The Trump administration's State Department published a 100-page document on July 21, 2026, titled "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism." It has no listed author. It was released without a press briefing. And according to members of Congress who recently returned from the island, it has one purpose: to manufacture consent for a military invasion of Cuba while simultaneously building a legal framework to criminalize domestic dissent.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a first-generation Cuban American who has made the overthrow of the Cuban government the centerpiece of his tenure — has produced what critics are calling the most unhinged State Department document in a generation. The report claims that Cuba, a nation crippled by a U.S. fuel blockade and spiraling humanitarian crisis, is the ideological center of a global conspiracy to destroy the United States, and that Black Lives Matter, Antifa, anti-ICE protesters, the Democratic Socialists of America, Code Pink, and a sitting U.S. mayor are all part of its intelligence apparatus.

It would be laughable if the consequences weren't so deadly serious.

The Blockade Behind the Report

Before examining the report's claims, it is essential to understand the context in which it was produced — because the State Department's own report deliberately omits it.

In January 2026, Donald Trump imposed what amounts to a total naval blockade on fuel shipments to Cuba. Any country attempting to deliver oil to the island was threatened with sanctions. The result has been catastrophic. By May, Cuba's energy minister announced the country had effectively run out of diesel and fuel oil. Only a single Russian-flagged tanker, the Anatoly Kolodkin, had delivered crude since December — and even that was permitted, according to the U.S., for "humanitarian reasons."

The consequences for ordinary Cubans have been devastating. Schools have shortened schedules. Rolling blackouts lasting nearly all day have disrupted hospitals, public transit, and refrigeration for food and medicine. The tourism-dependent economy has effectively collapsed. Cuba has suffered multiple island-wide blackouts in a single week. Citizens face a daily question of where their next meal will come from. The International Bar Association called the fuel blockade a serious violation of international law and a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order.

In March, Rubio offered $100 million in humanitarian aid to Cuba — while his own policies were the direct cause of the crisis. He blamed the Cuban government for preventing aid from reaching the population, a claim that mirrors the pattern of sanctions regimes everywhere: strangle a population, blame their government for the suffering you caused, and then offer yourself as the savior.

This is the reality of Cuba in 2026: an island of 10 million people pushed to the brink of total collapse by a U.S. economic war. And it is against this backdrop — this reality that the report painstakingly avoids — that the State Department asks Americans to believe Cuba is the mastermind of a global plot to destroy Western civilization.

"Stupidest, Most Fantastical Thing I've Ever Read"

The report begins with a sweeping claim: For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.

It describes Cuba as "less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States." The country, the report alleges, is the capital of 21st century communism, ideologically immovable, and a permanent enemy committed to the destruction not just of the U.S. but of "Western civilization" through the spread of "Third Worldism."

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), who traveled to Cuba on a fact-finding mission in July alongside Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), was blunt.

"It may be the stupidest, most fantastical, most biased thing I've ever read from a governmental agency. This report focuses on the 1960s & 70s with no clear connection to today. Yet somehow, the State Department uses this report to say that this impoverished nation is responsible for everything from Black Lives Matter to Antifa, the anti-ICE protests and more."

Ramirez went further. Speaking to The Intercept, she said the report was intentionally designed to instill fear of the Cuban people and to justify a military attack on Cuba.

"It's hypocrisy at its finest, because while criticizing the regime in Cuba, it instead attacks Americans' constitutional rights to free speech and free assembly."

Daniel DePetris, a Defense Priorities fellow and foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune, was equally blunt on social media: This report actually states, in all seriousness, that Cuba's main goal is to conquer the United States. It's about as dumb as dumb gets. Don't be fooled: This is the State Department trying to build the foundational case for U.S. military action, should Trump decide to do it.

Cubans protest prolonged power outages with a street fire in Havana

Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King's College London, addressed Rubio directly: Before building another casus belli for Cuba, try to solve the strategic disaster that is the Iran War you started but cannot win.

Naming Names: The Enemies List

The most chilling aspect of the report is not its geopolitical delusions but its domestic targeting. Across its 100 pages, the document names specific American individuals and organizations as part of Cuba's alleged intelligence network — a tactic that serves dual purposes: demonizing dissent abroad and constructing a legal predicate for surveillance and prosecution at home.

The report devotes nearly five full pages to the National Lawyers Guild, a nearly century-old progressive legal organization, describing it as "one of the most persistently relevant — and insidious — organizations in Cuba's U.S. network." The NLG's crime? Providing legal representation to activists, protesters, and political dissidents — exactly what lawyers are supposed to do in a free society.

