Commentary: Trump is sowing fear over Cuba, terrorism and the ‘radical left’. What comes next?

WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION IS ALLEGING

The US State Department on Jul 20 published a nearly 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism”.

The report’s core claim is that Cuba has spent over half a century influencing and aiding the domestic left in the US. Among its more extraordinary allegations:

the far-left Weather Underground had direct contact with Cuban officials and Cuban spies in the 1970s, who helped facilitate the group’s bombings in the USdelegations of other “American radicals” travelled to Cuba during that decade to learn urban terrorism and guerrilla tacticsCuban intelligence today treats infiltrating US universities as a top priorityleftist activists in the US and elsewhere routinely make “revolutionary tourism” excursions to the island, andthe DSA specifically maintains a “fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime”.

That framing collapses under scrutiny. The report anchors its argument in a handful of genuine espionage and terrorism cases. But it then tries to connect these with more innocuous activities: attending a Cuban-organised trip, expressing solidarity with Havana, or opposing the US embargo on the island.

This echoes a long US tradition of using national security as a premise to target leftist movements. This includes everything from the targeting of civil rights and labour organisers during the McCarthy era to the Cold War surveillance of anti-war activists.

Equally telling is what the report leaves out: six decades of documented US covert action against Cuba, including assassination plots and support for armed exile groups.

The report also came just days after Rubio convened delegations from dozens of countries in Washington for a conference on “resurgent far-left political terrorism”. At the event, he said the threat of far-left violence “can no longer be denied” and that it was “time to crush this evil forever”.

And in May, the White House released a new counterterrorism strategy that called “violent left-wing extremists” one of three terror threats facing the US (alongside narcoterrorists and Islamist terror groups). There was no mention of neo-Nazi or other far-right groups.