How Cuba Is Covertly Boosting America’s Radical Left
The Cuban regime is pouring resources into “sustaining and expanding a wide range of ideological and intelligence front groups” that work to train and influence left-wing activists in the U.S., according to a new report from the U.S. State Department.
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The Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples (ICAP), a Cuban intelligence and influence network, maintains social and financial ties with a number of prominent radical left-wing groups in the U.S., from Black Lives Matter to Code Pink, the State Department says in a released Monday, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.”
ICAP was founded in 1960 by Fidel Castro and “ostensibly exists to promote goodwill toward Cuba through a global infrastructure of ‘friendship’ and ‘solidarity’ organizations and deep, longstanding ties to U.S. universities, student groups and activist movements,” the report says.
The group’s self-reported network includes more than 2,000 solidarity organizations across 150 countries. Its expansive outreach is concerning — not only is ICAP run by Fernando González Llort, a Cuban spy who spent 15 years in a U.S. prison after being arrested in Miami as part of the Wasp Network in 1998, but former officers of Cuba’s Intelligence Directorate have claimed that roughly 90 percent of ICAP staff are affiliated with the Cuban spy agency.
“The Cuban regime leverages ICAP’s ‘solidarity’ networks to drive policy, shape activist movements, and maintain a stable of advocates and agents in the United States,” the State Department says.
‘Solidarity’
ICAP works closely with the U.S.-based National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a coalition of more than 60 American groups, including the Democratic Socialists of America, National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, and Communist Party USA. While publicly committed to lobbying for an end to the U.S. embargo, the group actually “functions as another key node for coordination between the Cuban regime and the American far left,” the report notes. NNOC works with ICAP to coordinate U.S. delegations to Cuba and to hold “solidarity” conferences where American activists meet with Cuban officials to “devise strategies for expanding and exploiting Cuban influence networks in the United States,” the report says.
One notable target of NNOC’s propaganda efforts was Calla Walsh, who at just 16 years old was celebrated by the New York Times as part of an “influential new force in Democratic politics” for her work on the campaigns of Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.)
One year later, she was invited to Cuba at just 17 years old as an up-and-coming figure on the left. She then visited the country four times between 2022 and 2024.
Her trips to Cuba ultimately led to her introduction to Fergie Chambers, a Marxist organizer and millionaire heir to the Cox Communications empire. Walsh met Chambers, who is 20 years her senior, at a 2022 conference in Cuba. That meeting seemed to cement her path toward extremism. Today, Walsh is a full-time resident of Lebanon who has descended from a progressive wunderkind to a radical who has been placed on a suspicious persons watch list by the U.S. government for her “expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran . . . as well as a spiderweb of U.S.-designated terrorist groups,” according to the Free Press.
She recently appeared in an Iranian state media interview calling the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the “greatest anti-imperialist leader” of her lifetime.
The lead up to Walsh’s radicalization included relationships with several of the groups cited in the report for having close ties to Cuba, including the People’s Forum, Code Pink, and the Democratic Socialists of America.
The People’s Forum is “one of the most significant left-wing protest groups in the United States,” according to the report, with the group having served as the driving force behind protests against President Donald Trump and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, while backing pro-Cuban agitation. The group has achieved substantial financial backing — recording nearly $4.5 million in revenue in 2022, a more than 800 percent increase from the year prior — thanks to the political network of Shanghai-based American technology magnate Neville Roy Singham. Singham and his wife Jodie Evans, one of the co-founders of Code Pink, apparently have a history of cozying up to American adversaries: the pair are under investigation by U.S. authorities for their suspected ties to Chinese intelligence services.
The People’s Forum, for its part, is “intimately linked to the Cuban regime,” according to the report.
The well-funded group has served as the fiscal sponsor for the Venceremos Brigade since 2024, accepting tax-deductible donations on the Brigade’s behalf while skirting donor-disclosure requirements, according to the report. It also played a key role in organizing the March 2026 Nuestra America Convoy, an international humanitarian mission that delivered 20 tons of aid to Cuba to protest the U.S. embargo and energy sanctions. In fact, the group supports frequent delegations to the island, including a May 2023 trip that saw 150–300 activists visit Cuba for ten days to meet with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Later that same year, the group hosted the Cuban president at its own headquarters in New York.