The NLG responded with characteristic wit, posting to X for the first time since March: We have been called much worse, by much better.

Other targets named in the report include:

• The Democratic Socialists of America — one of the largest socialist organizations in the country, targeted for participating in solidarity delegations to Cuba
• Code Pink — a peace organization currently under Treasury Department investigation for the crime of delivering medical supplies to children's hospitals in Cuba
• Communist Party USA — listed as a Cuban asset
• Hasan Piker — a left-wing political streamer named for participating in humanitarian aid convoys
• Christian Smalls — the founder of the Amazon Labor Union
• Isra Hirsi — a campus activist and the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar
• Jeremy Corbyn — the former leader of the UK Labour Party
• Pablo Iglesias — the former Spanish Deputy Prime Minister
• Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — a sitting elected official
• Harvard University — singled out for faculty trips to Cuba as recently as 2017

The report also attacks international solidarity efforts, specifically the March 2026 Nuestra América Convoy, which delivered humanitarian aid to everyday Cubans suffering under the blockade. The convoy included delegates from across the Americas and Europe, all of whom the State Department now suggests are witting or unwitting agents of Cuban intelligence.

Code Pink condemned the report as a conspiracy theory that masquerades as a report on Cuba, full of baseless smears and imaginary, contrived links to Russia, China, and Iran.

"The report attempts to paint the tiny island as a threat but says nothing about the U.S. blockade that starves and punishes 10 million people. This latest attempt by the State Department is just one of many politically motivated witch hunts designed to silence anti-war voices who dare to challenge U.S. militarism. It's about justifying even more aggression against Cuba while turning advocates for peace into suspects. We've seen this playbook before. It's McCarthyism, plain and simple."

Code Pink noted pointedly that we live in a world where, sadly, the people delivering medicine — not those who are enforcing the policies that deprive Cubans of medicine, food, fuel, and electricity — are under investigation. The organization referenced the 187 United Nations General Assembly votes opposing the decades-long American embargo, adding: We will not be intimidated for delivering humanitarian aid and advocating for diplomacy over war.

The COINTELPRO Parallel

Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent and author of The Imperial Bureau: The FBI, Political Surveillance, and the Rise of the US National Security State, identified the report's historical antecedent with precision.

"This report goes so far as to cite reports from the long-discredited House Un-American Activities Committee, in order to revive absurd Cold War conspiracy theories and update them for the present."

Gibbons described the document as using guilt-by-association techniques to smear activists, organizations, and even elected officials.

"It appears designed to justify both domestic political repression and regime change in Cuba. Congress must not only condemn the report but hold hearings examining its authorship and to determine if the claims behind it have been used to facilitate the surveillance of American activists."

The comparison to COINTELPRO — the FBI's notorious program that targeted, infiltrated, and disrupted domestic political movements from the 1950s through the 1970s — is not hyperbolic. The report constructs an infrastructure of alleged foreign subversion that maps directly onto organizations the Trump administration has already been targeting through other means: ICE conspiracy prosecutions against anti-detention protesters, terrorism designations for anti-war activists, and the ongoing weaponization of the DOJ against perceived political enemies.

As one critic wrote on X in response to the report: This is justification for the military invasion of Cuba and the new COINTELPRO.

Activists load humanitarian aid onto a boat during the Nuestra América solidarity convoy to Cuba

The Real Target: Dissent at Home

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) led a coalition of 11 progressive members of Congress — including Greg Casar, Maxine Dexter, Jesús "Chuy" García, Jonathan L. Jackson, Jim McGovern, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mark Pocan, Delia Ramirez, Rashida Tlaib, and Nydia Velázquez — in a statement condemning the report as a McCarthyite attack on Americans' free speech rights.

"Trump appears hellbent on taking America back 70 years to the height of Cold War McCarthyism, when hawkish foreign policy was paired with unsubstantiated accusations of communist subversion and political repression against dissidents at home."

The statement noted the Orwellian inversion at the heart of the report: the same administration that has deployed U.S. military ships to seize fuel vessels headed for Cuba and threatened to take over the island now claims that Cuba is carrying out an assault against the United States by turning Americans into instruments of their own nation's undoing.

