Marco Rubio's State Department accuses Cuba of fueling "far-left terror" in the United States and recruiting solidarity activists to "turn America against itself."
According to Teishan Latner, a leading scholar of U.S.-Cuba left solidarity, the claims are the same ones the FBI and CIA made in the 1960s and 1970s. They were as spurious then, he says, as they are now.
This week, Belly of the Beast journalist Yohan Rodríguez speaks with Latner about how the State Department twisted his scholarship into a sweeping McCarthyite conspiracy theory to criminalize U.S. social justice movements and justify possible military action against Cuba.
Also this week:
Trump Renews World War I Law to Sanction Cuba
Cubans Caught in Trump’s Deportation Machine
Giménez Blames Free Healthcare, Ignores Sanctions
Rubio Targets Solidarity, Mining and Construction
Rubio's Cuba Report, Graded by a Historian
When the State Department released its report "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism" last month, historian Teishan Latner recognized the material — some of it seemed to be drawn directly from his own writing.
According to Latner, the State Department report regurgitates false claims the FBI and CIA made about U.S.-based activists in the 1960s and 1970s, when the agencies alleged that U.S. solidarity delegations served as a recruiting pipeline for Cuban intelligence.
“There's no evidence that Cuba has actually successfully recruited anyone who has been a member of a U.S. solidarity brigade,” Latner said.
Asked how he’d grade the report if a student submitted it as a paper, Latner said: "It would probably be a very poor grade, especially on the basis of evidence."
While the report may be laughable as a work of scholarship, Latner says it serves a political purpose: to crack down on progressive organizations and leaders, and to strengthen the case for the administration’s hostile policy against Cuba.
Watch Belly of the Beast journalist Yohan Rodríguez’s interview with Latner HERE.
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Donald Trump renewed U.S. sanctions on Cuba last week under the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA), a 1917 law designed to cut off trade with Germany during World War I. Cuba is the only country in the world still subject to sanctions under the century-old law.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla said TWEA’s extension is confirmation that the Trump administration intends to keep suffocating the country at the "cruelest moment" of the U.S. economic war on Cuba.
The law has now been invoked against Cuba every year since 1963 by both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump signed the same extension in August 2025, and Biden did so in September 2024.
The law serves as one of the primary legal underpinnings for the U.S. embargo (referred to as the “blockade” in Cuba), which constitutes the most comprehensive sanctions regime imposed by any country on another in modern history.
Read our article on the Trading with the Enemy Act HERE.
Giménez Blames Free Healthcare, Ignores Sanctions
U.S. Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL) says universal healthcare in Cuba “sucks” and “doesn’t work,” pointing to hospitals without medicine and deteriorating conditions.
The criticism amounts to political gaslighting: the policies Giménez has championed are the primary reason why Cuba’s hospitals are collapsing.
U.S. economic warfare has restricted Cuba’s ability to obtain medicines, medical equipment, fuel and other resources needed to keep its healthcare system running.
Cuba received 127 deportees from the United States this week, bringing the total this year to 882 people returned to the island by U.S. immigration authorities.
But some migrants aren’t being sent home despite the Cuban government’s continued cooperation with U.S. deportation efforts.
Four Cuban men were among a group of deportees flown to Liberia last week. They refused to get off the plane because Liberia was “not their country” and they would face danger there. U.S. officials told the migrants they would be returned to the United States, but instead flew them to a detention facility in Equatorial Guinea.
Immigrant rights advocates say there is no medical staff at the hotel-turned-holding site, and guards have withheld food and physically abused migrants.
Other Cuban deportees have landed even farther from the island. Yasmany Moreno de Armas told CBS News he was deported to the Central African Republic, a country he said he'd never heard of before landing there.
The State Department has issued a Level 4 Travel Advisory for the country, warning U.S. citizens to avoid travel there due to risk of “unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines and terrorism.” U.S. authorities have also deported Cuban nationals to Eswatini and South Sudan.
