WASHINGTON — Left-wing activists with deep ties to the Cuban government and intelligence have developed a plan for “coordinated nationwide actions” outside US military bases and Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in the event of an “imminent threat” or actual attack by American forces, according to a bombshell State Department report published Monday.
The National Network on Cuba (NNOC) — an umbrella organization of groups including the Democratic Socialists of America, Communist Party USA, CODEPINK and more than 50 others — released the plan last month, stating its goal would be to make it “politically and materially costly for the U.S. government to wage war on Cuba” within 24 hours of a threat or attack.
President Trump has suggested the US military “may stop by” the Commmunist island on its way back from Iran, where a prolonged conflict has erupted due to Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for oil exports.
The demonstrations — or worse — are supposed to target US military bases, recruitment offices, federal buildings, ICE facilities or field offices, and even “sports arenas during high-visibility events,” the NNOC’s “National Rapid Response Plan” noted.
The 99-page report also highlighting how a frequent “collaborator” with Havana, Black Alliance for Peace, has circulated a “target guide” of 1,335 military or law enforcement facilities.
A State Department official said Monday that both US domestic law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies “are looking carefully” at the “very serious and distinct threat” and noted that some of the groups in the NNOC “have been involved in violent action in the past.”
Cuba’s influence “runs through leftist nonprofits in New York, anti-ISIS protests, DSA socialist groups … all of the college campus uprisings we’ve seen in recent years,” the official added. “It’s publicly chronicled in decades of declassified US intelligence reports, Cuban defector testimonies, open-source analysis, the statements of many of these people themselves — but nobody has really tied it together.”
The funding streams for some of those groups are already being targeted by the Treasury Department and Department of Justice, including Code Pink, whose centimillionaire backer Neville Roy Singham is under scrutiny for potential financial crimes by the Southern District of New York.
Code Pink and the other US-based groups that comprise NNOC have sent delegations to Cuba in recent years.
The report cites the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples (ICAP) as the “central nexus” of Havana’s intelligence and influence network through its “longstanding ties to U.S. universities, student groups and activist movements.”
In June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned ICAP, which was founded by late dictator Fidel Castro, for functioning as “a political subdivision, agency, or instrumentality of the Government of Cuba … that supports Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence activities.”
ICAP’s leader, Fernando González Llort, served 15 years in US prison for being part of a Cuban spy network that sought to expose exile groups and obtain information about American military sites in the 1990s.
Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe have been engaged in talks for months with Cuba’s leaders, with the spy chief warning in May that Havana “can no longer be a safe haven for adversaries” of the US.
“As Cuba has become, you know, more ideologically isolated, they’ve continued to actually give Russia, China and Iran more influence, to control more of their economy, to do more spying from their territory, to put more foreign intelligence agents and foreign terrorists on their soil just 90 miles from the United States,” a State Department official said.
“So it is a growing and significant threat.”
Reps for Cuba’s embassy in Washington, DC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
