The State Department this week cast Cuba — even amid its economic collapse — as the major promoter and "launch pad" of left-wing national security threats to the U.S., a menace on par with China and Russia.
Eariler this year, South Florida's Cuban diaspora might have seen the Trump administration report as a sign of imminent U.S. military action across the Florida Straits. But it now seems resigned otherwise — some calling it a wake-up call for the U.S. itself to exert more regime-eroding espionage, others dismiissing it as a "rhetorical flourish" to keep exiles mollified as the U.S. continues negotiating with Havana.
The 100-page report, "Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism," claims that “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American history" — including "the rise of Antifa," the loosely defined "anti-fascist" ideology the administration calls an extreme lefti-wing insurrection movement — "can be linked" to Cuba.
Cuban communism has certainly been effective at recruiting spies in the U.S., and has certainly benefitted P,R,-wise from leftist comrades in the U.S. But critics of the report say it's absurd to brand all such sympathizers as Havana-coached seditionists, or to hold Cuba accountable for every spasm of protest or unrest in America over the past 60-plus years.
Either way, this is perhaps the administration's strongest assertion yet that the economically wrecked nation is still stoking leftist subversion inside the U.S. and from abroad, especially from China and Russia.
“It highlights the success Cuban intelligence services have had and how the U.S. has underestimated their work for too long — and how the U.S. has paid a price for that,” says Republican Miami attorney Marcell Felipe, an exile communist leader who heads the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora.
Citing the report, Felipe pointed to how effectively Cuba's intelligence apparatus has been able to plant or recruit operatives inside the U.S., like convicted spy Ana Montes or, more recently, former U.S. diplomat Victor Manuel Rocha.
According to polls, most Cuban-Americans in South Florida favor if not demand U.S. military action to bring down Cuba’s repressive regime.
A few months ago, Cuban exiles would likely have taken this week’s State Department paper to portend U.S. military intervention in Cuba — as many did in May when the administration indicted the island's 95-year-old de facto leader Raúl Castro for ordering the killings of Cuban exiles in small planes off Cuba's coast in 1996.
The Castro indictment came, after all, just a few months after U.S. special forces had stormed Caracas to capture then. Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who was also under indictment in the U.S.
READ MORE: Is Trump still mulling military action in Cuba? Maybe a 'humanitarian invasion'? Only he knows
Felipe, however, seemed to suggest the exile community has since revised its thinking in that regard, as the realization sinks in that military action is likely President Donald Trump's last resort, if a resort at all, or as his administration signals that a military intervention may instead take the form of a humanitarian effort — troops delivering bread instead of bombs.
“I think there are many rationales for military intervention in Cuba," Felipe told WLRN, "but I don’t know that we will need military intervention.
"I think the number one strategy the United States is currently pursuing in Cuba is an intelligence intervention.”
That means, he said, the Trump administration keeping its heavy economic pressure on Cuba, like the de facto oil blockade it slapped on the island in January, while ramping up the kind of subversive espionage in Cuba that Cuba has used in the U.S. to divide and conquer Cuba’s leadership.
"Identifying and elevating the power of that one or several Cuban leaders who want and can bring about regime change," Felipe said.
"Free elections and freedom of expression, releasing political prisoners."
But other Cuban-Americans see this week’s sweeping U.S. condemnation of Cuba as one more bone thrown to Miami exiles — to make up for the reality that President Trump likely won’t invade Cuba.
“You’ve got to give them something, so this is a rhetorical flourish — y’know, this is a chocolate sundae, you gotta pile on the whip cream and the cherry and the peanuts," said former Democratic Miami Congressman Joe Garcia, also a Cuban-American.
"And it only has legs in South Florida. Beyond here few if anyone are taking seriously a report that puts this small, collapsed island on par with China or the Soviet Union during the Cold War as a U.S. national security threat."
The State Department’s claims of a vast, Cuba-led left-wing conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. even blames Havana for the George Floyd murder protests in 2020 — something Garcia called not only dubious but "offensive" to the U.S.'s Black community.
Still, even though Garcia calls the report “over the top,” and even if the U.S. military doesn’t attack Cuba, he said the Cuban regime can’t keep denying it has to allow the democratic and capitalist changes the U.S. is demanding.
“Their unwillingness to give an inch publicly while at the same time pretending that everything is normal is part of the craziness — it’s insane," Garcia said.
"And it is their lack of understanding of how the game has changed that puts us here.”
Either way, on Tuesday the first shipment of $100 million in humanitarian aid the U.S. recently pledged to Cuba was flown from Miami to Havana.
