by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action Los Angeles (ARA-LA/PART)
At a recent international gathering of right-wing states and parties, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, angling to run again for US president as a MAGA hard-liner this time, delivered a speech and a 100+ page document attacking Cuba, the Black freedom struggle in the US, and anything to the left of MAGA, as violence-prone communists intent on subversion.
This new McCarthyism seeks to amp up support for Trump’s war measures, strangling energy and economic blockade, and other attacks on Cuba. It uses that in turn to justify racist measures against and criminalization of the Black liberation movement, and even mainstream political figures like Antonio Villarraigosa and Karen Bass, as conscious agents of a Cuban-led conspiracy and covert operations.
It must be denounced, but more important, we must redouble our efforts and solidarity with the Cuban people and their revolution and sovereignty, with the Black liberation movement, and with efforts for the socialist and anti-colonial transformation of US society.
A few quotes from Rubio will serve to demonstrate the grave threat this now-dominant politics of neo-fascism poses.
He wrote, “For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”
“The Cuban campaign against America is unique,” he continued. “It is irregular and covert – … the Cubans perfected a new model for a long war of attrition, organized around espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.”
Rubio projects onto Cuba the tools of US efforts to overthrow the Cuban revolution (which included assassination attempts, invasion attempts, biological warfare, propagandistic media, subsidies to dissidents and infiltration of agents and terrorists into Cuba) in order to justify further such efforts and the intensification of the US stranglehold on the island nation.
He then goes on to paint a picture of “communists” hidden everywhere in the US, operating as agents of Cuba, most particularly in the Black movement for freedom, justice and equality, but including not just the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Zohran Mamdani in his cross-hairs, but even Barack Obama (apparently not enough of a war criminal to satisfy Rubio and Trump). He links the Cubans to Palestinians.
Rubio says that “the most successful and enduring sphere of Cuba’s campaign against America has taken place on the ideological battlefront. Since the 1960s, the regime has served as the beating heart of a new and distinct kind of Marxism, forged around an overriding resentment and fundamental hatred of the United States and the broader West. The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa. Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”
Rubio sees Cuban internationalism and anti-imperialism as uniquely threatening. “Castro’s Marxism was radically different from its Soviet counterpart. It was permeated by something new: The doctrine of tercer-mundismo (“Third Worldism”). The concept of the “Third World” had initially emerged in the context of the Cold War, referring to the bloc of nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East that belonged neither to the American capitalist “First World” nor the Soviet socialist “Second World” spheres. But in Castro’s Cuba, the concept would harden into both a self-conscious ideology and a revolutionary identity.” He continues, “As the socialist magazine Jacobin approvingly recounted earlier this year, it was Cuba that ‘was seen by many in the Third World as the ideal site for radically rethinking anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonization.’ What Cuba was proposing, Jacobin writes, ‘was essentially a decolonization of Marxist thought.’”
After this excursion into revolutionary theorizing, Rubio proceeds to blame Cuba for “inspiring” hundreds of bombings in the US more than 50 years ago, in 1971-72, against the US war in Vietnam, and then gets into his real target, the Black liberation movement. Starting with Robert F. Williams (though neglecting his equally militant wife Mabel) who advocated for armed self-defense against Ku Klux Klan night-riders and were forced into exile in Cuba, Rubio moves on to an indictment of Malcolm X, Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), Assata Shakur, and Black Lives Matter, but including by name also LA Mayor Karen Bass, who once was in the Venceremos Brigade, “Hasan Piker; Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls; a delegation from the Democratic Socialists of America; former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, former Spanish deputy prime minister Pablo Iglesias; several other current and former members of European Parliament; and Isra Hirsi, campus activist and daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.).”
In section VI of the document, entitled “Racial Revolution”, Rubio waxes ecstatic about Angela Davis, using her as an example of Cuba’s successful penetration of US culture and academia with revolutionary thinking. “Davis was received in Havana with a hero’s welcome from throngs of enthusiastic supporters. It was neither the first nor the last time she would go to Cuba: in 1969, she had been welcomed by Castro as part of a Communist Party delegation; in 1974, she returned again to attend the Second Congress of the Federation of Cuban Women. Davis never moderated or backed away from her devotion to revolutionary communism, let alone expressing regret for her association with Castro. (She went on to run – twice – as the Communist Party USA’s vice-presidential nominee, in 1980 and 1984). But today, she is one of the nation’s most decorated academic celebrities, and has been canonized as a revered icon on the American left. Now a Distinguished Professor Emerita at UC Santa Cruz, Davis has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and retroactively named TIME’s “Woman of the Year” for 1971. (In 2020, the magazine also listed Davis as one of the 100 most influential people in the world). She was honorary co-chair of the 2017 Women’s March.” [No doubt a bitter pill indeed for Trump to swallow.]
