State Department: Cuban Intelligence Treats Infiltrating American Universities as a ‘Top Priority’ — And Links Decades of U.S. Unrest to Havana, ‘In Some Way, Shape, or Form’
On July 20, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department published a report running roughly 100 pages, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” Its central claim is blunt: Cuban intelligence has made infiltrating American universities a top priority for decades, cultivating students and faculty who go on to occupy positions of real influence inside the U.S. government, its political parties, and its activist movements.
“Cuban intelligence treats infiltrating American universities as a top priority,” the report states.
The report goes further still, linking — carefully, not flatly — a string of major American political upheavals to that campaign. Havana has already answered, dismissing the document as a pretext for a military attack it says the Trump administration is preparing. What follows is what the report claims, the infrastructure it says Cuba built to back those claims up, and the espionage convictions that give the argument an evidentiary spine.
- ~100 pages — the length of "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism," released July 20, 2026 — per Local10 and the Washington Post
- ~80 universities — U.S. schools holding active exchange agreements with the University of Havana as of 2023, per the report via Breitbart
- 2,000+ groups, 150+ countries — ICAP's claimed international "solidarity" reach — coordinated by a man who served time in a U.S. prison, per the report via Fox News
- 10,000 Americans — brought to Cuba through the Venceremos Brigade since its 1969 founding, per the report
- 60+ organizations — the coalition behind a "National Rapid Response Plan" for U.S. protests if Washington strikes Cuba — per Fox News
Rubio put his own name on the report’s broadest claim: “For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States.” The document backs that claim with specifics, arguing that university campuses are not incidental to Cuban strategy — they are where the strategy starts.
“U.S. universities are one of the premier targets of Cuba's subversive activities, serving as fertile ground for recruiting ideologically sympathetic young Americans who will ascend to positions of influence, power, and access.”
"Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism" · State Department, July 20, 2026
The report argues Cuban intelligence services favor ideological recruitment over financial incentives, developing assets over years or decades rather than buying loyalty outright — a patient model built for reaching people who won’t hold real power until long after they’ve left campus.
The report traces the pipeline it describes back to 1969, when the Venceremos Brigade began busing American activists to Cuba. The Brigade has carried roughly 10,000 Americans to the island since, and the report — quoting an earlier congressional assessment — calls it one of “the most extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D) both attended the Brigade’s 1973 trip — a fact documented independently by the Los Angeles Times and cited in commentary around this report, though it is not itself an example the report names in its own text.
The modern hub, per the report, is the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples — ICAP — which claims more than 2,000 affiliated “solidarity” organizations in over 150 countries. Its president since 2017, Fernando González Llort, is a former Cuban intelligence officer sentenced to 19 years in the 1998 Wasp Network case who served roughly 15 years before his 2014 release. On the American side, the report and subsequent State Department sanctions point to a 60-plus-member coalition called the National Network on Cuba, which the report ties to ICAP and to a leaked June 2026 “National Rapid Response Plan” — a 24-hour mobilization playbook for protests at U.S. military bases, ICE facilities, and federal buildings if Washington strikes Cuba. The report names ICAP, the National Network on Cuba, Code Pink, the People’s Forum, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the National Lawyers Guild as the network’s core — and says the University of Havana alone held exchange agreements with nearly 80 U.S. universities as of 2023, calling that academic bridge “a key node in the Cuban intelligence network.”
The report’s abstract argument about universities has a concrete, decades-long paper trail in federal court. Ana Belén Montes was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies when Cuban intelligence recruited her in 1984; she went on to become the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior Cuba analyst before her 2001 arrest. Walter Kendall Myers, who earned his Ph.D. at the same Johns Hopkins school and later taught there, spied for Cuba for nearly 30 years as a State Department intelligence analyst; sentenced to life in 2010, he died in a federal prison medical facility in March 2026. Víctor Manuel Rocha, recruited by Cuban intelligence in 1973 shortly after graduating Yale, rose to U.S. ambassador to Bolivia while secretly working for Havana for more than four decades before his December 2023 arrest and 15-year sentence.
None of this is new to federal law enforcement. A 2014 FBI intelligence bulletin, first surfaced publicly by the Washington Free Beacon and reported by Fox News that September, already warned that Cuban intelligence was aggressively targeting Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and George Washington University specifically because those schools feed graduates into the State Department, Congress, and the FBI. The 2026 report treats that decade-old warning as background, not news — evidence the pattern outlasted any single administration’s attention span.
The report’s most sweeping sentence is also its most carefully hedged one.
“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.”
"Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism" · State Department, July 20, 2026
That phrase — “in some way, shape, or form” — is doing real work. The report is not claiming Havana orchestrated any of these events, only that decades of cultivated “fellow travelers” fed into them somewhere along the way. Elsewhere, the document frames the whole picture even more broadly: “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself.”
New report: Cuba's assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty — it was a revolution against Western civilization itself.
Separately — and this is worth keeping distinct from the report itself — President Trump told Fox News the week before the report’s release that “a lot of things are going to happen in Cuba over the next several months,” the latest in a string of remarks dating to February 2026 floating a “friendly takeover” of the island. The State Department has not tied that language to this report, and neither should readers.
New from @DailyWire on our report — a 99-page report portraying communist Cuba as the Western Hemisphere's foremost engine of Marxist subversion.
Havana’s answer arrived within hours. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the report “neo-McCarthyism” on X. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez was more pointed:
“This is part of the Secretary of State's strategy to create a pretext for maintaining his cruel and criminal economic war that punishes every Cuban family, and his ambition to launch a military attack on Cuba.”
Bruno Rodríguez · Cuban Foreign Minister, July 20, 2026
The report arrives inside a wider pressure campaign the administration has been building on Cuba for months, from sanctions on ICAP to direct diplomatic contact with Havana.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R) — released the report and put his own name on its central claim about Cuban-sponsored radical leftism.
President Trump (R) — has separately floated a “friendly takeover” of Cuba since February 2026, most recently telling Fox News more escalation is coming; his remarks are not part of the report’s own text.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe — a Trump appointee who made a rare trip to Havana in May 2026 to deliver the administration’s message directly to Cuban officials, part of the same broader pressure campaign, separate from this report.
Miguel Díaz-Canel and Bruno Rodríguez — Cuba’s president and foreign minister, who reject the report as a pretext for war.
The State Department has now put on paper, at Cabinet level, an argument that once lived mostly on the fringe: that Cuba’s influence in American life runs through its universities, not just its embassies. The paper trail behind that argument is real — a documented recruitment brigade, a sanctioned “solidarity” institute run by a onetime Cuban intelligence officer, and three federal espionage convictions with direct university ties. Whether that machinery explains, “in some way, shape, or form,” the George Floyd riots or the rise of Antifa is a different, far larger claim — one the report itself, notably, stops short of stating as flat fact.
