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“To mistake Cuba’s poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely. Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger. Its power was always ideological, subversive, and parasitic — and it has proven remarkably durable, outlasting the Soviet empire that helped build it and grafting itself onto every new enemy of the United States that has arisen since. Today it serves as the connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition, a staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside our own borders.”
[Confundir la pobreza de Cuba con la inocuidad es malinterpretar completamente la amenaza. Su debilidad material nunca fue la medida de su peligro. Su poder siempre fue ideológico, subversivo y parasitario —y ha demostrado ser notablemente duradero, sobreviviendo al imperio soviético que ayudó a construirlo e injertándose en cada nuevo enemigo de Estados Unidos que ha surgido desde entonces. Hoy sirve como tejido conectivo de una coalición antiestadounidense más amplia, un terreno de operaciones donde convergen las ambiciones de Moscú, Pekín y Teherán con los movimientos radicales que operan dentro de nuestras propias fronteras.] (Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism [Cuba: La Capital del Comunismo del Siglo XXI])
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Pero nada de eso importa para Estados Unidos, sin embargo, ante el problema que es Cuba… al menos para y desde la perspectiva de Estados Unidos. Y desde esa perspectiva es un problema; uno mayor y más trágico para su pueblo.
Aun así, este parece ser un momento al menos para lo que aparenta ser la actuación de acción, una actuación que se ha presentado como un proceso en cámara lenta, puntuado por crisis en otras partes del mundo que requieren atención, pero que persiste de todos modos. Con esos fines, el Departamento de Estado ha buscado reformular la narrativa sobre Cuba en Estados Unidos. Un paso en esa dirección es el Informe, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism [Cuba: La Capital del Comunismo del Siglo XXI], publicado en julio de 2026. Fue desarrollado en torno a una tesis central expuesta en el comunicado de prensa del Informe: “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself — waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” [El asalto de Cuba contra Estados Unidos nunca fue, en su raíz, una disputa sobre política económica o soberanía ni siquiera sobre la posesión de un territorio en particular. Fue una revolución contra la civilización occidental misma —librada, en parte, mediante el novedoso e insidioso método de persuadir a los hijos de Occidente para que se volvieran contra su propia herencia.]
Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism [Cuba: La Capital del Comunismo del Siglo XXI] es una extensa evaluación de seguridad nacional—de aproximadamente 100 páginas—que desarrolla una tesis general única: Cuba no es meramente un Estado caribeño pobre o en vías de fracaso, sino más bien un aparato integrado de inteligencia, subversión y guerra ideológica cuyo objetivo principal desde 1959 ha sido Estados Unidos. El informe no contiene un resumen ejecutivo etiquetado por separado, una sección formal de metodología ni un conjunto enumerado de recomendaciones. En su lugar, está organizado en capítulos históricos y temáticos que colectivamente presentan a Cuba como el “corazón palpitante” de una red revolucionaria global.
El Informe puede entenderse de manera más útil dentro del proyecto más amplio de la Administración Trump de caracterizar el activismo doméstico de izquierda como una forma de terrorismo con raíces extranjeras. En julio de 2026, el Secretario Rubio convocó una “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” [Reunión Ministerial sobre el Resurgimiento del Terrorismo Político] en el Departamento de Estado—una conferencia explícitamente dedicada a la proposición de que la violencia política y el extremismo originados desde la izquierda constituyen una categoría distinta y resurgente de terrorismo que requiere una respuesta internacional coordinada. En sus declaraciones durante la conferencia, Rubio trazó líneas directas entre los movimientos revolucionarios extranjeros, las organizaciones radicales domésticas y lo que la administración enmarca como la corrupción ideológica de las instituciones democráticas occidentales por fuerzas hostiles a la civilización liberal. El informe sobre Cuba funciona como la base probatoria de un capítulo de esta campaña más amplia. Pero está claro que Cuba puede ser importante pero no es única. La solución al problema de Cuba deja sin resolver el problema mayor de la dialéctica política entre Estados y la integridad de los procesos políticos autóctonos en la democracia representativa liberal, y quizás irresoluble bajo las condiciones actuales. Eso resulta en política bastante útil.
Esta publicación introduce mi análisis crítico de Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism [Cuba: La Capital del Comunismo del Siglo XXI], configurado en gran parte por mi propio trabajo. Ese informe, ¿La Revolución Contra la Civilización?: Un Análisis Crítico del Informe del Departamento de Estado de 2026 sobre Cuba, se presenta a continuación.
