[Source: uvamillercenter.substack.com]
Previously published at CovertAction Magazine
Named after a U.S. intelligence agent who was allegedly killed by the Chinese Communists during the Chinese Civil War, the John Birch Society was an extreme right-wing organization that regularly warned about communist subversion of U.S. society from within.
According to Republican political operative Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s father Fred was one of the John Birch Society’s financiers.
Thus, it should be no surprise that the U.S. State Department under Donald Trump’s direction would issue a 100-page report about Cuba that could have easily been published by the John Birch Society. Released on July 21, the report is entitled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.
It asserts in its initial paragraph that, “[f]or nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”
The report goes on to claim that the Cubans are linked to “[m]any of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history—from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses”—and have long sought to “undermine, degrade and destabilize America with spies and soldiers,” as well as with “students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells,…solidarity committees and nonprofit networks.”
The latter “collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history,” with Cuba having “perfected a new model for a long war of attrition organized around espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.”
According to the report, Cuba is “less a nation-state than an all-encompassing…subversive operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States…[and] against Western civilization itself—waged, in part, via the…the insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.”
The above comments epitomize the John Birch conspiratorial narrative of foreign communist subversives infiltrating American institutions to destroy them from within.
In a December 2025 CAM article, I noted that the John Birch Society disseminated the writings of a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, who tried to depict the hit 1970s television series M*A*S*H as being part of a Soviet psychological-warfare offensive because it poked fun at military officers.[1]
Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism follows Bezmenov by alleging that Cuba has worked to weaken American society by infiltrating activist networks and indoctrinating American youth through educational exchanges and university programs that function as fronts for Cuban intelligence operations.
For much of its existence, the John Birch Society was an intellectual laughingstock confined to the fringes of American political life.[2]
Conservative intellectual and CIA agent William F. Buckley, who founded National Review in 1955 to make conservatism more intellectually respectable, cut off any association between the magazine and John Birch Society and did the same with the Young Americans for Freedom group he co-founded.
Sadly, in the 21st Century, John Birch Society thinking has reached the highest levels of the U.S. government, first with the phony Russia-Gate scandal, which accused Donald Trump, the most right-wing president in U.S. history, of being a Russian agent, and now with this new Cuba report, which is replete with disinformation and makes accusations that its own evidence does not corroborate.
The sources for a number of claims in the Cuba report are congressional committees in the 1980s considered to be a relic of the McCarthy era that relied on testimony from CIA operatives who alleged that the Soviet KGB and other communist intelligence services had infiltrated left-wing activist groups, publications and think tanks.[3]
At one point in the report, the authors claim that “Florida law enforcement testified to catching Cuban intelligence affiliates teaching black youth in Miami to firebomb schools.”
The above sentence in the report contains a hyperlink to a U.S. Senate Subcommittee hearing from March 1982 chaired by Senator Jeremiah Denton (R-AL), which noted that some Cuban-Americans—who were part of a group trying to ease travel restrictions[4] (there was no suggestion they were Cuban intelligence agents)—“allegedly” had some connection with a black activist named Al Featherstone, who was accused in the early 1970s of teaching young blacks to firebomb schools.
Some Cuban-Americans having some vague connection to an activist accused of teaching young blacks to bomb a school is not the same thing as having Cuban intelligence “affiliates” being caught teaching them. In any case, it is unlikely that Featherstone was teaching any bomb-making.
In an internet search, I found no reference to any black activist named Al Featherstone (let alone one who taught bomb-making to children), though found reference to Ralph Featherstone, a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s who was murdered in a car bombing by white supremacists, possibly working under the FBI’s counter-intelligence operation (COINTELPRO). The report may have confused Al with Ralph and inverted reality by blaming Cubans for violence carried out by home-grown terrorists.[5]
Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism advances more disinformation in suggesting that the Weather Underground, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which carried out bombings of strategic targets in the U.S. linked to the Vietnam War and police brutality, received terrorist training in Cuba after its members traveled there as part of the Venceremos Brigade.
The report also claims that Cuban intelligence operatives helped Weather Underground fugitives flee to communist bloc countries and then re-enter the U.S., and helped other Weather Underground members communicate with each other by code through the Cuban Mission to the UN in New York.
The source for all the above allegations was a 1976 FBI report derived from a CIA investigation that relied heavily on an FBI informant in the Weather Underground, Larry Grathwohl, who was allegedly told these things by Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers.
Given the FBI and CIA’s desperate desire to depict New Left organizations as instruments of foreign communist powers, Grathwol’s statements were very likely part of a “deep state” disinformation operation and cannot be considered as reliable historical evidence unless they were corroborated with other evidence.
A 1977 New York Times article discussing the FBI report, which is ironically linked to in the State Department report, concluded there was “no firm evidence that senior communist intelligence services…ever made any direct attempt to incite American dissidence,” and that “the data in the report indicate that the Cubans and North Vietnamese gave relatively little tangible support [to New Left groups like the Weather Underground]. The only cash donation maintained was $5,000 from an American living in China….There is no indication in the report that the bureau or other [U.S.] intelligence services ever established that weapons, communications equipment or espionage tools had been fed to the antiwar radicals by the communists.”
