The U.S. State Department published a 100-page report this Monday that documents nearly seven decades of espionage, ideological subversion, and exportation of revolution by the Cuban regime against the United States, designating Cuba as "the capital of 21st century communism."
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared the document on his official account on X with a direct message: "For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the main sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States. The American people deserve to know."
The report from the State Department asserts that the Cuban campaign against the U.S. is unique because it combines espionage, infiltration, sabotage, and ideological warfare into a single revolutionary project, something that no other hostile state has replicated with the same effectiveness.
The document traces the origin of this strategy back to a letter that Fidel Castro wrote in 1958: "I swore to myself that the Americans would pay dearly for what they were doing. When this war ends, a much broader and larger war will begin for me."
The report dedicates a chapter to the Cuban espionage apparatus, the Dirección de Inteligencia (DI), highlighting cases that shook the U.S. government for decades.
Ana Belén Montes, recruited in 1984 as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, became the principal analyst on Cuba at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She revealed the identities of at least four undercover agents and the location of a secret military base in El Salvador before being arrested in September 2001.
Victor Manuel Rocha, former ambassador and official of the National Security Council, spied for Cuba for approximately 50 years before being arrested in December 2023 and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The then Attorney General Merrick Garland referred to it as "one of the deepest and most enduring infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent." In 2026, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to revoke his citizenship.
The report also outlines direct links between Havana and movements such as the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the Puerto Rican FALN, which carried out up to 130 attacks between 1974 and 1983. In an 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI recorded approximately 2,500 attacks on U.S. soil at a rate of nearly five per day.
In the current report, the document warns that Cuba hosts 18 known signal intelligence facilities, three of which are actively operated by China and two by Russia, with personnel on the island tripling since 2023. According to the Wall Street Journal, China and Cuba signed a secret agreement to build a new facility in exchange for several billion dollars, capable of intercepting communications in the southeastern United States.
The report also states that since 2023 Cuban mercenaries have fought in Ukraine on behalf of Russia, and that the National Network on Cuba (NNOC) distributed in June 2026 a rapid response plan with instructions to launch coordinated actions against federal facilities, military bases, and ICE detention centers within 24 hours of any U.S. military action against Cuba.
The document concludes with a warning that summarizes its central thesis: «Confusing Cuba's poverty with its harmlessness is a complete misunderstanding of the threat. Its power has always been ideological, subversive, and parasitic».
The publication falls within the maximum pressure policy of the Trump administration, which since January 2025 has re-placed Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, imposed over 240 sanctions, and declared a national emergency in January 2026 designating the island as an unusual threat to national security.
Filed under: