The State Department released a 100-page report Monday accusing Cuba of influencing virtually every major progressive movement, organization, protest and activist in the United States over the last 65 years.
Media outlets, including Belly of the Beast, are also implicated in the vast conspiratorial screed, which one member of Congress has called the “stupidest” thing he’s ever read.
Also this week:
Ramped Up Sanctions Target Doctors, Ports and Oil
U.S. Economic War Drives Hotel Chains Out of Cuba
Congressional Democrats Push Back
No Electricity, Garbage Everywhere
First Shipment of U.S. Aid Arrives to Cuba
Belly of the Beast Recommends
Red-Baiting and Regime Change
Cuba, a country enduring a devastating economic crisis with 20-plus hours of blackouts a day, has apparently played an instrumental role in “turning America against itself” through a “sprawling influence and espionage network.”
According to the State Department, Cuba is responsible, at least in part, for the Black Panthers, the National Lawyers Guild, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd “riots,” the Democratic Socialists of America, Angela Davis, university activism, anti-ICE organizers, Antifa, Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass...the list goes on.
And yes, Belly of the Beast is also mentioned as being part of this vast Communist conspiracy for our role in helping Hasan Piker shoot a documentary while he was in Cuba.
According to the report, Cuba’s “subversive” influence has even reached mainstream liberal politicians like Barack Obama and institutions like Harvard University.
"The Stupidest Thing I've Ever Read"
The report seems to embrace its McCarthyite parallels, citing "blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions, and a slate of anti-communist laws" as having effectively crushed the Communist Party by 1959. The historical background reads less like a cautionary tale and more like a blueprint for an impending crackdown.
Speaking on the House floor after returning from a trip to the island, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) called the report "the stupidest, most fantastical, most biased thing" he's ever read.
From the front page of the 100-page State Department report.
The report is an absurd hodgepodge of distorted history and sweeping, conspiratorial conclusions. But its political implications are real.
The report serves two purposes:
1. Justify repression at home. The report casts protest movements, journalists, academics, solidarity organizations and activists in the United States not as independent actors, but rather products or instruments of a hostile foreign government. It thus provides a pretext for repression in the United States, making it easier to smear, discredit, persecute and silence critical voices.
2. Justify regime change in Cuba. The report says Cuba has tried to attack the United States from within, turning “Americans into instruments of their own nation's undoing” by “persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” By portraying Cuba as an existential threat — not just to U.S. security, but to U.S. society itself — the Trump administration further strengthens its case for economic warfare and military intervention.
WatchBelly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández break down why the State Department released the report:
Former U.S. diplomat Orna Blum wrote on her Substack that multiple sources at the State Department told her the report did not go through the "standard tracking process" by which documents like this get assigned, drafted and cleared for publication. According to Blum, the departure from the normal review process indicates that the report was likely written by political appointees at the State Department and National Security Council (both run by Marco Rubio).
"Career diplomats are floored — by the sloppy writing, by the attempted history lecture, and most of all by how undisguised the attempt is to make a foreign policy report into an election-season blacklist," writes Blum.
One former top official told Blum the report is a "disgrace and a danger."
House Committee Subpoenas BreakThrough News
Congressional Republicans wasted little time expanding the McCarthyite campaign.
The House Ways and Means Committee issued a subpoena to BreakThrough News this week, demanding internal communications and financial records from the nonprofit outlet, which covers Cuba as well as the Palestine solidarity movement and ICE repression, among other issues.
BreakThrough News says it's the latest escalation in a years-long effort by Republican lawmakers to paint its reporting as part of a foreign influence operation. The outlet says it hasn't received foreign funding and isn't charged with any crime.
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The Trump administration sanctioned nine more Cuban entities and two individuals Thursday, including Cuba's health minister, the state company that manages the island's overseas medical missions, the agency that recruits doctors for them and the director who runs it.
The move further expands an ever-growing list of Cuban entities targeted by Trump's May 1 executive order, which imposes "secondary sanctions" on non-U.S. companies doing business with blacklisted Cuban entities.
The State Department also sanctioned Cuba's main port terminal at Mariel and the companies that run it, the country’s primary remittance processor, two fuel importers, and CEINPET, the research arm of the state oil company that develops techniques to refine locally produced crude oil. Unlike past designations, this one doesn't only seek to cut off oil imports — it targets Cuba's efforts to use the oil it already has.
Among the new blacklisted names is CEIBA Investments, a company based in Guernsey, a dependency of the British crown, which owns the Miramar Trade Center in Havana and holds stakes in several Meliá hotels. CEIBA is the first non-Cuban, non-U.S. company designated under the May 1 executive order, further extending the reach of the Trump administration’s economic war beyond Cuban and U.S. entities. Previously, other foreign investors such as Sherritt International and Antilles Gold, were sanctioned indirectly through joint ventures with Cuban companies.
