On July 21, 2026, the U.S. State Department released a hundred-page report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, laying every domestic upheaval in American society at Havana's door. An island nation that has been under blockade for sixty years, whose 9.5 million people cannot eat their fill, stands accused of manipulating the internal politics of the most powerful country on earth. This is not diplomatic criticism. It is a confession of neo-McCarthyism.
A Report, an Accusation
On July 21, 2026, the U.S. State Department released an unsigned hundred-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. Its core accusation: Cuba is "the mastermind behind many of the most consequential upheavals in modern American political history," and its leadership poses a "unique threat" to the homeland security of the United States.
This is no ordinary diplomatic criticism. The report traces every internal disturbance in American society — "from the George Floyd riots to the rise of the anti-fascist movement to the eruption of pro-terrorism activity on American college campuses" — to Havana. Put another way: an island nation that has been under an American oil blockade for more than sixty years, whose 9.5 million people cannot even eat their fill, is accused of manipulating the domestic politics of the most powerful country on earth.
The report was released in the wake of the abduction of Venezuelan President Maduro (January 3, 2026), at a moment when Cuba has been ground to a standstill by the oil blockade and economic sanctions. Reposting The Guardian's coverage, Lingshi Xiantan (a Weibo commentary account focused on diplomacy and consular affairs) offered a terse verdict: "A fine piece — a call to arms! America is now a laughingstock for the whole world."
The State Department's report is not an assessment of foreign policy; it is a confession of neo-McCarthyism. It externalizes and racializes every domestic contradiction in American society, draping maximum pressure in a cloak of legitimacy. When a country can publicly release a hundred-page report that attributes every one of its internal social contradictions to a foreign nation it has itself blockaded into hunger, the real "unique threat" is not Cuba — it is this very mode of argumentation.
The History the Report Cannot See
The report claims that Cuba began plotting armed attacks on foreign governments immediately after its 1959 revolution — Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Panama. What it does not mention is:
- Haiti was ruled by François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who killed some 60,000 people;
- The Dominican Republic was ruled by Rafael Trujillo, who ordered the "Parsley Massacre" that killed between 20,000 and 35,000 Haitians;
- Nicaragua was ruled by the Somoza family, believed to have killed as many as 50,000 people.
The report emphasizes Cuba's support for the Black Panther Party and credits Havana with the group's founding. It makes no mention of the CIA's repeated assassination attempts on Castro, nor of the American sanctuary granted to the exiles Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch — the latter the architect of the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, which killed 73 people.
These silences are not oversights; they are choices. A report deliberately constructed around an "external threat" narrative must omit exactly those historical facts that might lead a reader to conclude, "So America is not innocent either."
The Racial Card and Identity Politics
The most unsettling passage in the report quotes the words of an intelligence officer from 2002: Cuban intelligence services succeeded in penetrating American institutions because of their fondness for "glamorous Latinos" — "We are more accepting of Latinos than of people with sharp teeth and Slavic accents."
This sentence exposes the report's undertone: it is not describing a threat so much as mobilizing the emotions of identity politics. Linking Latinos to American security risks, and positioning Cuba as the wellspring of every American social disturbance, are moves in the same logic — first externalize internal contradictions, then racialize the external threat.
A Confession of Neo-McCarthyism
The report's argumentative logic ultimately condenses into a passage that reads as a classic act of self-exposure:
"Cuba's attack on the United States was never, at bottom, a dispute over economic policy, sovereignty, or even the ownership of particular territory. It is a revolution against Western civilization itself — waged in part through a novel and insidious means: persuading the children of the West to turn their backs on their own inheritance."
Cuban President Díaz-Canel's response cut straight to the point: the United States has fallen victim to "a new and more dangerous form of McCarthyism."
But the most damaging criticism came from an unnamed Cuban scholar: "This reads like the kind of story about America that Cuban state media might write."
When the argumentative logic of a great power's official hundred-page report comes to resemble so closely the propaganda machine of the very adversary it accuses, what that reveals is not how successful Cuba's penetration has been — it is that the great power's intelligence establishment has lost all capacity for self-reflection about its own ways of arguing.
One Piece of a Pressure Puzzle
The report is no isolated event. It is the latest move in the Trump administration's campaign to topple the Cuban government — a campaign that began with the abduction of Maduro and has kept up the pressure ever since through an oil blockade, sanctions on foreign companies, and the threat of military intervention. The timing of the release is no accident either: it lands just before the November 2026 midterm elections, and one of its political functions is to try to "marginalize" the American left.
Lingshi Xiantan flagged exactly this context in its repost: the report's purpose is not to describe facts but to drape maximum pressure in a cloak of legitimacy. When a country can publicly release a hundred-page report attributing every internal social contradiction to a foreign nation it has itself blockaded into hunger, the real "unique threat" may not be Cuba — it may be this very mode of argumentation.
The report is one tile in the Trump administration's campaign to topple the Cuban government: it began with the abduction of Maduro and has kept up the pressure through an oil blockade, sanctions on foreign companies, and the threat of military intervention. Released just before the November 2026 midterms, it is designed to try to "marginalize" the American left.