Mi “comunicado de prensa” ofrece una buena idea de lo que el informe más extenso elaborará:
Este nuevo análisis crítico examina el informe del Departamento de Estado de 2026 sobre Cuba—el relato más exhaustivo jamás publicado por el gobierno estadounidense sobre la subversión cubana—y concluye que, si bien sus afirmaciones fácticas sobre el espionaje cubano, las alianzas extranjeras y las redes de influencia están sustancialmente fundamentadas, su marco analítico es internamente circular, políticamente instrumental y peligrosamente incompleto. El análisis revela lo que el informe oculta: que el conflicto entre Estados Unidos y Cuba no es un asalto unidireccional, sino una dialéctica de sesenta y siete años de cambio de régimen mutuo en la que ambas partes han corrompido a la otra sin lograr transformarla. De manera más provocadora, el análisis identifica la función política más profunda del informe—no meramente catalogar las amenazas cubanas, sino caracterizar a la izquierda estadounidense como portadora sintomática de una infección ideológica extranjera, suministrando así el capítulo cubano de una narrativa más amplia sobre la corrupción de la democracia estadounidense. El retrato que el informe hace de Cuba como “less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation” [menos un Estado-nación que una operación integral de inteligencia y subversión] es poderoso pero infalsificable; mi contrarretrato de un rígido partido-Estado leninista atrapado en un “estado estable de miseria” es más preciso analíticamente pero menos instrumentalizable políticamente. La imagen completa requiere sostener ambas perspectivas simultáneamente—y confrontar la incómoda posibilidad de que la política estadounidense pueda reforzar inadvertidamente el mismo sistema que dice oponerse. El análisis es lectura esencial para cualquier persona que busque comprender de qué se trata realmente la política cubana de la Administración Trump.
Sin embargo el calculo en EEUU ha cambiado: "For the first time in Cuba's history, Cuba lacks two things they've always relied on: an outside sponsor and the U.S.'s lack of attention on it as a top priority,' Rubio said. ["'Por primera vez en la historia de Cuba, el país carece de dos elementos de los que siempre había dependido: un patrocinador externo y el hecho de que Estados Unidos no lo considere una prioridad absoluta", dijo Rubio."] (Axios)
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La tabla de contenidos ofrece un indicio del alcance del análisis:
Tabla de Contenidos
1. Resumen ejecutivo para formuladores de políticas y lectores generales
2. Resumen del Informe del Departamento de Estado sobre Cuba
—Estructura y afirmaciones principales
—La estructura entrelazada: cómo las ocho partes forman un argumento único
—Base de fuentes y metodología
3. Análisis crítico a la luz de la producción académica de Larry Catá Backer
4. Marco analítico: narrativa de seguridad vs. análisis ideológico
5. El problema de la explicación monocausal y la campaña de “terrorismo político”
6. La “mentalidad embarguista,” la constitución mutua y el estado estable de miseria
7. La cuestión de las misiones médicas y el trabajo en Cuba
8. Los derechos humanos como instrumento político
9. El tercermundismo: ¿arma o ideología?
10. El marco “America First” (Estados Unidos primero), la plantilla venezolana y la guerra contra las pandillas
11. Lo que el análisis omitió: el lado estadounidense del espejo
—A. La corrupción del sistema estadounidense
—B. La dialéctica del cambio de régimen mutuo
12. Lo que ambos relatos comparten—y lo que queda sin resolver
13. La dicotomía de caracterización: agudizada
14. La ambigüedad que persiste
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El Informe del Departamento de Estado, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism [Cuba: La Capital del Comunismo del Siglo XXI], puede consultarse en línea AQUÍ. Mis Reflexiones sobre ese Informe, ¿La Revolución Contra la Civilización?: Un Análisis Crítico del Informe del Departamento de Estado de 2026 sobre Cuba, pueden consultarse AQUÍ y se presentan a continuación.
La revolución contra la civilización: Un análisis crítico del Informe del Departamento de Estado de 2026 sobre Cuba
Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)
W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Profesor de Derecho y Asuntos Internacionales, Penn State Dickinson Law
Borrador de Documento de Trabajo (14 de agosto de 2026)
Declaración para los medios
Para publicación inmediata
Un nuevo análisis crítico examina el informe del Departamento de Estado de 2026 sobre Cuba—el relato más exhaustivo jamás publicado por el gobierno estadounidense sobre la subversión cubana—y concluye que, si bien sus afirmaciones fácticas sobre el espionaje cubano, las alianzas extranjeras y las redes de influencia están sustancialmente fundamentadas, su marco analítico es internamente circular, políticamente instrumental y peligrosamente incompleto. Basándose en la producción académica del autor, el análisis revela lo que el informe oculta: que el conflicto entre Estados Unidos y Cuba no es un asalto unidireccional, sino una dialéctica de sesenta y siete años de cambio de régimen mutuo en la que ambas partes han corrompido a la otra sin lograr transformarla. De manera más provocadora, el análisis identifica la función política más profunda del informe—no meramente catalogar las amenazas cubanas, sino caracterizar a la izquierda estadounidense como portadora sintomática de una infección ideológica extranjera, suministrando así el capítulo cubano de una narrativa más amplia sobre la corrupción de la democracia estadounidense. El retrato que el informe hace de Cuba como “less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation” [menos un Estado-nación que una operación integral de inteligencia y subversión] es poderoso pero infalsificable; mi contrarretrato de un rígido partido-Estado leninista atrapado en un “estado estable de miseria” es más preciso analíticamente pero menos instrumentalizable políticamente. La imagen completa requiere sostener ambas perspectivas simultáneamente—y confrontar la incómoda posibilidad de que la política estadounidense pueda reforzar inadvertidamente el mismo sistema que dice oponerse. El análisis es lectura esencial para cualquier persona que busque comprender de qué se trata realmente la política cubana de la Administración Trump.
