Cuba and the new McCarthyism

A recent State Department report distorts history to try to discredit the left wing

(Photo illustration)

By Guian McKee

Historians often complain that policymakers ignore history and its benefits for guiding their decisions. A report issued recently by Marco Rubio’s State Department, however, suggests that history in the hands of politically motivated government officials can be dangerous. Entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” the report uses the supposed threat of Cuban subversion to discredit not only critics of administration policy but also most major U.S. left-wing organizations and social protest campaigns more generally.

As such, the State Department report constitutes a return to the tactics of the Red Scare. In combination with President Donald Trump’s recent efforts to brand his opponents as communists, it suggests a frightening and dangerous neo-McCarthyite turn in administration actions.

To be clear, not everything in the report is wrong. Cuba has sponsored and trained terrorists, harbored fugitives from U.S law enforcement, engaged in extensive spying and intelligence activities against the United States and its allies, and provided signal interception posts for Russia, Iran, and China. It has also systematically repressed protests and dissent among its own people, although the report itself focuses less on those actions than on Cuba’s efforts to subvert the United States.

It is also true that many American leftist organizations have expressed solidarity with Cuba and opposed U.S. government policies such as the longstanding economic embargo of the island and the more recent cut-off of energy supplies. Some groups have also participated in cultural and political exchanges with the Cuban government and travelled to Cuba.

Even granting these factual points, however, the State Department’s Cuba report offers a wildly overstated and thoroughly politicized assessment of Cuba’s influence in the United States. It uses that analysis to attack the legitimacy of the Trump administration’s political opponents across a range of social and policy issues, effectively branding them as un-American and rendering them beyond the bounds of acceptable politics.

These are tactics that directly echo those of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisconsin) during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The core of the State Department report lies in its claim that unlike the Marxist-Leninism of the Soviet Union and its focus on the inexorability of class conflict, revolutionary Cuba developed an ideological framework that emphasized the effects of U.S. imperialism on the Third World and specifically on the costs imposed on oppressed peoples around the globe – including within the United States. As the report claims, “Cuban communism helped shape a distinct and uniquely dangerous form of revolutionary leftism – built around racial, social and even civilizational grievances rather than economic class conflict – which would go on to instantiate itself as the dominant genre of left-wing radicalism around the globe.” This ideology, the report maintains, represented nothing less than “a revolution against Western civilization itself.”

Again, this is not entirely wrong. Fidel Castro and fellow revolutionaries like Che Guevera did deploy a doctrine of “tercermundismo” or “Third Worldism” that influenced radical thinking in the U.S. and elsewhere. Yet placing these ideological developments completely in a Cuban context, as the State Department report unequivocally does, distorts their actual historical context. The idea of “Third Worldism” emerged from the global struggle against colonialism during the 20th century. Key nexus points and ideas arose not just from Cuba but from conflicts in Asia, Latin American, and Africa. The latter, and specifically the war in Algeria, produced one of the seminal texts of this ideology, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, while another key text, Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, emerged from the author’s experience of right-wing dictatorships in Brazil and Chile. European and American intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and William Appleman Williams contributed (without obvious Cuban influence) as well.

Cuba was a part of this intellectual lineage, but it was far from the sole or most influential source.

A deeper problem with “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism”, though, lies in the way it uses the historical evidence it marshals. Much of the report dives deep into the well-worn history of the leftist revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s. Readers engage with the radical civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, as well as Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, Assata Shakur, and others. The report explores the increasingly deranged world of the Weather Underground, culminating in the violent robbery of a Brinks armored bank truck in suburban New York in 1981. These are all fascinating stories of a troubled period of American history, but the report manages to turn them into bland, colorless episodes in which the main point is to highlight any support that such actors received from the Castro regime.

But boring historical writing is not the chief issue with this part of the report. Instead, it treats these episodes as if they are compelling, current evidence against both the Cuban regime and the present-day American left. The report’s authors seem to feel a strange, almost visceral connection to these events, treating them as though they happened in the last news cycle, rather than half a century ago.