“Cuba,” says Rubio on behalf of his master, Trump, “played a foundational role in the formation of Black Power ideology. Throughout both the twentieth and twenty-first century, the regime has sought to cultivate a fifth column of American black extremists through appeals to international racial solidarity – framing both Cubans and African-Americans as oppressed Third World peoples arrayed against the common enemy of white America.”
It’s probably ignorant and unintentional irony on Rubio’s part in the use of the term “fifth column”. It derives from a statement made by the fascist general in Franco’s assault on Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, who declared that in addition to his four columns of soldiers attacking Madrid to overthrow the Republic with Nazi German and Fascist Italian support, he had a “fifth column” of Falangist supporters inside Madrid itself. “Fifth Column” was previously a reference to a treasonous fascist element within.
Of Kwame Toure Rubio writes, “The central ideas he popularized — Black Power, the reimagining of blacks as a colonized people inside the United States, and the now-widespread concept of “institutional racism,” which Carmichael is widely credited with inventing — became the operating grammar of black radical (and later, mainstream liberal) politics for the next half-century.” I am not aware of any “mainstream liberals” who support Pan-African liberation or the view that Black people are colonized inside the US.
Rubio goes on in this vein for pages, smearing the George Floyd Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, Black Congresswomen Ayanna Presley and Maxine Waters, and NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani as somehow manifestations of Cuba’s successful subversion of US politics and culture.
He then goes on to indict these “fellow travelers” as dupes responsible for undermining US efforts to destroy the Cuban revolution. “These partnerships provide Cuba with access to city councils, universities, trade delegations, churches, hospitals, and local activists, collectively feeding a nationwide pro-Cuban constituency that can then lobby the U.S. government on Havana’s behalf. In cities with Cuban sister city partnerships, local governments have frequently passed resolutions advocating for Cuban regime interests. The ICAP-affiliated National Network on Cuba boasts of 117 resolutions representing 60 million people in the United States – across U.S. state legislatures, city councils, county and school boards, labor unions, and other organizations – advocating for reforms such as lifting the U.S. embargo and removing Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) list.”
How must we respond? It’s easy enough to ridicule his denunciation of Barack Obama for meeting with Bill Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn 35 years after they resurfaced from the Weather Underground, or the fevered imagination in which Antonio Villarraigosa, the consummate self-serving political sell-out, is portrayed as an agent of Cuban subversion. But this would repeat the errors of the liberal response to McCarthyism during the first Cold War — criticizing him for indiscriminately lumping loyal pro-imperialist liberals in with the supposedly nasty red menace of communism. It would also ignore the blatant racial coding of Black and Brown people as anti-American, un-American and disloyal, which has been the cornerstone of Trump’s neo-fascism.
The proper response is a denunciation of anti-communism and of those neo-fascist and white supremacist politics and the racist tech broligarchy of billionaires who back them. It’s no surprise that Elon Musk of X/SpaceX/Tesla, Peter Thiel of Palantir, and vulture capitalist David Sacks, whose private equity firm has invested heavily in Meta and other A-I, and who all three made their first fortunes together in PayPal, all grew up in apartheid South Africa, and are all big backers of Trump and of JD Vance (with whom Rubio is contending for heir apparent of MAGA and successor to Trump in 2028).
But even more important, we must step up and stand up in solidarity with Cuba, in opposition to the new colonialism of Trump’s aggressive military Keynesianism in Iran, Venezuela, Somalia, Ukraine and elsewhere, and in conscious anti-racist and anti-colonial solidarity with Black Lives Matter, the Uhuru movement, and the enlightened sectors of the labor movement that have broken with business (as usual) unionism and separated from the CIA-led efforts to make US labor federations stalking horses for US global domination. The best defense against neo-fascism is a good offense against imperialism, colonialism, racism and war.
