Pro-Soviet Union groups active since the Cold War are part of a movement pushing for softer U.S.-Cuba relations.
Activist organizations made headlines on March 21 after delivering humanitarian aid to Cuba to protest President Donald Trump’s sanctions on the regime. At least seven groups involved previously pushed Soviet-friendly agendas or had direct USSR ties, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.
High-profile leftist groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s daughter and staunchly pro-China influencer Hasan Piker joined the Cuba trip, dubbed the Nuestra América Convoy. Beneath the Cuban “solidarity” messaging, however, lies a web of anti-American politics that has persisted despite the USSR’s 1991 demise.
“Cuba is a time capsule for old communists to relive their revolutionary 1960s youth, and a cult destination for younger militants who are either fully indoctrinated or see their support as virtue signaling against the United States,” Cold War scholar J. Michael Waller, a former CIA operative in Latin America, told the DCNF. “To them, Cuba represents the ‘cool’ Communism of the 1960s, despite the connection with the surviving elements of the Soviet active measures machine.”
The convoy’s “strategic partners” included the Soviet-aligned U.S. Peace Council, International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) and National Lawyers Guild (NLG), according to its website.
Activists at the National Network on Cuba (NNOC) also helped plan the convoy. The NNOC is a coalition of member organizations that include the Soviet-sympathetic Communist Party USA (CPUSA), CovertAction Institute and Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
The NNOC has also organized educational trips to Cuba in tandem with the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), founded by Fidel Castro.
CPUSA, U.S. Peace Council, IADC, CovertAction, SWP the NLG and the NNOC did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Leftists’ Cuba caravans came largely in response to Trump throttling Cuba’s international oil trade. The president previously imposed terrorism sanctions on Cuba for harboring criminals and threatened to “take” the island. ICAP President Fernando González Llort told the NNOC that visiting Cuba is “a political and truthful act” against America in a November video speech.
“The work you do from the United States is essential,” said González, a convicted Cuban regime spy who the U.S. released in 2014. “Each approved local resolution, each caravan, each brigade, each communication piece that dismantles the lie, it is a sharp blow against the policy of asphyxiation.”
‘That Old KGB Network’
Castro established ICAP in 1960 to facilitate flashy trips to Cuba as propaganda, according to Cuban state media and the CIA. Castro’s pro-Soviet government received heavy Russian military support.
ICAP also participates in the Soviet-backed World Peace Council. Soviets created the group and its American affiliate, the U.S. Peace Council, to campaign internationally against America, according to the CIA and the U.S. Peace Council’s former director.
The 89-year-old National Lawyers Guild frequently took pro-Russia stances while denying that it was a Soviet front, a profile by Capital Research Center notes. However, the NLG helped create the IADL, an entity that the CIA and International Commission of Jurists exposed as a front group hiring Soviets.
Additionally, CovertAction Magazine worked with Russia to disrupt CIA spying by publishing compromising materials, according to Soviet documents reported by Politico. Moscow also established CPUSA in the 1920s by merging other communist groups, which the party’s website boasts about.
Meanwhile, the Socialist Workers’ Party promoted “unconditional” American support for Soviet Russia despite criticizing dictator Joseph Stalin.
Overlap between pro-Soviet groups was so extensive that one CPUSA member served as the NLG’s executive secretary and the IADL’s representative to the United Nations, records show. Such groups eventually blended into the left’s Cuba movement as partners of the Nuestra América Convoy or the NNOC, founded in 1991 in Washington.
To support Cuba, the Socialist Workers Party has organized protests, outreach and electoral campaigns in America. SWP’s current U.S. director even attended a 1960 Havana event where rebel leader Che Guevara spoke, according to the SWP’s official newspaper.
The U.S. Peace Council partnered with the NLG to raise money for the March Cuba convoy. CPUSA has also sent multiple so-called Cuba delegations since 2017, its website shows.
Soviet-aligned groups endure because America did not take their influence seriously, Waller told the DCNF.
“They have never been held accountable for being willing collaborators with that old KGB network,” he said. “Their non-Communist allies and coalition partners were always fine with those connections and covered up for them. The big foundations and big academia laundered them and employed them. Big media never exposed them. FBI almost never went after them. And so they never had to cover their tracks because there was no need.”
Clinging To A Failed Experiment
Blaming America for Cuban poverty is an attempt to whitewash socialism’s repeated failures, economic and foreign policy experts told the DCNF.
“As we have seen with nearly every Communist regime in history, Cuba is not a viable state without constant outside support and repression of its people,” said George Moraitis, a former Navy officer and GOP House candidate in Florida. “Whether it’s China, Russia, or these far-left activist groups, the regime survives on lifelines from those willing to prop it up coupled with an aggressive police state.”
With Cubans increasingly protesting communism, “The last thing they need is American activists giving cover to the very regime they’re trying to escape,” Moraitis said.
Cuba’s authoritarian policies largely remain, according to Heritage Foundation economist Anthony Kim. “Heavy state intervention has stifled innovation, and the state’s foreign-currency earnings are dependent on a few exports, along with tourism,” he told the DCNF.
“A small number of limited reforms beginning some years ago, for instance, have allowed Cubans to work as ‘self-employed people’ in the private sector, but currently they can work only in narrow categories defined by the state,” Kim said. “The government — which has been spending more than 60% of the island’s economic output — has remained firmly in control of the private sector and the daily economic life of the Cuban people.”
Leftists are promoting yet another failing communist project to Americans, Waller told the DCNF.
“Their current claims have been the same claims for more than half a century,” Waller said. “It’s all tired, stale Soviet active measures themes. They can’t even be creative about it. They’re just performing their swan song after having wasted their lives on a loser cause.”
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