This latter conclusion is at odds with Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, which accused the Cubans of training left-wing U.S. terrorists and claimed that the “violent export of revolution abroad” has long been the “raison d’être of the Cuban regime.”
The historical reality is, of course, the opposite: It was the U.S. and CIA that engaged in a long-standing terrorist operation directed against Cuba beginning with the 1961 Bay of Pigs and extending through the 1962 Operation Mongoose, whose explicit aim was to bring the “terrors of the earth” to Cuba, as Robert F. Kennedy framed it.
In March 1996, a group of clergymen, who undertook a “fast for life” on the San Diego/Tijuana border as a call for a more humane U.S.-Cuba policy, noted that, for many years, airplanes from Miami manned by CIA-backed Cuban terrorists “sprayed phosphorus on sugar fields; bombed sugar cane mills and tourist hotels; dropped off weapons, explosives, and infiltrators on Cuban territory; scattered leaflets urging people to rise up against their government; and buzzed parks and residential neighborhoods to intimidate common citizens.”
Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism is accurate in noting that the Western left became disillusioned with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and enthralled by the Cuban Revolution as an alternative model. This enthrallment helped shape the New Left’s turn away from the Marxist concept of class struggle and its embrace of a Third World ideology valorizing anti-colonial struggles that regarded racial minorities in Western countries as being the equivalent of colonized subjects.
However, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism goes way beyond the historical evidence in alleging that left-wing movements in the U.S. were somehow manipulated by the Cubans and part of a Cuban campaign to weaken U.S. society and foment a revolution there. Besides overestimating Cuba’s influence, the latter insinuation ignores the organic origins and nature of left-wing movements in the U.S. and vast societal injustices to which they were responsive.
At the beginning of the report, the authors claim that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), formed by American activists who opposed the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose and believed in Cuba’s right to national self-determination, was communist-directed and “dedicated to building a revolutionary column in the U.S.”
A New York Times article linked to in the report actually noted, however, that Cuban intelligence did not have the capacity to operate in the U.S. before 1970.
The main source for the suggestion that the FPCC was a Cuban front was a 1961 congressional hearing chaired by reactionary Senator James O. Eastland (D-MS), which actually presented evidence that the leaders of the FPCC were sincere in their commitment to democratic and anti-imperialist principles, were anti-communist and independent of the Cuban regime, and that their goal was to help the American public develop a more nuanced understanding of the Cuban Revolution compared to the barrage of propaganda that demonized it.[6]
The huge gap between the sweeping claims made in Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism and evidence adopted to try to back them up applies to the accusation that progressive anti-war groups—like CodePink, the National Lawyers Guild and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—are fronts for Cuban intelligence operations.
The report actually presents no evidence whatsoever to corroborate such a claim. It even notes that, in the 1980s, CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin was deported from Cuba after writing something critical of certain Cuban policies and admits that the DSA “was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government itself” and that it “embraced the radicalism of the post 1960s Cuban influenced New Left on its own accord”—which is true of the other groups as well.[7]
Perhaps the most offensive aspect of Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism is its suggestion that Cuba helped spawn the Black Power movement and formation of the Black Panther Party—which it labels an extremist group.
The main evidence for this claim is the fact that Fidel Castro helped secure a wide radio transmission for Robert F. Williams, President of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and godfather of the Black Power movement, whose 1962 book Negroes with Guns influenced Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton. Williams migrated to Cuba after the Cuban Revolution and ran his radio broadcast, called Radio Free Dixie, from there.
Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism quoted from right-wing, CIA-linked journalist Robert Moss,[8] who testified before a congressional subcommittee on terrorism in the 1980s that Castro had once claimed that his agents in the U.S. “were so industrious and well-placed that they had the capacity to create race riots at a moment of his choosing—race riots that he said would make the Miami troubles [race riot that started in May 1980] look like a sunshower.”
The insinuation that African Americans, who have been exploited and oppressed in America since before the country’s founding, would only decide to rebel because of prompting by foreigners is as ridiculous as it is insulting. Predictably, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism suggests that the Black Lives Matter movement was Cuban-driven, along with the George Floyd protests, though no evidence is presented to establish that either is true.[9]
The political agenda underlying Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism is crystal clear in its attempt to discredit left-wing groups that are growing in political support because of the abhorrent policies of the Trump administration, and in its attempt to build public support for ramped up economic warfare and a regime-change operation in Cuba.
Around the time of the report’s release, the Trump administration leaked to the media that it had set up a CIA task force on Cuba for the first time since the era of the Bay of Pigs. This task force has begun adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence analysts, officers who conduct cyber operations and officers who specialize in covert operations.[10]
Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, told The New York Times that the intentions of the CIA task force “are no surprise, since Cuba has long been the target of the CIA’s efforts at espionage, subversion and destabilization, including terrorism. And yet the State Department has the audacity to call Cuba a threat for exercising its right to legitimate self-defense.”
