The State Department just published a 100-page report arguing that Ben & Jerry's ice cream guy, the Amazon Labor Union, and sitting members of the United States Congress are all, in some meaningful sense, agents of Cuban influence. This is not a bit. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is running a full McCarthyite blacklist operation out of Foggy Bottom, and he'd like you to know he's proud of it.
The Report That Names Names
Released July 28th, the State Department document is titled 'Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,' and according to reporting by Ken Klippenstein, it runs 100 pages and identifies at least 43 contemporary American individuals and organizations as connected to Cuban influence operations. The named parties include New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, media personality Hasan Piker, Democracy Now host Amy Goodman, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Amazon Labor Union, among many others.
The report's own logic is worth sitting with for a moment. It concedes, explicitly, that the DSA 'was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government' and that it has 'organic ideological commitments.' Then it immediately insists the group still has ties to Cuban influence, because DSA members have visited Cuba. By that standard, every journalist, academic, and tourist who's ever flown to Havana is a national security threat. Dennis Rodman's Cuba trip must have kept Rubio up at night.
The report doesn't try to hide what it's going for. It actually praises the 'blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions' of the 1950s for their effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA. That is the State Department of the United States citing McCarthyism favorably. As a model. In 2026.
What 'Cuban Influence' Apparently Means Now
The report's central thesis, per Klippenstein's breakdown, is that '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.' Which is a sentence that should embarrass any analyst who wrote it, because what it's actually describing is American people being mad about American cops killing American citizens.
Over three pages of the report are dedicated specifically to the DSA. The argument, stripped of its national security language, is that the DSA's political views are ideologically compatible with Cuba's, and that's basically it. Ideological compatibility is now the bar for being listed in a government blacklist document. By that logic, every country with universal healthcare is running an influence operation through the Democratic Party's left flank, and Finland is the real puppet master.
The report's authors seem aware on some level that they're stretching. The Cuba connection for most named groups rests on things like participating in something called the 'Nuestra América Convoy' to Cuba, or having praised Venezuelan elections, or having organized with the Venceremos Brigade in the 1970s. Karen Bass, the sitting Mayor of Los Angeles, is in the document because she organized with that Brigade more than fifty years ago. This is the intelligence community's version of bringing up your ex's bad behavior from high school.
Rubio's Political Terrorism Pipeline
This report didn't appear out of nowhere. Klippenstein reported last week that Rubio convened an international summit on what the administration is calling 'political terrorism,' where he introduced the brand new term 'Far-Left Terrorism,' abbreviated FLT, without ever really defining it. A White House press release from that summit stated that 'far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.' Rubio also promised at the summit that new terrorist designations for left-wing groups would be coming 'soon.'
The problem the summit ran into, per Klippenstein's reporting, is that when you try to substantiate a massive claimed threat of left-wing political terrorism in the United States, you end up reaching for examples like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. Groups that haven't existed since the 1970s. The summit was deliberately vague about which groups today are supposedly equivalent. The Cuba report is the answer to that vagueness. It's the follow-up that fills in the blanks with actual names.
Under Secretary of State Jeremy Lewin made the connection explicit, posting on X that 'the Cuban regime has been behind both the ideological underpinnings of third worldism and subversive organizing structures of the new radical left political terrorists that Secretary Rubio called out with clarity last week.' That's the administration's own official directly linking last week's terrorism summit to today's blacklist document. They're not trying to hide that this is the same project.
Who Actually Gets Named Here
Let's be clear about the political weight of who's on this list. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib are all Democratic Socialists. AOC and Tlaib are card-carrying DSA members. Zohran Mamdani, who just won the New York City mayoral primary in a landslide, is also a DSA member. The DSA has helped nominate dozens of politicians to office in recent years. This isn't a fringe group. It's a significant piece of the American left that won real elections.
Also on the list: the Amazon Labor Union, the organization founded by Chris Smalls that won a landmark union election at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse. Their Cuban influence operation, apparently, consisted of participating in a convoy. The National Lawyers Guild is in there too, along with Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, and the Black Alliance for Peace. Antifa is named, despite being a decentralized concept rather than an organization, which is a targeting problem the government has been struggling with since 2020 and clearly hasn't resolved.
This is a document about American political life on the left, wrapped in a national security justification thin enough to read through.
The M-Word Nobody in the Press Wants to Say
McCarthyism was a specific, documented, historically catastrophic period in American history where the federal government used national security framing to destroy the careers, reputations, and lives of American citizens for their political beliefs. It wasn't called that at the time. At the time it was called protecting America from Communist infiltration.
The State Department report doesn't just echo that period. It endorses it. It looks back at McCarthy-era blacklists and prosecutions and writes approvingly about their effectiveness. That is the tell. The authors aren't unaware of the comparison. They're making the comparison on purpose, as a statement of intent.
Rubio has been in politics long enough to know exactly what he's building here. This is a deliberate, documented, government-sponsored effort to stigmatize, isolate, and potentially lay legal groundwork against American citizens and organizations based on their political views. The Cuba framing is the vehicle. The destination is the suppression of the domestic left.
The Dingo Take
Here's what this actually is. It's a list. A government list of American citizens, elected officials, labor organizers, journalists, and political groups that the Secretary of State wants you to think of as enemy agents. The Cuba framing is load-bearing only in the sense that it gives the whole enterprise a national security costume. Strip that away and you have a 100-page document that says: these people, with their political views, are a threat to America. That is not a counterintelligence report. That is a political enemies list with a passport stamp on it.
The particular insanity of naming sitting mayors and sitting members of Congress as components of a foreign influence operation cannot be overstated. Karen Bass runs the second-largest city in the United States. Zohran Mamdani just won a mayoral primary that the entire country watched. These are not fringe actors operating in the shadows. They are elected American officials, and the State Department just put them in a blacklist document alongside a favorable citation of 1950s McCarthyism. What recourse do they have? What's the process? There isn't one. That's the point.
Rubio telegraphed more terrorism designations are coming 'soon.' He's got his enemies list. He's got his international summit to give it legitimacy. He's got his historical models, and he's not embarrassed to cite them. Anyone waiting for this to stop on its own is going to be waiting a very long time.