Tabla de Contenidos
1. Resumen ejecutivo para formuladores de políticas y lectores generales
2. Resumen del Informe del Departamento de Estado sobre Cuba
• Estructura y afirmaciones principales
• La estructura entrelazada: cómo las ocho partes forman un solo argumento
• Base de fuentes y metodología
1. Análisis crítico
2. Marco analítico: narrativa de seguridad vs. análisis ideológico
3. El problema de la explicación monocausal y la campaña de “terrorismo político”
4. La “mentalidad embarguista,” la constitución mutua y el estado estable de miseria
5. La cuestión de las misiones médicas y el trabajo cubanos
6. Los derechos humanos como instrumento político
7. ¿Tercermundismo: arma o ideología?
8. El marco “America First” (Estados Unidos primero), la plantilla venezolana y la guerra contra las pandillas
9. Lo que el análisis omitió: el lado estadounidense del espejo
• A. La corrupción del sistema estadounidense
• B. La dialéctica del cambio de régimen mutuo
1. Lo que ambos relatos comparten—y lo que queda sin resolver
2. La dicotomía de caracterización: agudizada
3. La ambigüedad que persiste
Resumen ejecutivo para formuladores de políticas y lectores generales
Este análisis examina un informe del Departamento de Estado de 2026 sobre Cuba y lo somete a escrutinio crítico basándose en la producción académica del autor sobre gobernanza cubana, ideología y relaciones entre Estados Unidos y Cuba.
Lo que argumenta el informe del Departamento de Estado: Cuba no es meramente una isla caribeña empobrecida, sino un aparato integrado de inteligencia y subversión cuyo propósito singular desde 1959 ha sido socavar a los Estados Unidos. El informe traza la influencia cubana a través de la ideología revolucionaria, el espionaje, las redes guerrilleras, las organizaciones activistas nacionales y las alianzas con Rusia, China, Irán y grupos terroristas. Concluye que Cuba es “less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation” [menos un Estado-nación que una operación integral de inteligencia y subversión].
Lo que el análisis crítico encuentra:
1. El informe es internamente circular. Sus ocho secciones forman un circuito autorreferencial en el que cada institución cubana—programas médicos, intercambios académicos, comités de solidaridad—se interpreta como subversión porque el marco ya ha definido a Cuba como nada más que un aparato de subversión. Esto hace que el argumento sea retóricamente poderoso pero difícil de verificar empíricamente.
2. El informe cumple una función política específica. Proporciona la narrativa de amenaza ideológica que legitima la orden ejecutiva de enero de 2026 que impone aranceles petroleros y la búsqueda por parte de la administración de una “solución venezolana” para Cuba—la remoción del presidente de Cuba negociando simultáneamente con el estamento militar.
3. La resiliencia de Cuba no puede explicarse solo por el espionaje. La producción académica de Backer demuestra que Cuba ha desarrollado un “estado estable de miseria”—un mecanismo de gobernanza en el que la privación administrada, el enmarcamiento moral del sacrificio y las aperturas controladas periódicas mantienen funcional al sistema. La presión externa puede fortalecer en lugar de debilitar este sistema al reforzar la narrativa de asedio.
4. Ambos relatos coinciden en hechos clave. Las operaciones de inteligencia cubanas son reales. Las condiciones de derechos humanos en Cuba son severas. Cuba mantiene relaciones significativas con adversarios de Estados Unidos. El pueblo cubano sufre privación material. El desacuerdo radica en la caracterización: ¿es Cuba primordialmente un servicio de inteligencia hostil, o primordialmente un Estado ideológico rígido cuyo activismo internacional no puede reducirse al espionaje?
5. El análisis inicialmente omitió dos dimensiones críticas. Al aceptar la invitación del informe a enfocarse en Cuba, tanto el informe como la crítica inicial oscurecieron (a) el grado en que la proyección ideológica cubana ha corrompido el propio sistema político estadounidense—volviéndose autóctona, autosostenible y políticamente indistinguible de los compromisos domésticos de sectores de la izquierda estadounidense—y (b) la dialéctica simétrica de cambio de régimen mutuo en la que ambas partes han pasado sesenta y siete años buscando corromper la integridad sistémica de la otra mientras despliegan caracterizaciones de la otra que son simultáneamente descripciones precisas de patologías reales y armas estratégicas en el conflicto.