Besides decrying Cuba’s alleged influence operations in the U.S., the State Department report details Cuba’s support for left-wing guerrilla movements across Latin America and in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and alleged terrorist activities, and Cuba’s growing alliance with American adversaries like Russia, China and Iran.
The report ends by claiming that the “Cuban people suffer today in hunger and darkness, forced to live in something akin to modern slavery under the occupying regime held hostage by their own hate.”
The reference to modern slavery is reminiscent of Cold War era propaganda where the term was often applied toward the Soviet Union and other communist states by American Cold Warriors.
That Cubans are suffering because of the cruel 60+-year-old U.S. economic embargo goes unmentioned, along with the incredible gains of the Cuban Revolution, including its establishment of a free health care system and ability to export doctors abroad to Africa, which is why so many Cubans stand behind it.
That the revolution was originally designed to overcome years of dictatorship and Cuba’s colonial and neo-colonial history is also unmentionable in the John Birch-style propaganda tract put out by the U.S. State Department—which shows that the 1950s McCarthy era in America continues to enjoy a second life.
The creator of M*A*S*H, Ring Lardner, Jr., had earlier been one of the Hollywood Ten accused of communist subversion in the early 1950s. ↑
When he was Attorney General in the early 1960s, Robert F. Kennedy called the John Birch Society “ridiculous” and said that its members “make no contribution to the fighting against communism here in the United States.” ↑
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, chaired by Jeremiah A. Denton, is discussed in Charles Mohr, “Hearing on Terror Opens With Warning on Soviet,” The New York Times, April 25, 1981. Witnesses at the hearing included former CIA Director William Colby, Claire Sterling, author of The Terror Network, rooting terrorism in the KGB, who was revealed to be a CIA asset, Michael Ledeen, a neo-conservative writer who worked as part of the “Octopus” criminal network headed by former CIA Deputy Director Theodore Shackley, his business partner, and Arnaud de Borchgrave, a CIA Mockingbird journalist for Newsweek. ↑
This group was the Antonio Maceo Brigade. ↑
Further invalidating the report’s view is that a linked New York Times article specifies that Cuban intelligence only developed the ability to operate in the U.S. some time after 1970. This makes it implausible that Cuban intelligence affiliates could be teaching blacks in Miami to firebomb schools in the early 1970s, since Cuban intelligence agents may not even have had the capacity to run any agents in the U.S. at that time. ↑
Eastland’s committee found that allegedly one donation to FPCC came from someone in Cuba—information he used to make the sweeping claim that FPCC was a Cuban government front. Witnesses at the hearing included FPCC co-founder Robert Taber, a journalist who had worked for CBS News, and Carlton Beals, a Latin American correspondent who wrote many insightful books. Beals and Taber envisioned FPCC as a means to combat anti-Cuban, or what Taber termed, counter-revolutionary, propaganda. ↑
The report noted CodePink, the National Lawyers Guild and DSA’s participation in the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), which helps coordinate trips to Cuba and solidarity initiatives, and works in collaboration with a Cuban government agency, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), run at some point by an alleged Cuban intelligence operative who was one of the “Cuban Five” [Cuban spies who operated in the U.S.] The ties between NNOC and ICAP supposedly embody Cuban intelligence’s ability to penetrate the U.S. left and dictate its behavior. The report claims that ICAP’s sponsorship of some other black liberation and ecumenical groups, including Pastors for Peace, was part of a Cuban influence operation in the U.S., though again provides no direct evidence to corroborate this claim. Regarding CodePink, the report mentions its funding by Neville Roy Singham, a tech billionaire married to co-founder Jodie Evans who has lived in China, but presents no evidence that Singham has any ties to the Chinese government, let alone the Cuban government. At one point, the report suggests that Mother Jones was part of a Cuban influence operation because its founder, Adam Hochschild, traveled to Cuba in the late 1960s and participated in the Venceremos Brigade. Hochschild was the son of a mining tycoon, Harold Hochschild with wide investments in Africa who operated a CIA-front organization, the Africa-America Institute. Neither association actually proves anything regarding Mother Jones. ↑
See Philip Agee, “Robert Moss’ Obsession,” CovertAction Information Bulletin (December 1979-January 1980), 16, 17. ↑
The report also claims without evidence that Cuba has helped provoke anti-ICE protests and is behind socialist groups and “Marxist militants” across the U.S. ↑
After it was shut in the early 2000s, the CIA station in Havana was re-established in 2024, toward the end of the Biden administration, but the officers there still had a difficult time operating because they were under near-constant surveillance and their movements were restricted. Trump administration officials said that the goal of the CIA task force was to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in hope of pressuring the Cubans to replace perceived anti-American hard-liners with more practical leaders more amenable to Mr. Trump’s demands.
Absolutely superb, comprehensive summary!
US fuckery never stops.
It’s rather pathetic actually..