A State Department report says American leftists are serving Cuba‘s goals for “urban guerilla warfare and terrorism” through a regime-linked activist group.
The Venceremos Brigade spent decades building relations with elected Democrats, labor leaders, and activists by giving supporters propagandistic field trips to Cuba and weapons training, the State Department said Monday in a 100-page report on the communist state’s influence. The report traces financial and political ties between the Venceremos Brigade and the Black Lives Matter cause, Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and others, describing how the group “brought some 10,000 American activists to Cuba” since Cuban officials helped form it in 1969.
“Since its creation, the Brigade has served as a tool for the Cuban regime to sponsor a wide range of subversive activities against the United States — ranging from influence campaigns to espionage and guerilla violence,” the State Department said. “It has been linked to the formation of some of the most infamous far-left terrorist movements in U.S. history.”
The Monday report, citing mostly public information, calls out American leftists’ affinity for hostile Cuba as a national security concern with an intensity not seen in prior administrations. The Trump administration argued why it thinks Cuba poses a continued threat to the United States after President Donald Trump threatened to overthrow its communist government in recent months.
“It has sought to undermine, degrade and destabilize America with spies and soldiers, but also with students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells, but also with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks,” the report stated. “With intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover, but also with ostensibly private exchanges, nonprofits, political organizations, and activist networks.”
The Venceremos Brigade did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
‘Fomenting a revolution within the United States’
Shortly after its formation, the brigade helped establish the now-defunct leftist militant group Weather Underground, which carried out bombings in the U.S., the State Department said. It also built partnerships with more legally legitimate entities, though its goal is still “fomenting a revolution within the United States,” the report alleged.
Susan Rosenberg, for example, is a Venceremos “brigadista” and former Weather Underground member who later became vice chairwoman of the leftist nonprofit group Thousand Currents. The charity was the fiscal sponsor for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation between 2016 and 2020, the State Department noted. Thousand Currents and the Black Lives Matter charity did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment.
The department also highlighted Bass as one of the Democratic politicians with ties to the brigade. Her past work with the group involved visiting Cuba as frequently as every six months, according to the report. She later claimed her activities were humanitarian and did not include the Venceremos Brigade’s signature military training.
Cuba’s government and U.S.-based activists’ funding carry the Venceremos Brigade’s operations, according to the department’s analysis. The brigade has previously organized its travel program in tandem with the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, also called ICAP, a Cuban intelligence front that Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned in June. The brigade also gets fiscal sponsorship from the People’s Forum, a nonprofit group behind demonstrations across the country against immigration enforcement, Israel, and Trump’s foreign policy decisions.
One of the Left’s most influential legal groups, the 89-year-old National Lawyers Guild, also “played a major role in the Venceremos Brigade dating back to the very first delegation” to Cuba, according to the State Department. “The NLG was one of six official partners of the ‘Nuestra America Convoy’ that brought U.S. leftist influencers to the country in March of 2026,” the agency wrote.
The People’s Forum and NLG did not respond to requests for comment.
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“These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history,” Rubio’s officials wrote about Cuba’s political network. “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’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory,” the State Department declared. “It was a revolution against Western civilization itself — waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