6. Las implicaciones políticas son elevadas. Si el informe está en lo correcto, el acercamiento es ingenuo y la presión es imperativa. Si el autor está en lo correcto, el informe puede reforzar inadvertidamente el sistema que dice oponerse. La posibilidad de que ambas caracterizaciones capturen verdades parciales—que Cuba sea simultáneamente un Estado ideológico genuino y uno que instrumentaliza cada institución para obtener ventaja estratégica—es la conclusión más intelectualmente honesta, aunque la menos satisfactoria para la formulación de políticas. ## Resumen del informe del Departamento de Estado sobre Cuba
El informe adjunto del State Department (Departamento de Estado) (Cuba-Report.pdf) constituye una evaluación extensa de seguridad nacional—de aproximadamente 100 páginas—que desarrolla una tesis general única: Cuba no es meramente un Estado caribeño pobre o en vías de fracaso, sino más bien un aparato integrado de inteligencia, subversión y guerra ideológica cuyo objetivo principal desde 1959 ha sido Estados Unidos. [1] [2] El informe no contiene un resumen ejecutivo etiquetado por separado, una sección formal de metodología ni un conjunto enumerado de recomendaciones. En su lugar, está organizado en capítulos históricos y temáticos que colectivamente presentan a Cuba como el “corazón palpitante” de una red revolucionaria global. [3]
Estructura y afirmaciones principales
El informe se desarrolla a través de aproximadamente ocho secciones principales:
I. The Revolutionary State (El Estado Revolucionario) enmarca la campaña de Cuba contra Estados Unidos como “irregular and covert” [irregular y encubierta], construida en torno a “espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself” [espionaje, infiltración, sabotaje, redes de intermediarios y una infraestructura revolucionaria diseñada para volver a Estados Unidos contra sí mismo]. [4]
II. Birth of a New Left (El nacimiento de una Nueva Izquierda) traza el papel de la Revolución Cubana en la creación del Tercermundismo—una nueva identidad revolucionaria forjada en la Conferencia Tricontinental de 1966 en La Habana. El informe argumenta que Cuba “decolonized Marxist thought” [descolonizó el pensamiento marxista] al reconfigurar la lucha de clases como un conflicto civilizatorio entre los pueblos colonizados del Sur Global y “Western civilization itself” [la civilización occidental misma]. [5]
III. Exporting Revolution (Exportando la Revolución) cataloga el apoyo cubano a movimientos guerrilleros e insurgencias a lo largo de América Latina, África y el Medio Oriente—desde los sandinistas en Nicaragua hasta los Macheteros en Puerto Rico, los Tupamaros en Uruguay, y grupos revolucionarios en Venezuela, Colombia y Argentina. [6] [7] [8] [9]
IV. An Espionage Empire (Un imperio de espionaje) perfila el servicio de inteligencia de Cuba (Dirección de Inteligencia) y presenta estudios de caso sobre la penetración cubana a largo plazo del gobierno estadounidense, incluyendo los cincuenta años de espionaje de Víctor Manuel Rocha, Ana Belén Montes, la pareja de Walter Kendall Myers y la Red Avispa (Wasp Network). [10] [11] [12] [13]
V. Revolutionary Tourism (Turismo revolucionario) examina la Venceremos Brigade (Brigada Venceremos), que el informe describe como “among the most extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States” [entre las operaciones de infiltración más extensas y peligrosas jamás emprendidas por una potencia extranjera contra Estados Unidos], y alega que sirvió como conducto de reclutamiento para el espionaje y el terrorismo doméstico. [14] [15]
VI. Racial Revolution (Revolución racial) aborda el cultivo por parte de Cuba de relaciones con líderes del Black Power (Poder Negro), el Black Panther Party (Partido de las Panteras Negras), y movimientos posteriores incluyendo Black Lives Matter. [16] [17]
VII. Front Groups and Fellow Travelers (Organizaciones fachada y compañeros de viaje) señala al ICAP, la National Network on Cuba (Red Nacional sobre Cuba), IFCO/Pastors for Peace (Pastores por la Paz), la National Lawyers Guild (Gremio Nacional de Abogados), el People’s Forum (Foro del Pueblo), Code Pink y los Democratic Socialists of America (Socialistas Democráticos de América) como elementos de la red de influencia de Cuba dirigida hacia Estados Unidos. [18] [19] [20] [21]
VIII. Anti-American Internationale (La Internacional Antiestadounidense) aborda las alianzas de Cuba posteriores a la Guerra Fría con Rusia, China, Irán y organizaciones palestinas, incluyendo la construcción de instalaciones chinas de SIGINT (inteligencia de señales) en la isla. [22] [23] [24] [25]
