The administration of US President Donald Trump has released a 100-page report tying left-wing advocacy groups in the US to Cuba – often relying on circumstantial and ideological links, rather than direct connections.
The document, released by the State Department on Monday, portrays the beleaguered Caribbean nation as an ideological threat to the US and its interests, frequently using language and concepts harkening back to the Cold War. It argues that Cuba, which is led by a communist government, is trying to subvert the US from within.
“While Soviet communism was frequently driven by more practical great-power concerns – the preservation of the Soviet empire and the defence of its material interests around the globe – its Cuban successor was built around a near-singular obsession with the ‘liberation’ of the Global South from its Western colonial oppressors,” it reads. “In the minds of the Cubans, there was only one path to this goal: the destruction of the Yankee imperialist regime.”
Left-wing activists have rejected the accusations that they have links to Cuba, saying the claims made in the report aim to increase pressure on Havana while intensifying the crackdown on dissent inside the US.
In a section titled “Front Groups and Fellow Travellers”, the State Department attempts to draw a link between left-wing groups in the US and across the world and Havana. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has helped elect several progressive politicians to Congress, is the most prominent group on the list. The Trump administration admits that the DSA is not a Cuban asset, but it says the group’s rise shows how “native and organic ideological commitments of the American far left now mirror the interests” of the Cuban government.
The report also singled out the antiwar group Code Pink. Its cofounder, Medea Benjamin, told Al Jazeera that the organisation “will not be intimidated” by the Trump administration. She said the approach of labelling activists as communists is a “flashback” to the 1950s at the height of the Cold War.
The document mentioned New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani by name as it zeroed in on the case of Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who was convicted of killing a police officer in 1973 before fleeing to Cuba. The State Department said that Cuba pursued a “Shakur strategy” to gain a foothold in left-wing circles and African-American advocacy groups, including the Black Lives Matter movement.
Antoni Kapcia, emeritus professor of Latin American history at the University of Nottingham, was surprised to see that an article he wrote for the left-wing magazine Jacobin was cited in the report. He called the claim that Cuba is sponsoring left-wing groups in the US “complete nonsense”.
The report is the latest move by the Trump administration against Cuba. After US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, Washington ordered the new authorities in Caracas to halt fuel shipments to Cuba. In May, US authorities issued a criminal indictment against 95-year-old former Cuban politician Raul Castro.
Both Benjamin and Kapcia ridiculed the idea that Cuba, an impoverished nation experiencing shortages and blackouts under US siege, is a threat to the US. The report described Cuba as the “connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition” and claimed that “its material weakness was never the measure of its danger”.
Benjamin told Al Jazeera the US administration “is painting a picture that doesn’t exist” about Cuba. “To call Cuba a threat is just so absurd,” she said.
Source: www.aljazeera.com