Thousands more Cubans are stuck in Central America. A recent Atlantic story describes Tapachula, Mexico, near the Guatemala border, as a “dumping ground” where the U.S. has been busing deported Cubans — some stripped of their green cards after decades in the U.S. — rather than deporting them to their home country.
Not even Cuban musicians are exempt from the immigration crackdown. Last week, ICE detained Latin Grammy-winning percussionist Degnis Bofill at the Miami airport despite his pending asylum case, days after Cuban musician Andy García was detained in Los Angeles.
Rubio Targets Solidarity, Mining and Construction
The Trump administration last week sanctioned three leaders of Cuba’s Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) after targeting the institute itself in June. The three individuals are:
Fernando González Llort, ICAP’s President
Noemi Ramona Rabaza Fernández, ICAP’s First Vice-President
Leima Martínez Freire, ICAP’s North America Director
ICAP is a Cuban government institute that has organized international cultural exchanges and solidarity delegations to the island since 1960.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the organization is used to “corrupt and radicalize Americans” as part of a “vast subversive network” — language that echoes the 100-page McCarythite report published by the State Department last month.
The sanctions are part of a broader State Department-led campaign to target solidarity activists who oppose the Trump administration’s economic war on the island.
That campaign has included harassing activists who travel to Cuba.
Last week, U.S. citizens returning through Miami International Airport after attending celebrations that marked the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth in Havana were stopped for secondary screening, with some having their cellphones and other devices seized for inspection.
In May, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sent requests for information to progressive streamer Hasan Piker and CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, seeking records on whether they’d violated U.S. sanctions law during a March trip with the “Nuestra América Convoy,” a humanitarian mission that brought roughly 20 tons of life-saving supplies to the island. At least 20 U.S. activists who participated in March’s convoy were detained at Miami International Airport upon returning.
Watch Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández’s interview with Medea Benjamin HERE.
Driving Out Foreign Companies, Clearing the Way for U.S. Investors
The most recent wave of sanctions were not limited to ICAP. Rubio also sanctioned Cuba’s Ministry of Construction and eight other entities across the mining, metals and transport industries.
Among the newly-blacklisted entities is Empresa de Níquel Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara, a state-owned nickel and cobalt processing facility. The facility is located five miles from Moa Nickel, S.A., where Canada’s Sherritt International has mined nickel and cobalt since the 1990s through a joint venture half-owned by Cuba’s state-run General Nickel Company.
Moa Nickel was sanctioned under Donald Trump’s May 1 executive order, which imposes “secondary sanctions” on non-U.S. companies doing business with blacklisted Cuban entities.
The pressure immediately produced a potential opening for a politically connected U.S. investor.
Days after Moa Nickel was sanctioned and Sherritt suspended its Cuba operations, Ray Washburne, a former Trump adviser who led the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) in the first Trump administration, signed a pre-agreement to acquire a majority stake in Sherritt.
Washburne and his wife, Heather, co-chair the host committee for the Republican Party’s September midterm convention, which Trump, Vice President JD Vance and numerous cabinet officials are expected to attend. Washburne told Reuters that the committee has raised $42 million to fund the event.
He's no longer the only U.S.-based investor interested in acquiring Sherritt. A rival consortium consisting of an unnamed U.S. anchor investor, commodities trader Glencore, London-based Kyma Capital and hedge-fund investor Trifon Natsis is also vying for the same 55 percent stake sought by Washburne’s Gillon Capital.
In addition to Cuba’s nickel and cobalt, gold has also drawn interest from a U.S. investor looking to take advantage of Trump administration sanctions.
On June 4, the Trump administration sanctioned Minera La Victoria, the 50/50 joint venture between Australia's Antilles Gold and Cuba's state-run GeoMinera S.A.
Antilles halted funding and direct management of the venture, suspended its shares on the Australian exchange for a week and paused construction at its Nueva Sabana gold-copper project.
By late June, the company had submitted a proposal to the State Department offering to hand at least 51 percent of its Cayman Islands subsidiary, Antilles Gold Inc., to a U.S. investor. Antilles said it was "encouraged" by Washington's response in early July.
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