The State Department’s Cuba Report Revives McCarthyism While Ignoring the Human Cost of Sanctions

On July 20, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department released a specious 100-page report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. Presented as a national security assessment, it is in fact a political manifesto that resurrects the rhetoric and logic of McCarthyism for the twenty-first century while ignoring the devastating humanitarian consequences of Washington’s escalating economic war against the Cuban people.

The report’s central premise borders on the fantastical. It argues that Cuba’s “singular goal” since the 1959 Revolution has been to “conquer the United States” and ultimately “erase it from the earth” through a hemispheric Marxist revolution. According to the report, Havana has spent decades orchestrating a vast conspiracy to infiltrate American society, directing or manipulating organizations as diverse as the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, Black Lives Matter, anti-ICE campaigns, Palestine solidarity organizations, labor unions, anti-war movements, and progressive advocacy groups. Organizations including CODEPINK, the National Lawyers Guild, Democratic Socialists of America, Pastors for Peace, and The People’s Forum are portrayed not as independent organizations exercising their constitutional rights, but as instruments of Cuban state influence.

This narrative recalls one of the darkest chapters in American history. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, civil rights activists, labor organizers, peace advocates, and artists were routinely smeared as communist agents. Careers were destroyed, organizations infiltrated, and constitutional freedoms sacrificed in the name of national security. The targets have changed, but the script remains strikingly familiar.

The report must also be understood within a broader political context. In 2025, the administration issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), directing federal agencies to develop new strategies for investigating and dismantling domestic terrorism. In its findings and examples, the memorandum highlights incidents and ideologies associated with the political left—referencing opposition to ICE, police, “Americanism”, capitalism and Christianity. Later implementation documents focus on “Antifa” and related left movements.

This July, the State Department convened representatives from over 60 countries to discuss what it described as the resurgence of “far-left extremism.”

Against that backdrop, the Cuba report appears like a justification for expanding surveillance and attacks on domestic political dissent.

The report also arrives amid an unprecedented escalation of U.S. sanctions against Cuba. Since returning to office, the Trump administration has further tightened an already brutal embargo. In January, President Trump declared on social media: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA — ZERO!” The administration subsequently expanded restrictions targeting fuel shipments, ports, shipping companies, mining operations, hotels, financial transactions, and state-owned enterprises.

The sanctions and lack of fuel have pushed Cuba’s once celebrated healthcare system to the breaking point. Physicians describe medicine shortages so severe that they must decide which children receive lifesaving surgery because there are insufficient supplies to treat everyone. Pediatric surgeons report a doubling of the island’s mortality rate, not because they lack medical expertise, but because mothers are giving birth to underweight babies and hospitals lack antibiotics, electricity, transportation, fuel, and basic medical equipment.

Operations that once would have been routine are now put on hold. More than 100,000 Cubans are waiting for surgeries, including thousands of cancer patients and approximately 12,000 children. Hospitals struggle with blackouts, transportation failures, and shortages of essential medicines. Cuba’s Ministry of Health reports that childhood cancer survival rates have dropped from 85 percent to 65 percent.

Rather than reckon with the human toll of its own policies, Washington has chosen to investigate humanitarian volunteers delivering medical supplies. Following a humanitarian delegation that delivered over $600,000 in medical supplies to Cuba’s children’s hospitals, CODEPINK and several participants on the trip are being investigated by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). OFAC has demanded exhaustive documentation about the trip, forcing CODEPINK to devote enormous time, energy and legal fees to defending humanitarian work.

Portraying peace organizations, humanitarian volunteers, lawyers, labor organizers, and religious delegations as agents of a foreign conspiracy undermines the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. Treating dissent as evidence of subversion does not make the United States more secure—it weakens the very freedoms it claims to defend.

The State Department’s Cuba report belongs in the dustbin of history, beside the loyalty oaths, blacklists, and witch hunts it so closely resembles. The economic war on Cuba should also be trashed. And the ghost of McCarthyism should be buried once and for all.