La Conclusión afirma que “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself” [el asalto de Cuba contra Estados Unidos nunca fue, en su raíz, una disputa sobre política económica o soberanía ni siquiera sobre la posesión de un territorio en particular. Fue una revolución contra la civilización occidental misma] y que la Cuba moderna sirve como “connective tissue” [tejido conectivo] que vincula a Rusia, China, Irán y movimientos radicales domésticos. [26] [27]
La estructura entrelazada: cómo las ocho partes forman un argumento único
Las ocho secciones del informe no son meramente capítulos secuenciales; forman una red argumentativa estrechamente entrelazada en la que cada sección depende de las demás y las refuerza. La historia ideológica de las secciones I y II (The Revolutionary State; Birth of a New Left) proporciona el motor motivacional que explica por qué Cuba supuestamente construyó el aparato de espionaje descrito en la sección IV (An Espionage Empire) y el conducto de turismo revolucionario descrito en la sección V. Las redes guerrilleras y de intermediarios de la sección III (Exporting Revolution) se presentan como los predecesores operacionales de las organizaciones fachada domésticas catalogadas en la sección VII (Front Groups and Fellow Travelers)—la sugerencia es que organizaciones como la Brigada Venceremos, el ICAP y la National Lawyers Guild son los descendientes institucionales de la misma infraestructura que en su momento armó a los Tupamaros y entrenó a los Macheteros. [28] [29] [30] [31]
La sección VI (Racial Revolution) funciona como el puente entre las operaciones de inteligencia dirigidas al exterior y la narrativa de influencia doméstica: el cultivo por parte de Cuba de líderes del Black Power y movimientos activistas posteriores se presenta como el mecanismo mediante el cual la ideología revolucionaria fue transmitida hacia la política doméstica estadounidense, creando el vínculo entre La Habana y movimientos contemporáneos como Black Lives Matter y el activismo universitario. Esta penetración doméstica, a su vez, es la plataforma sobre la cual la coalición antiestadounidense de la sección VIII (Rusia, China, Irán, Hamás, Hezbolá, FPLP) puede supuestamente operar dentro de Estados Unidos—utilizando a Cuba como lo que el informe denomina “connective tissue” [tejido conectivo] entre adversarios extranjeros y movimientos radicales domésticos. [32] [33] [34]
La circularidad es deliberada y estructural: la ideología motiva el espionaje; el espionaje posibilita las organizaciones fachada; las organizaciones fachada reclutan activistas; los activistas se convierten en agentes o compañeros de viaje; la red resultante sirve a adversarios extranjeros; y esos adversarios refuerzan la capacidad de Cuba para continuar el ciclo. [35] [36] [37] [38] La conclusión del informe reúne todos los hilos en la proposición de que Cuba no es un Estado que también lleva a cabo subversión, sino más bien una operación de subversión que incidentalmente ocupa un territorio—“less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States” [menos un Estado-nación que una operación de inteligencia y subversión abarcadora, centrada en torno a su revolución existencial contra Estados Unidos].
Este entrelazamiento tiene consecuencias analíticas. Debido a que cada sección hace referencia a las demás y depende de ellas, cuestionar cualquier afirmación factual individual amenaza la estructura completa. [39] Pero de igual manera, dado que el argumento es circular—cada elemento explicado por referencia a los demás—se vuelve casi infalsificable desde dentro de su propio marco. Toda institución, programa o relación internacional cubana se lee como evidencia de subversión precisamente porque el marco ya ha establecido que Cuba es, en su raíz, nada más que un aparato de subversión.
Base de fuentes y metodología
El informe se apoya en memorandos desclasificados de inteligencia estadounidense, informes del Congreso y del Senado, materiales del FBI y del DOJ (Departamento de Justicia), declaraciones de desertores de la inteligencia cubana, casos judiciales, reportajes periodísticos, registros de organizaciones sin fines de lucro y análisis de fuentes abiertas. [12] [40] [41] [42] No presenta una metodología sistemática, jerarquía probatoria, escala de incertidumbre ni criterios para evaluar explicaciones alternativas. Todas las fuentes se despliegan para sustentar un marco interpretativo único. ## Análisis Crítico
Para este análisis, el autor se apoya en su monografía de 2018 Caribbean Marxism: Essays on Cuba in the Post Fidel Castro Era, su artículo de 2025 en el Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs titulado “Cuba’s Stable State of Misery,” su ensayo de 2026 “The Conceptual Architecture of America First—Ideological Transactionalism and the Case of Cuba,” y numerosas publicaciones en su blog Law at the End of the Day (lcbackerblog.blogspot.com) que documentan en tiempo real los desarrollos en la política de Estados Unidos hacia Cuba.
