The United States State Department has released a 100-page report titled "Cuba: Capital of 21st-Century Communism", alleging that the Cuban government heads what it calls a broad "anti-American coalition" and is responsible for "many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history" — including the George Floyd protests, the rise of antifa, and pro-Palestinian activism on university campuses. The unsigned document, published on Monday, portrays Cuba as "a unique threat to American homeland security" and argues that Havana has spent decades attempting to subvert the United States from within by cultivating left-wing organisations, activist networks, and ideological sympathisers.

The report names prominent US groups including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a left-wing membership organisation that has helped elect several progressive politicians to Congress, and the antiwar group Code Pink. Notably, the administration concedes that the DSA is not a Cuban asset, but argues that the group's politics "mirror the interests" of the Cuban government. New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is also cited by name, for declining to denounce a DSA tribute to Assata Shakur — a Black liberation activist who was convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1973, fled to Cuba, and was granted asylum there. The report frames Cuba's relationship with Black American radical figures as a deliberate "Shakur strategy" to gain influence over African-American advocacy movements, including Black Lives Matter.

The document has drawn swift and forceful criticism from academics and activists alike. Antoni Kapcia, emeritus professor of Latin American history at the University of Nottingham — whose own writing was cited in the report — called its central claim "complete nonsense", arguing that Cuba's support for left-wing movements abroad was largely a policy of the 1960s, when the island faced severe US-imposed isolation, not a sustained modern strategy. Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin compared the report to McCarthyism — the anti-communist political persecution that swept the United States in the 1950s — and said her organisation "will not be intimidated". Cuba's president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, also condemned it as "a new and more dangerous version of McCarthyism".

The report lands at a particularly stark moment for Cuba, a Caribbean island nation of some 9.5 million people currently enduring a severe humanitarian crisis. A US oil blockade in place for six months, combined with sweeping sanctions and the cutoff of Venezuelan fuel supplies that followed Washington's abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, has left much of Havana without power for more than 24 hours at a stretch. Residents describe searching through uncollected rubbish for food. Both Kapcia and Benjamin noted the jarring contrast between Cuba's material desperation and the report's portrayal of it as a fearsome global menace. The report pre-empts this objection directly: "To mistake Cuba's poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely."

Analysts and critics see the report as part of a broader maximum-pressure campaign against Havana that may be building towards more drastic action. Republican congressman Carlos Gimenez, who represents a South Florida district with a large Cuban-American community, cited the report and posted on social media: "Cuba is next." Kapcia said the document "looks as though it's just setting up an invasion or some sort of intervention", though he assessed a military campaign as unlikely given Cuba's diminished strategic importance and rising antiwar sentiment in the United States — adding pointedly: "I rule nothing out when it comes to Trump." The State Department, run by Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban descent, has not commented on those assessments.