by Aaron Coy Moulton, Associate Professor of Latin American History, Stephen F. Austin State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
For nearly 70 years, Cuba has “waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” according to a newly released State Department report.
“Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” sounds an alarm without offering any new insights into Cuban intelligence operations or explaining how the Caribbean island could be undermining its northern neighbor when its own economy is on the verge of collapse.
Instead, the State Department re-ups an old conspiracy theory that partly blames Cuba’s communist leaders for contemporary U.S. social conflicts, such as the widespread protests held after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and what it calls “the rise of Antifa.”
Those movements “can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the State Department asserts. This report is new, but its claims are old — I have often come upon similar conspiracy theories about communist machinations in my research regarding U.S.-Latin American relations in the 20th century.
Cuban communist agents in Alabama?
The 1959 Cuban Revolution did inspire many Americans to reassess their nation’s Cold War policies. Some admired how Cubans overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista and repelled the U.S.-backed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Some appreciated how Cuba desegregated its beaches and hotels, although it does have a complicated legacy of racism that endures to this day. Many of the Americans who admired Cuba formed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1960.
Immediately, conspiracy theories arose along these lines: because many activists who supported Cuba’s communist government also supported civil rights in the U.S., therefore all civil rights activism was somehow shaped by Cuba. The John Birch Society and the Alabama Legislative Commission to Preserve the Peace regularly conflated civil rights protests with communism, and the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Internal Security echoed this narrative in hearings held in 1960 and 1961. The State Department’s 2026 report cites those same hearings as its only evidence that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was subversive — more than 65 years later, with no new evidence offered.
Blaming Cuba for US activism
These conspiratorial fears reached their zenith at the height of the Black Power movement and the Vietnam War protests. U.S. institutions opposed to civil rights reforms spread the idea that communism, not domestic grievances, guided efforts to treat people of color more fairly. The most frequently cited example was Robert F. Williams, a U.S. military veteran and North Carolina civil rights leader who fled to Havana in 1961 due to threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Anticommunist conspiracy theorists used his residence in Cuba as proof the country was behind civil rights and antiwar protests, even blaming him for the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, which were in fact an outgrowth of entrenched racism.
Very few civil rights leaders, whether nonviolent or militant, moved to Cuba for good. Despite the new report’s emphasis on such links as a central channel of Cuban influence, the State Department does not identify any prominent activist living there today.
Distracting from real issues
These conspiracy theories are more than exaggerations for a broader audience — they distract from more urgent issues relating to Cuba, such as assessing the impact of U.S. policies on the island or finding the best way to establish a democratic government there. The State Department provides no evidence to support its assertion that Cuba is “extraordinarily influential over left-wing politics in the United States today.” It ties the Standing Rock protests to the National Lawyers Guild, which it calls part of “Cuba’s U.S. network,” and links Black Lives Matter to a woman who spent time in Cuba 50 years ago.
The State Department also offers no substantive evidence of current meddling beyond social media posts from Cuba-linked sites operating at a much smaller scale than those from Russia or China. It seems absurd that the Cuban government, which can’t afford to import the oil it needs for its own economy to function, would be able to afford this kind of meddling — if it ever could.
