US Creates ‘Blacklist’ of Prominent Leftwing Politicians and Groups

Prominent leftwing politicians, influencers and groups have been named in a US department of state report into Cuba’s “sustained campaign of subversion” against the US.

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, streamer Hasan Piker, Democracy Now host Amy Goodman and Ben and Jerry’s founder Ben Cohen, are among those named in the 100 page report entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” which was released on Monday.

The report, described by journalist Ken Klippenstein as a “blacklist”, also lists the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a major grassroots group that canvasses for and endorses leftwing politicians.

Presenting little if any evidence for its claims, the report says Cuba has conducted “a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”

Promoting the report on X, secretary of state Marco Rubio wrote: “For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States.”

Last week Rubio convened a conference of 66 countries to discuss supposed leftwing terrorism, with Rubio calling leftists “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilisation”.

The report openly mentions “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions, and a slate of anti-communist laws” in the 1950s which caused the Communist Party USA membership to collapse.

Over three pages are dedicated to the DSA, which counts representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani among its members.

The report says the group “serves as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist radicalism”.

This is because “it maintains a fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime – not because the group is controlled by Cuban agents, per se, but because that commitment is now simply the de facto policy orthodoxy on the American far left.”

The report comes as a US blockade is crippling Cuba’s economy, raising questions over whether the small island really poses a “unique threat to American homeland security”.

US journalist Ken Klippenstein said that naming of individuals and groups was a “virtual blacklist” and “guilt by association at its finest”.

“What the report shows isn’t that any of these people are knowingly taking directions from a foreign power – only that they disagree with the US government on Cuba policy (or at most, agree with Cuba),” he wrote on Substack. “Their views can be wrong – aggressively, offensively wrong even – but it’s their goddamn right as Americans to hold them.”