The People’s Forum has had a hand in organizing protests around a number of left-wing causes, from a demonstration in New York City on October 8, 2023, that celebrated the Hamas attacks on Israel as “an unprecedented liberation struggle,” to partnering with the New York chapter of Democratic Socialists for America to recruit up to 4,000 “rapid response” activists to counter ICE enforcement operations in the city.
Code Pink, meanwhile, was founded in November 2002 to protest the looming Iraq War, but “occupied a position on the Cuban-aligned left” from its inception, according to the report, with co-founder Medea Benjamin having lived in Cuba from 1979 to 1983.
However, the report identifies the 2017 marriage of Singham and Evans as a “pivotal event” in Code Pink’s relationship to foreign regimes.
“Code Pink has been a consistent participant in major Cuba solidarity efforts since the July 2021 mass protests on the island,” the report notes. In March 2026, the group chartered dedicated aircraft for more than 100 participants of the Nuestra America Convoy that held 6,300 pounds of medical supplies valued at $33,000.
The Democratic Socialists of America, likewise, has also “significantly expanded its relationship with – and support for – the Cuban communist project,” over time. In 2019, the DSA announced its plans to formally join NNOC. The DSA has since established its own Cuba Solidarity Working Group, built a designated lobbying and campaign infrastructure around Cuba-specific advocacy, and has sent several official DSA delegations to the island.
The organization also operates a “Venceremos Fund” that solicits donations to “support the struggle to dismantle U.S. empire,” directing funding to Cuba.
The Assata Shakur Effect
Within other progressive U.S. movements, Cuba’s decades-old propaganda efforts are still bearing fruit today. In the 1970s, the regime “aggressively leveraged” former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur as a “propaganda mechanism,” the report says, with Cuba having successfully turned Shakur into “the globally recognized face of the themes Havana had sought to push for decades — U.S. racism, black internationalism, anti-imperialism, and Cuba as the spiritual center of the Third World struggle.” Cuban leaders did so by offering Shakur refuge in the country after she was convicted of murder and other charges and sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. for her involvement in a shootout with two New Jersey state troopers that resulted in the death of Trooper Werner Foerster. Shakur was able to escape prison with the help of an armed group of BLA associates and Weather Underground alumni. She fled to Cuba where she lived until her death in 2025.
Shakur’s relationship with Cuba has influenced the advocacy of a number of Black Lives Matter chapters; the front page of BLM’s website includes a quote from Shakur’s autobiography: “It is our duty to fight for freedom.” BLM co-founder Alicia Garza said in 2014 that the quote was a key influence in her organizing work.
Assata’s Daughters, a Chicago-based BLM offshoot, is a police-abolitionist activist group that claims to “develop and train” young black activists “in the spirit of Assata.” The group’s youth program teaches children ages 6 to 13 about “Assata Shakur and her revolutionary politic,” while its “Assata’s University” program trains activists 14 and up.
Meanwhile, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), which works within the ICAP-National Network on Cuba network, financially sponsors a Black Lives Matter “abolitionist” group called Equality for Flatbush. The group advocates for “the abolition of the police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and prisons,” with a focus on fighting “gentrification” and “police violence” in Brooklyn. Its members conduct “cop watch” patrols to confront police in the area, and previously coordinated “24-hour jail support” for arrested rioters during the George Floyd riots of 2021.
The State Department’s report further identifies the National Lawyers Guild, another group that provided support to thousands of George Floyd rioters, as “one of the most persistently relevant – and insidious – organizations in Cuba’s U.S. network.”
“The association of extreme-left lawyers and radical street activists has played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today,” the report adds, citing the group’s “intimate ties” to Cuba and other communist regimes. The NLG today works to keep “revolutionaries” on the streets with its Mass Defense and Legal Observer programs, that deploys “legal observers” to protests to provide immediate support for arrested rioters, “mobilizing a network of bail funds and allied NGOs to secure their quick release.”
In 2020 alone, the NLG claims to have “coordinated legal support” for more than 20,000 arrested protestors during the George Floyd riots.
The group also works closely with Antifa networks; in 2017, the president and two officers of the NLG’s San Francisco chapter published an op-ed titled “We are all antifa.”
That same year, the NLG’s research and education director published a statement promising that “the NLG will continue to support anti-fascists and anti-racists in the street and in the courts, and will not be swayed by the argument that hateful, dangerous speech should be tolerated at any cost.”
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