A documentary that outlines seven decades of Castro's intervention in the democracies worldwide premiered on Monday at the Palacio de la Prensa in Madrid, in an event organized as a counterpoint to the upcoming XXX Ibero-American Summit, which took place in the Spanish capital on November 4 and 5.
The production, titled "Interference: the Shadow of Communism is Long," was driven by the platform Silenced Ibero-American Voices and can be viewed freely online with audio in Spanish and English.
The film, lasting 71 minutes and divided into three episodes, examines how the Cuban dictatorship has operated since 1959 to weaken democratic systems: from the creation of guerrillas and funding armed expeditions to the alleged connections of Castroism with drug trafficking, the regime’s espionage apparatus, and the use of mass emigration as a tool for political pressure.
The film structures its analysis around five chronological milestones: the takeover in 1959, the Sovietization of Cuba in 1961, the Tricontinental Conference of 1966, the founding of the São Paulo Forum in 1990, and the migration wave orchestrated by Havana and Managua in 2021.
Regarding the Tricontinental Conference held in Havana, the producers state that "it brought together communist, revolutionary, and openly terrorist organizations from more than 82 countries, laying the foundations for the globalization of terror."
The São Paulo Forum, founded by the dictator Fidel Castro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is described in the documentary as "an instrument of interference in the democracies of the region."
After the screening, a discussion took place with Amelia Calzadilla, leader of the Cuban Classical Liberal Party; Edgardo Pinell, Nicaraguan lawyer and journalist; and Miguel Henrique Otero, director of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional.
The three panelists discussed the historical involvement of Havana in the transformation of Latin American states into totalitarian regimes under the guise of liberating revolutionary movements.
The premiere occurs at a time of heightened international pressure on the regime. In July of this year, the U.S. Department of State published the report "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism", a document of nearly 100 pages that accuses Havana of maintaining for almost seven decades a campaign of espionage, infiltration, sabotage, and propaganda against the United States and other democracies.
That report cites documented cases such as that of Ana Montes, a former intelligence analyst who provided secrets to Cuba for 16 years, and Víctor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia who acted for decades as an agent of the Cuban regime.
The document also notes that Cuba hosts 18 signal intelligence facilities, three operated by China and two by Russia, and that the intelligence personnel from both powers on the island has reportedly tripled since 2023.
The report also accuses the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) of operating as an intelligence and influence tool linked to more than 2,000 international groups.
The Cuban chancellor Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla described the report as a "slanderous pamphlet", a response that the promoters of the documentary believe is indicative of the regime's attitude towards the accusations of its foreign activities.
The website of the documentary encapsulates the spirit of the production in one phrase: “the best summary of the last seventy years, where cruelty is the system and the suffering of Cubans is their business.”
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