A 107-page report published on July 20 by the State Department, under the direction of Secretary Marco Rubio, has sparked a debate among Cuban analysts: Is Washington building a formal case against the Havana regime?
The document, titled "Cuba: the capital of 21st-century communism", categorizes the regime in Havana as a structural threat to U.S. national security and details decades of espionage, subversion, and influence operations coordinated from the Island involving China, Russia, and Iran.
The analyst Alejandra Franganillo, associate researcher at Pan-American Strategic Advisors, was very straightforward in the panel "Transition in Cuba" this Thursday. "I believe we are building a case. Many people thought this report was ridiculous, that we are returning to the McCarthy era. But we all agree that they are preparing a case for a possible intervention or whatever is on the table."
The presenter Tania Costa posed the question that shaped the debate: “Why now? Because this has been known for a long time,” she said, referring to the historical summary of Cuban influence on certain pro-regime groups in the United States such as the Venceremos Brigade, Pastors for Peace, and the National Lawyers Guild.
In this regard, Costa, who claimed to have read all 107 pages, explained that the bulk of the document contains facts from the 1960s and 1970s that the Cuban community was already familiar with because many of them have been publicized by the regime in Havana itself. For her, the real novelty lies elsewhere: "For me, what is significant are the constant references to the Intelligence Directorate (of the Cuban regime), which until now is just an abbreviation, the DI, that is not known to Cubans."
That organization, different from the well-known DTI or State Security, appears in the document as the central actor in the regime's anti-American operations. Franganillo emphasized this point: "For me, right now, the only thing that works in Cuba is intelligence. The Cuban intelligence system is one of the strongest. I believe that there is the Russian and the Cuban."
The report also states that since 1958 the foundational goal of Castroism has been to destroy the "empire" of the United States, reframing the issue: it is no longer about an oppressed people with no economy, but rather a strategic threat 90 miles from Florida.
As Chaling-Chong summarized: "We are no longer talking about the people being oppressed, about a lack of economy. No, we are talking about the fact that there exists a tyranny whose purpose, since its inception, has been to destroy us, and it is located 90 miles away and provides lodging for all international anti-Americanism."
The panelists agreed that the report primarily targets the average American citizen, for whom these revelations are indeed new. A viewer of the program summed it up accurately: "It's as if they are preparing Americans, showing the American people what Cuban tyranny really is."
The political context amplifies the significance of the document. Franganillo emphasized that Marco Rubio heads a State Department team that is largely made up of Cuban-Americans, which she describes as the most powerful Cuban lobby in the history of Washington.
The report comes after a series of high-profile cases of Cuban espionage: Ana Belén Montes, a defense intelligence analyst who worked for Havana for nearly two decades, and Víctor Manuel Rocha, a diplomat sentenced in 2024 to 15 years in prison for the same reason. Neither of them, Franganillo emphasized, was Cuban.
In March of this year, the FBI revealed that Cuba recruited spies at Ivy League universities, illustrating the penetration capability of the DI, which the report now places at the center of the analysis.
The question that remains open in the debate is the same one that hangs over the entire strategy of the Trump administration towards Cuba: if the report is the first step in an ongoing case, what will be next?
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