The Trump administration is laying
the groundwork for blacklisting and criminalizing all left-wing,
progressive, anti-war and anti-imperialist dissent.
Your Death is My Command by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost
The State Department’s 100-page report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States,” along with Donald Trump’s assertion
that “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our
election infrastructure,” lays the groundwork for dictatorship.
Elections will be sabotaged in the name of
“national security.” Left-wing dissent will be criminalized in the name
of “combating terrorism.” Democracy will be snuffed out in the name of
protecting “freedom.”
Trump, who has lately taken to issuing warnings about a communist plot
to take over America, posits that an island of 9.6 million people —
nearly 90 percent of whom live in extreme poverty amid extended
blackouts due to decades of U.S. economic warfare — is an existential
threat.
These accusations are not meant to be
rational. They, like the charge that our elections are manipulated, are
transparent excuses to go after institutions and individuals that are
seen as threatening Trump and the Republican Party’s absolute grip on
power.
While Cuba has supposedly “carried out one
of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in
American history,” Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as
non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise U.S. election
infrastructure.”
Under the heading “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” the State Dept. report assembles a disparate collection of organizations belonging to Cuba’s “ideological network.”
For example, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO),
founded as an ecumenical social justice organization by the
Presbyterian Church, is described as part of a Cuba “solidarity network”
which “facilitates radical agitation within the United States.”
I am an ordained Presbyterian minister. I can assure you the Presbyterian Church is not facilitating “radical agitation.”
The report lists a wide variety of
organizations on whose behalf IFCO has acted as an intermediary —
perfectly legally — facilitating tax-exempt donations and handling grant
management, compliance and reporting.
These include The Jericho Movement, Equality for Flatbush, Claudia Jones School, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, changingFrequencies, Viva Palestina US, and The People’s Forum, which the report describes as “a major activist group in Cuba’s U.S. ideological network.”
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Democratic Socialists of America
(DSA) are castigated in the same chapter. The NLG “is one of the most
persistently relevant — and insidious — organizations in Cuba’s U.S.
network.”
The report continues:
“The association of extreme-left lawyers
and radical street activists has played a key role in a disproportionate
share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United
States from the 1960s up to today.
Throughout its history, it has maintained
intimate ties to Cuba and other communist regimes and has explicitly
sought to advance the causes of the international far left, including by
working to defend and facilitate terrorism and extremist violence —
from the Weather Underground of the 1970s to the violent BLM militants
and Antifa terror cells of today.”
The NLG is labeled a foreign influence
operation because it provides assistance to activists, whose right to
legal representation is constitutionally enshrined.
In 2025, the Trump administration
conditioned federal funding to Harvard University on defunding and
dissolving the law school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (HLS NLG), which provided legal assistance to individuals and student groups that opposed the genocide.
A subsection in the report is dedicated to the anti-war activists at CODEPINK and their co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans.
It notes that Evans’ marriage to the
wealthy software entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham was attended by a
“Who’s Who’ of progressivism” including co-host of Democracy Now! Amy
Goodman; Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen and the playwright V
(formerly known as Eve Ensler) who wrote “The Vagina Monologues.”
In the nation’s capital CODE-PINK
co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, center, together with
Colonel Ann Wright, left, and other activists in 2022. (Marcy Winograd)
Naming guests at a wedding is one of the more bizarre passages.
The report grossly exaggerates the
influence of Singham’s support for left-wing organizations — described
as “far-left” — while ignoring the massive sums supplied by U.S.
corporations, millionaires and billionaires, as well as the Israel
lobby, to both major political parties, super PACs, think tanks and
advocacy networks.
Israel has a far more insidious influence on U.S. politics and foreign policy than Cuba, Russia and China combined.
The State Department attacks the co-founders of The People’s Forum, Manolo De Los Santos and Claudia De la Cruz.
It draws on documents that are often decades old and infused with Cold War paranoia.
These include a 1966 Senate report
claiming there is “overwhelming evidence that the machinery of the Cuban
Government has been progressively organized over the years, to carry
out its number one task — the export of Communist subversion.”
It ignores more thoughtful assessments, including a 1981 C.I.A. estimate that acknowledged
“[m]uch of the turmoil around the world is rooted in regional and local
disputes of a political, social, or religious nature and has nothing to
do with Communism.”
In a chapter titled “Revolutionary
Tourism,” the Venceremos (“We Shall Overcome”) Brigade is characterized
as one of the most “extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever
undertaken by a foreign power against the United States.”
This assertion libels thousands of individuals and organizations as Cuban assets, offering nothing more than innuendo.
It lists “the founder of Mother Jones,” —
although there were four founders — along with “several other [unnamed]
notable magazine editors, leaders of powerful labor unions and advocacy
groups, think tank executives, and a suite of professors at top U.S.
universities” as Brigade “alumni.”
Transporting humanitarian goods to Cuba is
not a crime. Although the Justice Department’s extradition request from
Spain of philanthropist Fergie Chambers,
who provided funds to humanitarian organizations in Gaza, may see the
criminalization of any person or any group that assists those suffering
under sanctions and a blockade.
The report attacks members of the March
2026 “Nuestra América Convoy” which transported goods to Cuba “in
defiance of U.S. sanctions.”
It notes that 120 organizations “from
across 33 countries joined the caravan” with “a suite of influential
progressives,” including Isra Hirsi — daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar,
video game live streamer and commentator Hasan Piker — with whom I discussed my book A Genocide Foretold last
year — former U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and “several other
current and former members of European Parliament.”
Even the Gaza flotilla activist Thiago Avila — who I interviewed last month after he was tortured by Israeli soldiers — gets a mention.
Those listed in the report did not become
“radicals” because of Cuban indoctrination. Their politics are
homegrown, formed in opposition to racism, genocide, police violence,
the terrorizing and killing of immigrants and U.S. citizens by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs and neoliberalism, along
with the crimes of U.S. imperialism and militarism.
Downtown Minneapolis ICE-out demonstration
on Jan. 23, 2026, following ICE agent Jonathan Ross’ fatal shooting of
civilian Renée Good. (Lorie Shaull /Flickr/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY
4.0)
The report makes passing reference to a wide range of people on grounds so tenuous that it has to be read to be believed.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is
mentioned for refusing “to denounce” a “tribute to [Assata] Shakur,” who
was almost certainly framed for murder and who fled to Cuba after escaping from a U.S. prison in 1979.
It dedicates two paragraphs to Los Angeles
Mayor Karen Bass for her “friendliness towards the communist regime.”
The evidence provided is her participation in a congressional delegation
that joined then President Barack Obama on a visit to the island.
Cuban agents, it charges, “maintain a
foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity
centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups
collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and
dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American
history.”
Cuba has allegedly “infiltrated the
highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated
generations of American activists [and] backed an unprecedented wave of
leftwing terrorism on American soil.”
Note the word terrorism. Note that it
makes these individuals and organizations terrorists. Note that it makes
them subject to draconian terrorism laws. And note that the Trump
administration has committed itself to hunting down and rooting out the
“radical left.”
The report charges that Cuba and its
allies are mounting “a revolution against western civilization itself —
waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the
children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.”
It accuses Havana of “gleeful support of
the George Floyd uprisings.” It asserts that “the rise of antifa” and
“the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses,”
can be “linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.”
It characterizes the DSA as serving “as a
particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s
effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist
radicalism.”
It claims the organization maintains a
“fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime.”
It alleges Cuba has built a “sprawling revolutionary network” that has
“shaped America’s most famous and influential extremist movements”
including the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and antifa.
These networks include “powerful leftist
nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant
organizations” in the U.S.
Cuba, the report concludes, “has sought to
undermine, degrade and destabilize America with spies and soldiers, but
also with students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells, but also
with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks with intelligence
officers operating under diplomatic cover.”
The broadside is chilling. It is worse than McCarthyism. It presages a savage purging of American society.
Those named in the report are condemned
without evidence. They are denied due process. That the assertions in
the report are distorted at best, and often fictitious, is irrelevant.
Fascist propaganda is not rooted in truth.
It is rooted in a hatred for liberal values, democracy and the left. It
is rooted in the belief that once those condemned as human contaminants
are removed, there will be a moral, spiritual and economic renaissance.
We have seen this fascist dance before. We know what comes next. It is not good.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
