Little Marco is a modern-day Joe McCarthy, brandishing a list of supposed Cuban influence agents.
Here we go again. As his approval ratings continue to fall, Trump flails about, escalating the bombing of Iran, imposing 50 percent tariffs on Canada, labeling Democrats “godless communists,” minting a gold token in his own image, and more. And now “Little Marco” Rubio has offered up his own brand of crazy, spearheading the administration’s next assault on our democracy.
Little Marco, whose oversize shoes are a perfect metaphor for the hapless schlump named by Trump to act as secretary of state, national security advisor, and AID director simultaneously, has revealed that the central source of “Far Left Terrorism (FLT)” in the United States is—wait for it—the beleaguered island of Cuba.
Rubio’s State Department just issued a report—“Cuba, the Capital of 21st Century Communism”—that charges that “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history—from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism [read opposition to Israeli genocide in Gaza] on American college campuses—can be linked, in some way, shape or form, to Cuban influence.” “In some way, shape or form.” Really.
To give form to this risible claim, the State Department report named names along the way. The supposed agents of Cuban influence include Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame, radio host Amy Goodman, mayors like New York City’s Zohran Mamdani and Los Angeles’s Karen Bass, Representatives Maxine Waters, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley, the Democratic Socialists of America, and many of the guests attending the marriage ceremony of tech magnate Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans, one of the founders of Code Pink. Little Marco is a modern-day Joe McCarthy, brandishing a list of Cuban influence agents.
DSA merits particular attention in the 100-page report. The report concedes that DSA “was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government” but “[n]one of that is to say that the group has no ties to the Cuban regime and its influence network.” DSA’s growth is per se a Cuban asset, because it means that “Havana no longer needs to rely solely on intelligence penetration or asset cultivation to exert influence over the United States.”
Obviously, the report itself would have benefited greatly from a little “intelligence penetration.” From the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1960, the US has launched invasions, sponsored repeated terrorist attacks, sabotaged Cuba’s industry, poisoned its crops, tried to assassinate its leaders, maintained an embargo for over half a century, and now is enforcing a blockade systematically cutting the island off from oil and medicine, collapsing the economy as a prelude to what will surely be Trump’s next imperial foray. And the wily Cubans responded by enlisting support from Ben Cohen, the DSA, and other sympathetic progressives.
Current Issue
The Cuba report was preceded by an international summit convened by Rubio to focus on the threat of “Far Left Terrorism.” “For 25 years,” Rubio informed the gathering, “the term ‘counterterrorism’—at least in the West—has meant…the fight against radical Islamist extremism.” Now the focus must move to the threat posed by “extremist violence from the political left.” This is, he warned, “a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.” They “despise the West because the West is great.”
Inevitably, Rubio trotted out the vile Stephen Miller, the White House aide driving the assault on immigrants, to elaborate. “The leftist,” he asserted, “is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy.” You can tell when you look at their demonstrations and “not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person.…They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”
Miller warned the audience that any appeals to free speech and civil liberties should “fall on deaf ears.” He fretted about the threat posed by those who are sympathetic, like jurors in US cities who refuse to convict demonstrators against ICE officers for “purely political reasons.” He warned that if you wait until the threat is “clear” and “present,” it will be too late.
It’s easy to dismiss this as Rubio clambering aboard the clown car with Miller and JD Vance. Vance set the standard with his admitted lie in the presidential campaign that Haitians are “eating the cats.”
But that jibe was linked to the fantastical “replacement theory” of the right and Trump’s nativist ravings, and led directly to the Trump administration’s unleashing an army of masked thugs to terrorize immigrant communities across the country.
Rubio’s fever dream about Cuba’s “objective” to “erase the United States from the earth” is as fanciful as Vance’s culinary warnings. But it is linked to gearing up a systematic attack on progressive institutions, funders, and leaders. While the Trump administration ignores or pardons violence on the right, it is, in Miller’s chilling summary, “formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government.”
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
Categorizing leftist dissent as terrorism and a national security threat essentially unlocks all of the powers given the executive in the wake of 9/11 to pursue Al Qaeda. As Miller puts it, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 directs “for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defend, debank, arrest and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.”
Miller, of course, labeled the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization.” This crazy will have deadly consequences. With the economy a mess and the Iran War a disaster, Trump and his crew are creating the predicate for attacking Cuba and for a new era of domestic political repression.
More from The Nation
A Cuban diplomat talks about the human cost of the US blockade, Cuba’s economic liberalization, and the gains of the revolution that Havana says are not up for negotiation.
Talking to the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories about genocide, standing up to the hatred of the establishment, and ending war.
Trump’s personalization of foreign policy is ultimately a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its source.
I left America in 2017 to flee an authoritarian government and the culture it facilitated. What I found in Berlin was not all that different.