Cuba, or How the US Makes Us All Enemies of the State.

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The fact that Substack makes betting action available is genuinely repellent.

My great-grandmother and my grandmother moved to Fort Lauderdale in the 1960s. My father followed in 1976, I split my time between Wyoming and Florida. I moved there permanently from 1987 until I finally left in 2020, and I raised all of my children in Broward county. They are the only “native Floridians” I know.

So I grew up among the people this report describes. My friends who came in the Mariel boatlift arrived in 1980 because a government had decided they were surplus while weaponizing their political prisoners. They came, they opened businesses, they raised kids alongside mine, and some of them still won’t “speak on it” over the phone. What “it” is is usually saved for happy hour.

My Haitian friends crossed the very same straits. Under the charmingly named Wet Foot, Dry Foot policy, a Cuban who reached sand got cut loose with a path to citizenship under the Cuban Adjustment Act. A Haitian who reached sand got three hots and cot until their flight home. Both were fleeing. The sorting was done on the basis of which cold war the arrival was useful to.

I have watched immigration status used as a political instrument in South Florida for my entire adult life. So, when the State Departmrnt publishes a hundred pages and mentions that a man was removed over an association, I know the shape of what I am reading.

On July 1, the State Department announced that three Cuban nationals had been apprehended after Secretary Rubio terminated their legal status. Carlos Antonio Lloga Dominguez (the wording of this announcement is worrisome) had been employed by ICAP for more than a decade. His wife and son were taken with him. The employment is not the point. The Department attached a rule to the case: any foreign national involved in ICAP’s operations should expect an ICE deportation flight. “INVOLVED IN.” Rubio put it more plainly on his own account, saying that anyone who transacts with ICAP will be sanctioned, prosecuted, or deported.

Three weeks later the Department published a hundred pages naming the American organizations it says are involved. Last week I called this predicate action. This is what I meant. They are showing you their playbook, this is them testing our will.

Their report is called “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” It runs a cool one hundred pages, it was published on July 20, 2026, and it’s worth your time to read. Two-thirds, give or take, is history, much of it fairly accurate and most of it well-trod territory. The final third is basically a list of currently operating American organizations and currently serving American officials, presented as “components of a hostile foreign network.”

That final third has no footnotes. The citations stop at page seventy-seven and never resume, the cloak of boring foot notes was necessary for their plan, boring is always the strategy.

This is not so much a case of history that happens to have a weak ending; let’s call it a designation instrument wearing a historian’s jacket, and their sourcing pattern is how you can tell. Claims about events forty and sixty years old, where the archive is settled and the citation is trivial, are easily footnoted. Claims about living Americans arrive bare, and someone made that choice for a reason. Documents like this are drafted, reviewed, cleared, and scheduled, and the distribution of citations across a hundred pages is an explicit decision, not an accident.

Twenty-five footnotes. The last one sits on page seventy-seven.

Everything after page seventy-seven goes unsourced/cited, because there is no footnotes needed for their plan: the National Lawyers Guild’s Cuba work, the People’s Forum, CodePink, the Democratic Socialists of America, the chapter on Russia, China, and Iran, and the conclusion. They make a strategic choice to switch to in-text attribution and the signals-intelligence passages name their sources properly. The organizational chapters, the ones that name Americans, largely don’t.

The twenty-five footnotes that exist tell you about the drafting process. Four cite the same volume, the 1972 and 1973 hearings of the House Committee on Internal Security. One cites a 1966 staff study by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Those are the successor bodies to the loyalty investigations, and a department reaching for them in 2026 is reaching deliberately; nobody stumbles into the Internal Security Subcommittee. One footnote supports the claim that eighty American universities hold agreements with the University of Havana, and its source is an alumni magazine. One actually reads, in full, that the assertion comes from the accused organization’s own website.

A department that expected these claims to be tested might have sourced them properly. This one sourced the settled past and left the actionable present unsupported, which tells you what they think you might check on.

You can verify the count yourself in twenty minutes with the PDF. It requires no political agreement with me, just a bit of reading and googling.

Honestly, overstating the critique hands the document a defense it did not earn, so take what you want of the true parts at full strength and move on.

Cuban intelligence used to be formidable and the report is pretty accurate about it. Florentino Aspillaga defected in 1987 and the CIA later confirmed that effectively every asset it believed it held inside Cuba since the Bay of Pigs had been running the other way. Ana Belén Montes, Walter Kendall Myers, and Víctor Manuel Rocha were real, and Rocha spent roughly fifty years inside the State Department and the National Security Council working for Havana. An old CIA chief of counterintelligence has said publicly that the Cubans outperformed the KGB. Cuba trained guerrillas in the tens of thousands and put nearly forty-nine thousand personnel into sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s.

I would argue that Puerto Rico deserves more credit than given. Filiberto Ojeda Ríos was recruited by Cuban intelligence and trained in explosives on the island. He co-founded the FALN, which carried out as many as a hundred and thirty bombings between 1974 and 1983, and he helped organize the Macheteros. In 1979, a Macheteros cell ambushed a U.S. Navy bus with automatic rifles, killing two sailors and wounding nine. Another ambush three years later killed a sailor from the USS Pensacola. When the group fired an anti-tank rocket at the building housing the FBI’s San Juan headquarters in 1983, and at a federal courthouse two years later, the ordnance was American, captured in Vietnam and routed through Cuba.

