US claims of Cuba’s ‘unique threat’ jar with reality of hunger and blackouts

The US government’s latest allegations that Cuba is behind “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history” and that its leaders pose “a unique threat to American homeland security” have come as startling revelations to those living under the six-month-long US oil blockade in Havana, where desperate people search through piles of uncollected rubbish for food, or else swelter at home in 24-hour-plus blackouts.The unsigned 100-page report, Cuba: Capital of 21st-Century Communism, published by the US State Department on Monday, blames Havana for everything from “the George Floyd riots to the rise of antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses”.It is the latest push in a maximum-pressure campaign to bring down the island’s government that began with the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, the president of Cuba’s ally Venezuela, on 3 January. Since then, Cuba has been brought to a standstill by the oil blockade, sanctions on foreign businesses and threats of a military intervention.It also seems to be an attempt to “other” those on the US left before November’s midterm elections.“Cuba’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory,” the report reads. “It was a revolution against western civilisation itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the west to turn against their own inheritance.”“Fidel would have been quite proud of this,” said one amused Cuban as he read it.The US State Department, run by the Cuban-American Marco Rubio, refused to name the author, but it is clearly someone who knows their history. “Almost immediately after taking Havana in January 1959, Castro began plotting armed assaults against neighbouring governments – launching expeditions against Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama in just that year alone,” it reads.What it fails to mention is that Haiti was then run by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who killed an estimated 60,000 of his own people; the Dominican Republic by Rafael Trujillo, who launched the “parsley massacre”, killing between 20,000 to 35,000 Haitians; and Nicaragua by the Somoza family, who are credited with the murder of up to 50,000 Nicaraguans.Although the report provides no new evidence, there is a suspicious emphasis on race. The supposedly remarkable success of Cuban intelligence at infiltrating US institutions was due to a soft spot for “glamorous Latins”, it quotes an intelligence officer saying to the Miami Herald in 2002: “‘We’re much more open to Latins than we are to people with steel teeth and a Slavic accent.’”It also bemoans the ideological commitment of the spies Cuba recruited, while failing to mention either that several were inspired by the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Castro, or the shelter the US offered to the exiles Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who organised the bombing of Cubana flight 455 in 1976, killing 73 people.Most jarringly, the report groups together the US’s long internal struggle around civil rights and social reform and reframes it as a battle between the forces of foreign actors and “western civilisation”, lingering over groups such as the Black Panthers, which it credits to Cuba.While several black revolutionaries found sanctuary on the island, most famously Assata Shakur, who had a $2m price on her head for the killing of a New Jersey state trooper, the experience was not perhaps as conspiratorial as the author suggests. In interviews, Nehanda Abiodun, one of the mentioned fugitives, said her politics and revolutionary rage came from her experience growing up in 1970s New York, not out of any love for Cuba, whose government she came to resent for muzzling her in return for refuge. She used to say that the first thing that happened on landing was being racially profiled by the Cuban police. If she was part of a well-oiled international conspiracy, it didn’t show.For five years the Cuban government has not even been able to afford to feed its 9.5 million people, who mostly blame it for the crisis. But the report is ready for this: “To mistake Cuba’s poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely. Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger.”It concludes: “Today, Cuban agents and operatives maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organisations, solidarity centres, 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.”In the run-up to the report’s release, Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s president, said the US had fallen prey to a “new and more dangerous version of McCarthyism”.But perhaps the more damning criticism came from a Cuban academic who preferred to remain nameless: “It reads just like a report Cuba’s state media might write about the United States.”