"We condemn this report's attack on Americans' constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. We denounce this administration's irresponsible attacks against civil society organizations, activists, journalists, labor leaders, Members of Congress, elected officials, and private individuals based on their advocacy for peaceful foreign policy and social justice at home."

The progressives committed to using full oversight power to stop the persecution of Trump's perceived political enemies and called for an end to the dangerous, cruel and illegal naval blockade causing collective punishment against Cuba.

"Cuba Is Next"

The report landed in a political environment already saturated with invasion rhetoric. Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.) declared on social media on the same day the report was released: "Cuba is next!" It was not the first time. Giménez had appeared on Fox Business in June making the same promise — that Cuba was next on Trump's invasion list, once the administration finished with Iran.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to take over Cuba. He has suggested military action may come after the conclusion of hostilities with Iran. AP sources reported in June that the U.S. was not looking at imminent military action against Havana — a reassurance that was undercut by the fact that such reporting was necessary at all.

The pattern is unmistakable. First the blockade — the economic strangulation. Then the propaganda — the report painting the target. Then the congressional cheerleaders — "Cuba is next!" — normalizing the idea. Then the military posture. Then the fait accompli.

This is not speculation. It is the documented playbook of U.S. intervention, applied with mechanical precision. Cuba has been subjected to economic warfare, covert operations, and attempted regime change for seven decades. What makes this moment different is the openness of the threat, the severity of the blockade, and the State Department's willingness to explicitly name American dissidents as enemy assets in a document that clearly serves as a prelude to something worse.

An Expert Contradicts the Premise

Alejandro de la Fuente, a professor of Latin American history and economics at Harvard University who chairs the university's Cuba Studies Program, is a Cuban-born scholar hardly sympathetic to the Cuban government. He traveled to Cuba in 2017 as part of a trip the report specifically mentions.

His assessment of the report's central thesis was devastating.

People walk in total darkness on a Havana street during a blackout

"The ineptitude and corruption of the regime have destroyed the country's economy and society, to the point that the very existence of the nation is in danger. Can a country like this pose a threat to the national security of the United States today? The answer, any reasonable observer would agree, is emphatically no."

De la Fuente also pushed back on the report's implication that university exchange programs served as recruitment grounds for Cuban intelligence. He noted that the Cuban government had been wary of such exchanges, delimiting them as much as possible because they understood that knowledge production requires freedom and a plurality of viewpoints — precisely what they do not allow.

"They would probably argue that it was U.S. universities that were trying to penetrate Cuban institutions and to foment subversion there!"

Miriam Pensack, a historian at Princeton University specializing in Latin America and the Caribbean, placed the report in a broader context of American imperial mythology.

"Cuba is not a new cudgel. The Cuban revolution was a galvanizing event for the way that the United States thought about its national security, really until the end of the Cold War. And it still has an ideological utility, even as the country is limping along."

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla addressed the report directly, calling it the latest fallacy from the U.S. Department of State against Cuba and part of the construction, by the secretary of state, of a pretext for sustaining its cruel and criminal economic war that punishes every Cuban family, and its aspiration to militarily aggress Cuba, for which it desperately seeks the support of U.S. citizens.

"It is further evidence of the macabre plan designed by that U.S. politician from South Florida, who only satisfies the interests of those who have always paid him."

The War Already Being Waged

Ramirez, her voice on the verge of tears as she described what she witnessed on the island, cut through the report's abstractions with the reality on the ground.

"Under no circumstances, at any moment during my trip, did I see anything to make me believe that Cuba poses an existential threat to the United States. On the contrary, what I witnessed was a war on the Cuban people by the United States, and specifically by Donald Trump and Marco Rubio."

This is the truth that 100 pages of State Department paranoia cannot bury. Cuba does not threaten the United States. Cuba is being destroyed by the United States. And this report — this McCarthyite fever dream dressed in government stationary — is not about protecting Americans from Cuba. It is about protecting the American war machine from Americans who oppose it.

The report names Code Pink for bringing medicine to children. It names the National Lawyers Guild for defending the accused. It names labor leaders, students, journalists, and elected officials for the crime of believing that peace is possible and that the people of Cuba deserve to eat.

It calls them agents of a foreign power. It calls them enemies. And it builds the bureaucratic infrastructure to treat them as such.

The question is not whether this report is accurate — it transparently is not. The question is what the administration plans to do with the permission it grants itself. The blockade is already a war crime. The naming of domestic dissidents is already a threat. The report is the paperwork.

Cuba is next. The only question remaining is whether Americans will let it happen.