Those are murders of American servicemen, enabled by a foreign government. Nothing that follows can touch them.

The signals-intelligence material also holds up, and it comes mostly from outside the Cuban government. Eighteen known facilities on the island, two Russian and three Chinese. In 2024 the Center for Strategic and International Studies used commercial satellite imagery to identify sites at Wajay, Calabazar, El Salao, and Bejucal, and documented a new circular antenna array at Bejucal the following year – we have enough backround that it reads like an inventory.

All of it’s indisputably true. It’s also not why the document was published, and the next section is.

Right around page thirty-two the report stops telling the old stories and starts building the narrative it intended.

The subsection is titled “Influence-Espionage Integration.” It sets out what the report presents as “Cuban intelligence doctrine on categories of asset.” The top tier is a full “agent” with access, tasking, and clandestine communication. The middle tier is a “hybrid” who knowingly cooperates without full tradecraft. The bottom tier is what the report calls a “useful link: a person who may have no access to secrets at all, and whose position or ideology can nonetheless advance Cuban objectives.” It‘s this last definition that becomes problematic.

Read the definition again and think about the requirement. There’s no contact requirement. No payment. No instruction. No awareness on the part of the person being categorized. The sole criterion is that their politics point in a congruent direction, as assessed by the party doing the categorizing. I feel like I need a CRINGE emoji here…

The “category” has no floor, and every naming in the last thirty pages stands on it.

A few pages earlier, the report has already explained why the ordinary evidence will be “absent”, the staging for “that’s what a spy would say.” Under a heading about true believers, it argues that Cuban intelligence recruits ideologues rather than paid assets, that the most damaging American spies took little or no money, and that this leaves no paper trail: no unexplained deposits, no sudden purchases, no debts quietly cleared. Everyone is suspect by association.

Put these the two passages together. The first establishes that a person can be an asset without knowing it, accidental spies everywhere. The other establishes that the absence of financial evidence is consistent with the model rather than exculpatory, accidentally producing no evidence other than proximity. It would impossible to “disconfirm” an allegation constructed this way. The document doesn’t even conceal this, and therein lies the rub. It states both propositions plainly, on the page, and continues. So much for innocent until proven guilty…

Now the sixty pages of history make sense. They are not context. They are the pre-loading suspicion that a reader can project onto page thirty-two. Somebody who has just absorbed Aspillaga and Montes and the Macheteros will accept a technical claim about “adversary tradecraft” without much resistance, and that technical claim then does thirty pages of work on American citizens. This is Epistemic Warfare.

On page fifty-eight, the report makes a claim that should stop anyone who writes about systems, and I mean stop dead.

It clearly argues that the concept of “institutional racism” was invented by Stokely Carmichael, and that it has since migrated into university departments, nonprofit networks, government agencies, public-health bureaucracies, and mainstream political culture, this is the “woke ideology” argument, expanded.

That’s not a claim about the actual conclusion, but moreso a claim about a specific sentence structure. Describing an outcome as produced by an institutional arrangement, rather than by the character of individuals, is a foreign ideological import traceable to a conference in Havana in 1967, and that its presence in American institutions is evidence of “penetration.” Yikes!!

I write structural analysis, it’s what I do for a living, sort of... So do a great many people who have never even thought about Cuba for ten consecutive minutes. The sentence “this system produces this result” is the ordinary working grammar of policy analysis, public health, epidemiology, labor economics, and disability research. The report places that grammar inside the network, your network, this is where the assumptions get dangerously broad.

Set that idea beside the “useful link” definition and the shape becomes very clear. The document doesn’t need to name journalists, analysts, or academics, because it’s already described the “category” in terms that cover them completely. A person with no access to secrets whose ideology advances the adversary’s objectives, writing in the “grammar” the report identifies as the adversary’s ideological product, is inside the definition as it’s written. No additional finding is required, and more importantly, no evidence.

Here is where I’d like mark the line between what’s documented and what’s inference, because that specificaton is the only thing that makes this whole thing worth reading.

Documented: NSPM-7 directs every federal law enforcement and intelligence agency to identify, disrupt, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute people the administration classifies as domestic political terrorists. Stephen Miller said so from a State Department podium on July 16, in front of delegations from more than sixty-five governments. That same day the Department announced a visa restriction policy aimed at far-left terrorist and aligned groups. The Secretary of the Treasury was in the room, which is what “debank” means in practice. NSPM-7 rests on a presidential memorandum rather than a statute, so no congressional vote defines who qualifies.

Inference: that the same instruments will be pointed at people who write. No writer has yet been designated under this authority on the strength of this report, and I am not trying to tell you one has.

But the distance between the documented and the inferred is one loosely defined administrative determination, made by officials who have already published the criteria, assembled the enforcement chain, exported the framework to sixty-five governments, and has recently tested it on a family. Whether that step gets taken further is a question about restraint. It’s not a question about capability, and it’s sure as shit not a question about authorization, because the authorization is that memorandum and the memorandum is already signed.