1. Marco analítico: narrativa de seguridad vs. análisis ideológico
La diferencia más fundamental es metodológica. El informe del Departamento de Estado opera dentro de un marco de seguridad nacional/contrainteligencia: Cuba es una “threat” [amenaza], sus organizaciones son “fronts” [organizaciones fachada], sus redes de solidaridad son “fifth columns” [quintas columnas], y su ideología es un “weapon” [arma]. [43] [44] [45] [46] Cada institución —programas médicos, intercambios académicos, comités de solidaridad, organizaciones culturales— se presenta como un componente de un aparato integrado de subversión. [47] [48] [49] [50]
Backer, por el contrario, argumenta que Cuba solo puede comprenderse si se aborda seriamente su lógica interna —su “Marxismo Caribeño” como un sistema ideológico distinto con sus propias premisas sobre la relación entre el Estado, la economía, el trabajo, los mercados, la soberanía y el compromiso internacional. [51] [52] [53] Advierte que importar supuestos liberal-mercantilistas o constitucionalistas occidentales al análisis del lenguaje político cubano produce distorsión en lugar de comprensión. [54] El informe del Departamento de Estado ejemplifica, posiblemente, exactamente este error analítico: asume que, dado que las instituciones cubanas no operan según principios liberal-democráticos, deben ser coberturas fraudulentas para operaciones de inteligencia.
2. El problema de la explicación monocausal y la campaña de “terrorismo político”
El informe presenta una narrativa conspirativa integral en la cual la influencia cubana explica un espectro extraordinario de desarrollos sociales y políticos estadounidenses —“from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses” [desde los disturbios de George Floyd hasta el ascenso de Antifa y la explosión del activismo pro-terrorista en los campus universitarios estadounidenses]. [49] Este encuadre debe entenderse dentro del proyecto más amplio de la Administración Trump de caracterizar el activismo doméstico de izquierda como una forma de terrorismo con raíces extranjeras. En julio de 2026, el Secretario Rubio convocó un “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” [Reunión Ministerial sobre el Resurgimiento del Terrorismo Político] en el Departamento de Estado —una conferencia explícitamente dedicada a la proposición de que la violencia política y el extremismo originados desde la izquierda constituyen una categoría distinta y resurgente de terrorismo que requiere una respuesta internacional coordinada. En sus declaraciones durante la conferencia, Rubio trazó líneas directas entre los movimientos revolucionarios extranjeros, las organizaciones radicales domésticas y lo que la administración enmarca como la corrupción ideológica de las instituciones democráticas occidentales por fuerzas hostiles a la civilización liberal. El informe sobre Cuba funciona como la base probatoria de un capítulo de esta campaña más amplia: suministra la genealogía histórica que conecta la ideología revolucionaria cubana con los movimientos contemporáneos de izquierda estadounidenses, estableciendo así que el activismo político doméstico al que la administración se opone no es meramente equivocado, sino que es el producto maduro del proyecto de subversión de décadas de un Estado terrorista extranjero. El marco del “terrorismo político” transforma un desacuerdo de política pública en una amenaza de seguridad y una oposición política doméstica en un objeto de contraterrorismo.
La producción académica de Backer sugiere que tales explicaciones monocausales confunden el genuino activismo internacional de Cuba con una manipulación omnipotente. Cuba, en el relato de Backer, ha logrado efectivamente una influencia internacional desproporcionada en relación con su tamaño, pero esto se debe a que representa un modelo ideológico alternativo que resuena con agravios genuinos en las sociedades poscoloniales —no porque controle secretamente los movimientos sociales estadounidenses. [55]
Backer reconoce que el internacionalismo cubano siempre ha sido simultáneamente ideológico, estratégico y autointeresado. [56] [57] [58] Pero no colapsa estas dimensiones en una única narrativa de inteligencia. Las misiones médicas cubanas, por ejemplo, son simultáneamente humanitarias, comerciales, ideológicas, diplomáticas y geopolíticas —no meramente una cobertura de espionaje. [59] [60] [61]
3. La “mentalidad embarguista,” la constitución mutua y el estado estable de miseria
El informe del Departamento de Estado trata el conflicto Estados Unidos-Cuba como unidireccional: Cuba ataca, Estados Unidos se defiende. La producción académica de Backer revela una dinámica mucho más compleja de constitución mutua. Argumenta que la política estadounidense y la política cubana se han convertido en actuaciones ideológicas mutuamente reforzantes. El gobierno cubano utiliza la hostilidad estadounidense para justificar la disciplina interna y el sacrificio político; Estados Unidos utiliza la represión cubana para justificar la continuación de sanciones y presiones.