The sanctions on Cuba's international health apparatus follow months of U.S. pressure on governments around the world to expel Cuban medical missions. One government that has not bent under the pressure is Calabria's. Check out our documentary about the Cuban medical mission serving in one of Italy's most impoverished regions HERE.
The State Department says the sanctions are meant "not to punish, but to bring about a positive change in behavior." It's not clear what change in behavior Washington expects short of Cuba completely surrendering its sovereignty.
U.S. Economic War Drives Hotel Chains Out of Cuba
Three Spanish hotel chains — Meliá, Iberostar and Barceló — announced Tuesday they will cease operations in Cuba.
Meliá announced it will shut down operations at all 34 of its Cuban properties. Iberostar (18 hotels) and Barceló (2 hotels) told Diario ABCthey would also be leaving the island.
The exodus comes a week after the Trump administration added Cuba’s Tourism Ministry to its list of sanctioned entities pursuant to the May 1 executive order targeting non-U.S. companies.
Melía, in an official filing to Spanish financial regulators, cited "significant operational, legal, economic and financial difficulties" that have made "a minimum level of operational stability" impossible.
Iberostar and Meliá had already been cutting ties with Cuba. In May, Iberostar announced it would suspend operations at 12 of its properties tied to GAESA, Cuba’s military-run conglomerate, which was among the first entities added to the U.S. blacklist. Meliá followed in June, halting operations at 15 properties.
The targeting of the Tourism Ministry seems to have been the final blow, as the companies are cutting ties with their remaining Cuban hotels.
Congressional Democrats Push Back
Pocan and Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-OR) took to the House floor to condemn the U.S. government’s “inhumane” policy toward Cuba a week after visiting the island — something Secretary of State Marco Rubio has never done.
U.S. policy is reaching “new levels of sadism against the Cuban people,” according to Pocan.
"We are hurting the very people we profess to care about," he said, adding that the blockade persists "not for national security reasons, but for political reasons."
Dexter, who is a physician, met Cuban doctors facing shortages of basic surgical supplies.
"The American people need to know that their government is intentionally suffocating the nation of Cuba," she said.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) also spoke before the House of Representatives, noting that infant mortality in Cuba has doubled to 9.9 per 1,000 births, and childhood cancer survival rates have dropped from 85 to 65 percent since the embargo tightened.
"What we are witnessing in Cuba, as some have characterized, is basically Gaza in slow motion," McGovern said. "Man-made starvation with the help and complicity of the United States of America."
Last week, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) pressed Assistant Secretary of State Caleb Orr on whether he was aware that the Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment.
When Orr deflected, blaming "the Cuban regime," Jayapal cut him off. "Obviously you don't know, so let me tell you what it is," she said.
Jayapal then referred Orr to a declassified 1960 State Department memo stating the goal of U.S. sanctions was to "deny money and supplies to Cuba" and "bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government."
Sixty years later, she said, that goal hasn't been realized — but the Cuban people "have been essentially destroyed."
Watch Jayapal question the assistant secretary of state HERE.
No Electricity, Garbage Everywhere
In a new video produced in collaboration with AJ+, Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández takes to the streets of Havana to document daily life under Trump's oil blockade.
A woman walks miles home from work because there's no fuel for buses. A man lives beside trash that hasn't been collected in weeks. A mother fans her baby through the night, waiting for the power to come back.
The first shipment of the U.S. government’s $100 million aid package arrived in Cuba this week. 700 aid kits, which include 10 days’ worth of non-perishable food and hygiene products, have been distributed to households in Bejucal and Alquízar, two towns on the outskirts of Havana.
Of the $100 million, $60 million will be distributed by the Catholic Church, with the remaining $40 million distributed through other “trusted NGOs” that have not yet been publicly identified.
The food handouts have been welcomed by Cubans, who are suffering extreme hardships due to a lack of electricity, medicine, food, public transportation and other basic social services the government has been unable to provide due to U.S. economic warfare.
But the $100 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of dollars in damage done to the Cuban economy by sanctions and the oil blockade.
U.S. officials have touted the aid, which is like breaking someone’s legs and then taking credit for offering them some aspirin.
Chargé d’Affaires Mike Hammer, the top U.S. diplomat in Cuba, who was in Bejucal to observe the aid deliveries, declined to answer questions when a Belly of the Beast journalist approached him on Friday.
Watch Hammer avoid answering questions by jumping into his SUV.
Lee Schlenker, who accompanied last week's congressional delegation to Havana, writes in Responsible Statecraft that Secretary of State Marco Rubio's actions don't match his talk of a possible deal with Cuba.
In an article in In These Times, Chris Mills Rodrigo traces the indictment of Raúl Castro back to a longer pattern of escalations that he argues are building a pretext for U.S. intervention. "It's the same recipe they have been feeding the American people from Iraq to Libya to Afghanistan," Belly of the Beast's Liz Oliva Fernández told Mills Rodrigo.
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