I am aware of what it means to write this paragraph in a piece with my name on it. That’s very much the point of writing it. A definitional category that covers everyone who might describe it’s a category that depends on nobody describing it. If it sounds convoluted, I think it’s supposed to.

The report’s Venezuela chapter runs several pages and it’s, arguably, the most valuable bit of information in the document.

Havana spent the 1960s trying to export revolution to Caracas by force and failed. The 1967 Machurucuto landing put Cuban-trained cadres on the coast to spark a rising that never came. In 1963, Venezuelan authorities pulled tons of weapons out of their own shoreline and traced them back to Havana by restoring the effaced coat of arms on the crates.

Fast forward to what succeeded in 1999 and involved no guerrillas at all. The report lays it out fairly cleanly. Cuba supplied personnel, technical expertise, and intelligence capability to a government that had won an election, and took oil in exchange. Tens of thousands of Cuban doctors, teachers, technicians, and political operators moved into ministries, neighborhoods, and social programs, building patronage relationships that bound poor communities to the new government while placing an enormous human infrastructure inside the state. This should sound almost familiar; Cuban advisers then constructed the internal security apparatus: loyalty vetting, purges, expanded domestic surveillance, and the conversion of the armed forces into a police force aimed inward. Read that sentence one more time, because this isn’t their innovation, it’s Russia’s, and it’s the same playbook Rubio and team are taking us.

For very good reason, the report calls this a “perfected model.” It describes the outcome as the hollowing out of state and non-state organizations from within, and the conversion of democratic institutions into positions held by the regime. At this point, you should be hearing alarm bells.

Loyalty as a criterion for public service. Surveillance as an ordinary method. Institutions turned to face the interior. A security apparatus that treats domestic political alignment as its organizing problem. This is where we are now, and every statement continues to be a confession.

The chapter is four pages long and, frankly, it’s so recognizable it’s like reading our own history since 2016.

Every action I might have recommend last week was defensive. Map your chain, document your independence, read the policy. Those are still very much worth doing but they are not sufficient, because a document with no legal force acquires force through anticipatory compliance, and anticipatory compliance is a choice made by boards and general counsel who have not even been ordered to do anything.

So the first item is a refusal.

Don’t preemptively sever relations or associations. If your organization is considering ending a fiscal sponsorship, dropping an affiliation, canceling an exchange agreement, or quietly declining to renew a partnership because an unfootnoted paragraph in a government report mentioned a name adjacent to yours, ask for evidence first. Put the standard in writing before you are under pressure, because you won’t draft a good one under pressure. Nothing in this report technically has any legal effect on a domestic nonprofit. Its effect runs entirely through what institutions do to themselves in advance, and every institution that severs on a unsubstantiated assertion makes that assertion into a fact for the next one.

Demand the real sourcing. The State Department published claims about identifiable American organizations without citations, demand sourcing. That’s a documents request, a congressional oversight letter, and a FOIA, and any one of those creates a paper trail. Ask what evidence supports the inclusion of a named organization. Ask which office drafted the final third. Ask what threshold was applied. A department that answers has to commit to a standard. A department that declines has said something too.

Name the constraint, before they go after basic fund raising. Designation authority that determines who may hold a visa, keep a bank account, or face federal prosecution on the basis of political classification should require an act of Congress. NSPM-7 does not have one, they just act like it. That’s the very specific structural defect, it’s nameable in a sentence, and it’s the one thing to say when talking to a legislator who asks: “what do you want?”

Read the report, in detail and deep dive into the footnotes. Review this as a record, not rhetoric. Twenty-five is a lot of footnotes, last one is on page seventy-seven, and the part that names Americans comes after. Don’t get lost in the boring.

The document argues that Cuba’s method was to attack the United States from within, by persuading Americans to turn against their own inheritance.

The inheritance in question includes the proposition that the government must show its work before it takes your status, your bank account, or your liberty. That claim has no footnote in this report either. It did not need one until now.

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TL;DR: The State Department’s new 100-page report on Cuban influence spends most of its length documenting real history, then uses that credibility to support something far more dangerous.

The footnotes stop on page 77. After that, the report begins naming American nonprofits, political organizations, universities, and public officials as parts of a hostile foreign network, largely without sourcing.

Its key category is the “useful link,” defined broadly enough to include someone with no access to secrets, no payment, no contact, and no awareness of helping Cuba. Political agreement alone may be enough. The report also argues that missing financial evidence does not disprove involvement.

That makes the accusation almost impossible to falsify.

This matters because the administration has already built an enforcement framework capable of targeting people through visa restrictions, deportation, prosecution, funding pressure, and financial exclusion. The report itself has no direct legal force. Its power comes from institutions obeying it before they are ordered to.

The practical response is clear: do not sever relationships based on unsupported claims. Demand the evidence. File FOIA requests. Seek congressional oversight. Require Congress to define any political designation authority that can cost someone their status, bank account, or liberty.

Read past the footnotes. That is where the instrument begins.