Backer identifica lo que denomina la “mentalidad embarguista” —el supuesto analítico de que la posición internacional de Cuba es de aislamiento. En realidad, Cuba se ha comprometido globalmente en sus propios términos a lo largo del período del embargo. La sorpresa del informe del Departamento de Estado ante la extensión de las redes internacionales cubanas puede reflejar parcialmente una incapacidad de reconocer que el embargo no aisló a Cuba —reconfiguró la forma del compromiso cubano mientras inadvertidamente ayudó a Cuba a construir marcos alternativos de globalización a través del ALBA y los principios del “comercio justo”.
El artículo de Backer de 2025 profundiza este punto a través de su concepto del “estado estable de miseria.” Su tesis es que Cuba no ha estado en un pre-colapso perpetuo durante décadas por accidente o únicamente por la ayuda externa. Más bien, el Estado cubano ha desarrollado un sistema en el cual la privación administrada funciona como un mecanismo de gobernanza. El sistema opera a través de tres elementos interconectados: (1) una ideología moral que trata el sacrificio material como políticamente y espiritualmente necesario —el consumismo como corrupción, la austeridad como virtud revolucionaria; (2) un aparato administrativo que permite aperturas económicas limitadas, temporales y reversibles mientras preserva el control centralizado del Partido; y (3) la instrumentalización de la protesta popular periódica como mecanismo de retroalimentación, permitiendo al Estado medir los límites tolerables de las privaciones sin que esas protestas necesariamente desestabilicen al régimen.
Este marco desafía directamente el supuesto implícito del informe del Departamento de Estado de que la miseria cubana es meramente un subproducto de la depredación del régimen y debe inevitablemente producir un colapso revolucionario. Backer argumenta, en cambio, que la miseria es estructuralmente funcional para el régimen —mantiene a la población enfocada en la supervivencia, refuerza la narrativa de asedio y sacrificio y —críticamente— conviene también a los actores externos. Los prestamistas extranjeros, los rivales geopolíticos e incluso Estados Unidos se benefician cada uno de la continuada estabilidad miserable de Cuba: los Estados prestamistas desarrollan narrativas de crisis sin cargar con el costo del colapso; los aliados ideológicos obtienen capital simbólico; y Estados Unidos retiene a Cuba como demostración del fracaso socialista.
La monografía de 2018 proporciona la arquitectura ideológica más profunda. Backer argumenta que la rigidez económica cubana no es mera incompetencia sino que refleja lo que denomina “Marxismo Caribeño” —un sistema marxista-leninista adaptado a las condiciones latinoamericanas y caribeñas, construido bajo la sombra de la hostilidad estadounidense, y comprometido con la subordinación de la actividad económica a los objetivos políticos, el rechazo de los mecanismos de mercado y una desconfianza hacia la acumulación privada autónoma. El sistema alcanzó su madurez institucional alrededor de 1976 y ha permanecido sustancialmente estático desde entonces —no porque los dirigentes cubanos sean estúpidos, sino porque la reforma amenaza la coherencia ideológica sobre la cual descansa la legitimidad del Partido. Backer contrasta desfavorablemente a Cuba con China, que logró separar el rol de vanguardia del Partido de la gobernanza administrativa y desarrollar la “modernización socialista,” mientras Cuba permaneció comprometida con un modelo ortodoxo cada vez más anacrónico.
Las implicaciones políticas son significativas: el informe del Departamento de Estado asume que una presión intensificada empujará a Cuba hacia el colapso o la capitulación. El análisis de Backer sugiere que el aparato cubano ha sido específicamente diseñado para absorber la presión externa y convertirla en narrativa legitimadora —las mismas condiciones de asedio que el informe describe pueden fortalecer en lugar de debilitar la justificación interna del régimen para su continuidad en el poder.
4. La cuestión de las misiones médicas y el trabajo en Cuba
El informe del Departamento de Estado menciona brevemente a los médicos cubanos desplegados en Venezuela únicamente como parte de la construcción estatal cubana y la infraestructura de inteligencia. [62] [63] [64] No proporciona un análisis serio de las dimensiones laborales de las misiones médicas. Backer, por el contrario, ha producido el análisis jurídico en lengua inglesa más detallado de estos programas.
