands with Palestine against genocide. What the State Department calls subversion, the rest of the world calls solidarity. The principle is simple: the oppressed peoples of the world share a common enemy, and a common duty to support one another.
The legacy of solidarity
The Cuban Revolution has given the world more than it has received. Over the past six decades, more than 600,000 Cuban health professionals have served in 165 countries. Operation Miracle, launched in 2004, restored sight to over 3.3 million people—most of them poor, most of them with no access to ophthalmological care. Cuban doctors have performed more than 17 million surgical procedures and assisted in over 5.6 million births through international missions.
Cuba’s solidarity with Africa was in the name of southern solidarity for national liberation. When Angola gained independence in 1975, it was immediately threatened by an invasion from apartheid South Africa, backed by the United States. Over the next 15 years, more than 300,000 Cuban soldiers would serve in Angola, fighting alongside the MPLA government. Cuban forces defeated South African troops in the 1988 Cuito Cuanavale campaign—a victory that shattered the myth of apartheid military invincibility and paved the way for the independence of Namibia and the eventual fall of apartheid itself.
Nelson Mandela acknowledged this debt. “The defeat of the apartheid army in Angola,” Mandela said, “was a victory for all of Africa.” He thanked Cuba as a nation whose “commitment to the freedom of Africans knew no bounds.”
The siege continues
The State Department report is a justification for its present siege of Cuba. In 2026, the United States continues to tighten sanctions against Cuba. The Trump administration has threatened tariffs on any country selling or supplying oil to Cuba, exacerbating an energy crisis that has brought 10-hour blackouts to Cuban cities, forced reductions in working hours, limited transportation, and caused a collapse in tourism. The energy crisis means mothers cooking by candlelight, hospitals operating without power, children studying by flashlight. The blockade targets all of Cuba—the people and the revolution they defend.
Cuba produces barely 40 percent of its petroleum needs; the rest must be imported. Critical shipments from Venezuela, a key ally, were halted after the United States attacked the South American country and arrested its president. In response to this siege, Cuba has turned to its traditional allies. In March 2026, Russian oil shipments began arriving—a tanker carrying 730,000 barrels of crude oil. The United States responded by tightening sanctions waivers to specifically prohibit Russian oil bound for Cuba.
This is the blockade’s logic: deny Cuba access to fuel, and then punish any nation that tries to help. It is a policy of collective punishment, imposed by the number one terrorist state on earth against a small island that has committed the unforgivable sin of insisting on its own sovereignty.
Why Cuba endures
And yet, despite this siege, Cuba survives. More than that, it continues to give. Even as Cuban families endure shortages, Cuban doctors remain abroad, saving lives. Even as the blockade tightens, Cuba finds ways to send its most precious resource—its trained professionals—to those in need.
The United States has tried everything to destroy the Cuban Revolution—invasion, assassination, economic strangulation, ideological warfare. It has failed. Cuba stands not because it is economically powerful or militarily mighty. It stands because it has something that the US empire cannot comprehend: a people who have chosen dignity over submission, solidarity over isolation, and sovereignty over subservience.
The State Department report cannot admit this truth. But sixty-seven years of siege have proven it: Cuba endures. The task now is for the peoples who have been targets of US imperialism—in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Palestine, the Philippines, and beyond—to come together in a determined and decisive way, to transform the collective punishment inflicted by the United States into a decisive defeat for U.S. imperialism. ###
*The discussion on Cuba’s revolutionary history draws from the author’s lecture, “Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Struggle of the South,” presented at Viva Palestina! A Solidarity Fair for Justice and Freedom (co-organized by the Philippines-Palestine Friendship Association and the UP Asian Center, March 22, 2026, GT-Toyota Asian Center Auditorium, UP Diliman).
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