More troubling still are the sweeping connections the report seeks to make between past and present. The core of this argument is that any focus on U.S. imperialism is inherently wrong and evidence of anti-Americanism. Directly echoing McCarthyite claims about an internal enemy, the report concludes that Cuba is using “the institutions of the modern American left – in its universities and its nonprofits, its street movements and its media” to attack the U.S. “not from without but from within — to turn Americans into instruments of their own nation’s undoing.”

As with so much of the Trump administration, this position hovers awkwardly around race: Influenced by global Third Worldism, the black radicals of the Sixties and Seventies developed an analysis that saw American blacks as an internal colony within the United States. This has remained a thread of radical analysis ever since. But the persistence of this idea is itself seen by the report as evidence of Cuba’s ongoing influence among American civil rights activists, and it is used to discredit any form of civil rights activism beyond the “integrationist theory of change associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the mainstream civil rights movement.” The latter, of course, is a vast oversimplification and deradicalization of King, who offered a searing economic critique of the United States and turned against what he saw as U.S. imperialism in the form of the Vietnam War.

Stokely Carmichael, the leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who coined the term “Black Power,” is a particular obsession for the report’s authors because of his evocation of the internal colony concept at the 1967 Organization of Latin American Solidarity conference in Havana:

The central ideas he popularized — Black Power, the reimagining of blacks as a colonized people inside the United States, and the now-widespread concept of “institutional racism,” which Carmichael is widely credited with inventing — became the operating grammar of black radical (and later, mainstream liberal) politics for the next half-century. What began in the mid-1960s as the language of a militant vanguard has since migrated into the nation’s premier activist organizations, university departments, nonprofit networks, government agencies, public-health bureaucracies, and mainstream political culture.

The report takes this leap right up to recent events, connecting such ideas not only to the administration’s institutional enemies but also to the Black Lives Matter organization and the George Floyd protests. The core idea that emerges from the report’s analysis is that any criticism of racial inequality in the United States that does not adopt a color-blind, integrationist position is Cuban-derived and hence illegitimate.

This simplistic rendering of current leftist analysis of racism reveals much about the Trumpist right’s deep insecurities and painful sensitivities around race. Any structural critique of the role of race in U.S. society or history has become intolerable for Trumpism, reflected in numerous declarations, including the Cuba report; Trump’s executive order of March 2025 on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History;” or the president’s recent farcical decision to add warning signs outside the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Similar guilt-by-association arguments are deployed against anti-ICE protestors, Zohran Mamdani, Karen Bass, the Democratic Socialists of America, and even the organizers of the “No Kings” marches. The report asserts that “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 specific offenses vary – after all, “some way, shape, or form” can cover a wide expanse of evidential ground – but they are generally linked either to accepting funding from donors who have had some form of positive engagement with the Cuban government or to criticizing the U.S. embargo of Cuba, including engaging in protests against U.S. policy.

Travel to Cuba is one of the worst offenses, as the State Department report tendentiously links the 1970s-era Venceramos Brigade, which brought American radicals such as the Weatherman on visits to Cuba, to contemporary politics: “Over the past half century, programs like the Brigade have helped Cuba infiltrate and establish a foothold in a series of radical American political movements. Increasingly, its reach has also extended to mainstream liberal institutions – elite academia, major nonprofits and NGOs, and even the Democratic Party itself.” The claim about the Democratic Party is based on little more than Barack Obama’s Chicago ties to former Weatherman Bill Ayers and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s participation in Venceramos activities as a young activist. As with McCarthy and HUAC, any past connection, no matter how tenuous, is evidence of guilt.

There is much about the contemporary U.S. left that can legitimately be criticized. The question can be raised whether defense of the Cuban regime is morally justified, much less politically wise. But it is within the constitutional rights of all these actors to adopt such positions. Broader critiques of American society and its imperfections should also be permissible. But not to the authors of “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.”

Cuba may be the State Department report’s chief enemy, but Americans who critique or demand reforms are tarred as fellow travelers. As such, the report seeks to preemptively discredit any opposition to a Trump administration attempt at regime change in Cuba. Even more frightening, it portends a midterm campaign of red-baiting, and potentially, a new McCarthyism that will seek to marginalize and blacklist those who oppose administration policy in areas seemingly far removed from Cuba.

Guian McKee is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Public Affairs at the Miller Center and co-director of the Center’s Health Care Policy Project.