The U.S. Department of State issued a strong condemnation of communism this Saturday, describing it as "the most barbaric and malevolent ideology the world has ever known," and expressed sorrow for the tens of millions of innocent men, women, and children who, according to the statement, were killed by this ideology.
The message, posted on the official account of the State Department on X, was shared on the last day of the Anticommunist Week 2026, proclaimed by President Donald Trump through Presidential Proclamation 11078, signed on November 3.
Alongside the text, the publication included a 42-second video featuring excerpts from the speech delivered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on July 16, during the opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.
In that speech, Rubio described radical leftism with particularly harsh language: "This is radical leftism. They may call themselves anti-capitalists or anti-imperialists, communists, anarchists, or Marxists, but the fundamental character is always the same. It is a poisonous resentment. They despise the West because the West is great. And for them, that is an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and what they cannot be. That is why they choose to destroy."
The Anti-Communism Week 2026 is the second consecutive edition of this commemoration; Trump established the first in November 2025, when he stated that communist regimes had caused over 100 million deaths worldwide.
This year's presidential proclamation describes communism and socialism as threats to freedom that have caused "suffering, poverty, exploitation, violence, and misery" for millions of people, and reaffirms that "America will never be a communist country."
Although the message from the State Department does not explicitly mention Cuba, the country is particularly referenced: it is one of the few in the world where the Communist Party has held power under a single-party system since 1959.
The island has also been the central target of the anti-communist campaign by the Trump administration during 2026. In July, the Department of State published the report “Cuba: the Capital of 21st Century Communism”, a document of approximately 100 pages that accused the Cuban regime of being the primary sponsor of radical leftism in the United States for over six decades, and of serving as a platform for operations from China, Russia, and Iran.
The Cuban Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, responded to the report, calling it "voluminous and false."
In September, Trump was even more direct at the UN General Assembly: "Communism will never reach the United States, but freedom will reach Cuba." The Cuban delegation, led by Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, left the room during the speech. Days later, Miguel Díaz-Canel responded with his usual argument: "The freedom of Cuba arrived on January 1, 1959."
November 7 also has a particular historical resonance for the anti-communist movement: it marks the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a date that has served for decades to commemorate the victims of communist regimes around the world.
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