The Trump administration is shining a spotlight on Barack Obama’s early political ties after releasing a sweeping State Department report that traces Cuba’s decades-long effort to cultivate radical left-wing movements inside the United States, including former Weather Underground militants whose home hosted the launch of Obama’s first political campaign.
The 100-page report, titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, argues that communist Cuba spent decades exporting revolution by training, funding and cultivating American radicals before many of those figures eventually found influence in mainstream politics, academia and major progressive organizations.
Among the report’s most eye-catching claims is its discussion of former President Barack Obama’s political beginnings.
According to the document, Weather Underground co-founder Bernardine Dohrn traveled to Havana in 1969 to meet with Cuban and Viet Cong officials before later helping orchestrate a campaign of domestic terrorism. The report states that Dohrn authored the Weather Underground’s first declaration of war against the U.S. government in 1970 and was once one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives.
Despite that history, the report says Dohrn eventually reinvented herself in elite institutions, first working at the prestigious law firm Sidley & Austin before becoming a longtime professor at Northwestern University Law School.
The report then highlights a connection that has long fueled political debate.
“In 1995, Barack Obama launched his first-ever run for political office in the living room of Dohrn and her husband, Bill Ayers,” the report states. Ayers, another Weather Underground founder, later became a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, according to the document.
The report does not allege Obama was affiliated with the Weather Underground or aware of any Cuban influence activities. Instead, it places his first political campaign within what it describes as a broader pattern of former revolutionary activists transitioning into influential positions throughout American politics, academia and progressive institutions.
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State Department authors argue that Cuba’s strategy evolved beyond supporting armed revolution, instead focusing on embedding ideological allies inside influential American institutions.
“Over the past half century, programs like the Brigade have helped Cuba infiltrate and establish a foothold in a series of radical American political movements,” the report states.
“Increasingly, its reach has also extended to mainstream liberal institutions — elite academia, major nonprofits and NGOs, and even the Democratic Party itself.”
The report claims one of Havana’s most successful recruitment tools was the Venceremos Brigade, a program established in 1969 that brought thousands of American activists to Cuba for what it describes as political education and networking with Cuban officials.
According to the document, U.S. officials eventually concluded the program was heavily influenced by Cuban intelligence and used to cultivate relationships with American activists who would later return home.
The report also details Cuba’s alleged relationships with the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, Puerto Rican militant organizations and numerous revolutionary groups across Latin America.
It claims Cuban intelligence provided operational support to the Weather Underground during its bombing campaign while helping train and arm other Marxist organizations throughout the Western Hemisphere. The report further argues Havana became the ideological center of a new revolutionary movement after the Soviet Union’s influence began to wane, replacing traditional class-based Marxism with what it describes as a broader anti-Western revolutionary philosophy.
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The document also points to another former radical activist who later entered the progressive establishment.
Susan Rosenberg, identified as a former Venceremos Brigade participant, is described as later joining the May 19th Communist Organization, which the report says was responsible for the 1981 murders of two police officers and a security guard. It notes Rosenberg later became vice chair of the board of Thousand Currents, the nonprofit that served as the fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
Throughout the report, State Department officials argue Cuba’s greatest long-term success was not military or intelligence-related, but ideological.
“For over half a century, this small island nation with a chronically failing economy has operated at the center of a vast hemispheric network,” the report states, arguing Cuba cultivated generations of activists, intellectuals and political organizations whose influence ultimately extended well beyond fringe revolutionary circles.
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