In Trump’s Campaign Against ‘Third Worldism,’ Cuba Is at the Center

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

In its 100-page report on the threat Havana represents to U.S. interests and the safety of its people, the State Department deemed Cuba the “capital of 21st-century communism.” The agency might as well have labeled communist Cuba the epicenter of “third worldism.” That is, after all, what the report alleges. And the modern manifestations of that ideology are as menacing for the United States as Marxism-Leninism ever was.

 

Cuban communism, the report contends with all requisite evidence, long ago departed from the Soviet model. The “revolutionary leftism” Havana promotes is less focused on fomenting “economic class conflict” and more committed to exacerbating “racial, social, and even civilizational grievances.” It seeks to mobilize not the disaffected international proletariat but “the colonized nations and peoples of the Global South.” The report quotes the far-left magazine Jacobin’s approving summary of communist Cuba’s mission statement: Havana presents itself to the “Third World as the ideal site for radically rethinking anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonization.”

 

The document takes readers on a jaunty excursion through the history of the late 20th century and Cuba’s many contributions to revolutionary violence that typified it. Cuban guerrillas terrorized Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, exported insurrectionary tactics and the tools of revolutionary violence to every corner of the world, and provided material as well as spiritual support for a variety of militant outfits — even inside the United States. All the while, Havana articulated a dogma of “third worldism” that “would go on to instantiate itself as the dominant genre of left-wing radicalism around the globe.”

 

One 1966 conference outlined the otherwise disparate and incompatible elements that Cuba cobbled together into an anti-Western alliance. Attendees included the “Palestine Liberation Organization, the Viet Cong, Puerto Rico’s leftist Pro-Independence Movement, South Africa’s African National Congress, and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union.”

 

Another conference the following year, “Black Power and the Third World,” sought to operationalize this anti-Western doctrine and use it to exacerbate “the racial problem in the United States,” as one CIA operative testified. The report describes how Cuba undermined the civil rights movement’s commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience in favor of “armed self-defense and revolutionary confrontation.” In addition, it outlined the methods Cuba used to establish contacts between America’s would-be militants and their comrades in places like Angola, Mozambique, and, in particular, Algeria, from which many of the Black Liberation Army’s militancy was directed.

 

Indeed, so many violent movements that upended the late 20th century — from the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to the Palestine Liberation Organization — were tethered together by Cuban initiatives. So, too, were terrorist organizations like the Puerto Rican independence gang FALN, which was one of the deadliest Marxist guerrilla groups of the 1970s and, according to one FBI account, was “supported and directed by the Cubans ‘at a firsthand level.’”

 

The FALN was just one Cuban-aligned terror group that tormented Americans in the 1970s. The Weather Underground was another. “Weathermen communicated through operatives working out of Cuban embassies in the United States and Canada in an effort ‘to blunt official surveillance,’” the report states, “utilizing the ‘Cuban diplomatic channels as a private communications network’ to stay in touch with other cells.”

 

It would be a mistake to conclude that Cuba’s crippling poverty has rendered it benign, the State Department document warns. Cuba’s assets and its agents of influence are “true believers,” it continued. They constitute a spy network that punches above Cuba’s financial weight, and elements within it are “likely directly responsible for the deaths of several American soldiers, agents, and citizens.”

 

The document is not a nostalgic romp through the Cold War–era archives. It is a warning about the threat that Cuba poses today as both a conduit for “adversarial states such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea” and a font from which chaos agents, spies, and militant insurgents alike spring.

 

The tools that Cuba uses to undermine American security from within vary, according to the report. There’s the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), an instrument of Cuban intelligence that oversees the influence campaigns conducted by the people-to-people outfit Venceremos Brigade.

 

The National Network on Cuba (NNOC) is another. Earlier this year, NNOC disturbed a “national rapid response plan” that the State Department alleges sought to “coordinate nationwide actions” against federal law enforcement in the event of hostilities between Cuba and the U.S. The plan was both a targeting document and a work of propaganda — “a practical application of the Third Worldist doctrine that U.S. government repression of ‘black and brown communities’ in the United States is part of the same phenomenon as U.S. imperialist oppression abroad,” the report reads.

 

The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) embodies the third-worldist philosophy in practice. In one illustrative anecdote, the report tracks the finances provided by Cuba to Hamas via the notorious pro-Iranian British  political figure George Galloway — a gift that the late Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh warmly received.

 

The National Lawyers Guild — a onetime Soviet cutout that has frustrated U.S. efforts to counter communist influence for nearly a century — is cited as an organization that financed the activities of the Marxist guerrillas of the 1970s with Cuba’s backing. “Today’s NLG is also notorious for working in coordination with Antifa networks,” the report adds. “Guild members have openly admitted to directly coordinating with self-described Antifa groups, meeting before street confrontations to preemptively ‘discuss tactics.’”

 

The People’s Forum, a group led by Neville Roy Singham, the Shanghai-based “former Marxist militant organizer with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,” was singled out for his work on behalf of communist Cuba’s efforts to cultivate new agents of influence. And, of course, the Democratic Socialists of America are singled out for special condemnation in the report, but not because that organization or its members are on Cuba’s payroll. Rather, the DSA is “the ideological inheritor of the Cuban-influenced radicalism of the post-1960s left,” the State Department contends, and “it freely embraced the policy agenda and worldview of its own accord.” Nevertheless, DSA members have had extensive contact with Cuban intelligence assets.

 

There is a geostrategic dimension to Cuba’s third worldism, too. Cuba provides America’s enemies with a vector to infiltrate and influence the United States. It is a listening post for China, a proving ground for Russian technology and an outpost for its military assets, and a foothold in the West for the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the decades in which Cuba ran Venezuela as a colonial outpost, “analysts estimated that thousands of suspected Hezbollah, Hamas and other Iranian-backed militants had traveled to Venezuela and to other parts of Latin America, including Bolivia and Nicaragua.”

 

The relationship between Cuban communists and Islamists isn’t so new, as the report contends. Cuba elevated Palestinian militants as proximate expressions of their own “antiimperialist and anti-Western creed” — sending soldiers and intelligence assets to remote Middle Eastern training camps and propping up “Marxist-Leninist groups” like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

 

“Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history — from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses — can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the report concludes. The practical utility of this report amid the Trump administration’s emerging conflict with the tenets of third worldism should not be understated.

 

With the report’s release, Undersecretary of State for Public Policy Sarah Rogers read the subtext aloud: “There’s been a lot of talk lately about a vicious, lowest-common-denominator leftism that imports anticolonial resentments to the metropole,” she wrote. Cuba, she contended, is “a culpable node” for the promotion of this emergent anti-Western intellectual fad. “Most people fail to appreciate the extent to which this ideology was — and still is — incubated and institutionalized right here in our hemisphere,” Rogers concluded.

 

Indeed, the Cuban threat is not a quaint artifact of a bygone era. It is a real and present danger. No one who reads the State Department’s dispatch could conclude anything less.