Backer trata la Misión Barrio Adentro como un “socio-political barter project” [proyecto sociopolítico de trueque] en el cual Cuba intercambiaba médicos por petróleo venezolano. [65] [66] [67] Toma en serio tanto los logros humanitarios —llevar atención primaria a poblaciones venezolanas desatendidas— como las dimensiones coercitivas: los médicos cubanos presuntamente mantenidos bajo vigilancia, a los que se les negaba libertad de movimiento, se les restringía la interacción social, se les exigía trabajar siete días a la semana y se les amenazaba con castigos por negarse. [68] [69] [70] [71]
Su conclusión crítica es mesurada: no declara definitivamente que el sistema de exportación laboral de Cuba constituya trabajo forzoso ilegal, pero argumenta que su estructura institucional crea una “foreseeable collision with international norms” [colisión previsible con las normas internacionales] porque en una economía de mando “the difference between a citizen’s duty to the state and involuntary servitude can be quite thin” [la diferencia entre el deber de un ciudadano hacia el Estado y la servidumbre involuntaria puede ser bastante tenue]. [72] [73] Señala que el Convenio No. 29 de la OIT, las Directrices de la OCDE y los Principios Rectores de las Naciones Unidas sobre las Empresas y los Derechos Humanos presentan todos bases potenciales para impugnar la práctica cubana. [74] [75] [76] [77]
De manera crucial, Backer también identifica el contexto político de los casos estadounidenses contra las prácticas laborales cubanas. En Licea v. Curaçao Dry Dock, el tribunal se basó en un informe de derechos humanos del Departamento de Estado de Estados Unidos cuyas aseveraciones fácticas nunca fueron impugnadas porque el demandado incurrió en rebeldía procesal. [78] [79] Backer advierte que “from the Cuban perspective, the United States is in no position to neutrally judge the Cuban state’s compliance with international human rights norms” [desde la perspectiva cubana, Estados Unidos no está en posición de juzgar neutralmente el cumplimiento del Estado cubano con las normas internacionales de derechos humanos] y que el lenguaje amplio de la sentencia puede tener una autoridad precedencial limitada fuera de Estados Unidos. [80] [81] [82] [83] ### 5. Los derechos humanos como instrumento político
Tanto el informe del Departamento de Estado como Backer reconocen que Cuba tiene serios problemas de derechos humanos. Pero Backer insiste en que el lenguaje de derechos humanos en las relaciones Estados Unidos-Cuba no es políticamente neutral. Funciona como instrumento de la política de cambio de régimen por parte estadounidense y como escudo defensivo (invocando el racismo, la desigualdad y la no participación en tratados por parte de Estados Unidos) del lado cubano. [84] [85] [86] [87]
El informe del Departamento de Estado caracteriza a los cubanos comunes como viviendo en “something akin to modern slavery” [algo semejante a la esclavitud moderna]. [88] Backer emplea un lenguaje diferente pero no menos crítico: describe un “estado estable de miseria” en el cual el Estado cubano ha desarrollado la capacidad de mantener el orden político mediante la privación administrada, el encuadre moral del sacrificio, y aperturas y cierres tácticos periódicos de la actividad económica privada. [89] [90] [91] [92]
La diferencia es diagnóstica: el Departamento de Estado enmarca la gobernanza cubana como puramente criminal y depredadora; Backer la enmarca como un sistema con coherencia ideológica interna que, no obstante, produce resultados materiales predeciblemente miserables para la población. [93] [94] [95] Ambas conclusiones son devastadoras para el gobierno cubano, pero el análisis de Backer permite comprender por qué el sistema persiste sin necesidad de atribuir esa persistencia enteramente al apoyo externo o a la destreza en materia de espionaje.
6. El tercermundismo: ¿arma o ideología?
El informe del Departamento de Estado presenta el tercermundismo como un arma ideológica desarrollada por Cuba específicamente para subvertir a Estados Unidos. [96] [97] [98] [99] Backer, si bien reconoce su instrumentalización, lo trata como una cosmovisión genuinamente sostenida con profundas raíces en el pensamiento anticolonial y con atractivo continuado en el Sur Global. [51] [53] [100] [101]
El relato de Backer implica que el informe del Departamento de Estado comete un error fundamental de perspectiva: asume que, dado que la ideología tercermundista sirve a los intereses estratégicos cubanos, no puede también ser sinceramente sostenida o genuinamente atractiva para otros sin manipulación cubana. El encuadre del informe —que los activistas estadounidenses que abrazan tales visiones deben estar manipulados o reclutados por la inteligencia cubana— no logra dar cuenta de la posibilidad de que la propia política exterior de Estados Unidos haya generado oposición auténtica tanto a nivel doméstico como global.
7. El marco “America First” [Estados Unidos Primero], la plantilla venezolana y la guerra contra las pandillas
El ensayo de Backer de 2026 introduce el concepto de un choque entre modelos cognitivos “mercantil/transaccional” y “burócrata/institucional” —lo que él denomina el “mercader” (商) versus el “burócrata” (士). El informe del Departamento de Estado puede entenderse como producto del más reciente marco transaccional de America First [Estados Unidos Primero]: Cuba no es meramente una amenaza para las instituciones liberal-internacionalistas (el encuadre anterior) sino una amenaza directa a la seguridad nacional, la integridad territorial y el orden social doméstico de Estados Unidos.
Backer sitúa el informe del Departamento de Estado dentro de la orden ejecutiva de la administración Trump del 29 de enero de 2026 sobre Cuba (EO 14380, “Addressing Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba” [Abordando las amenazas a Estados Unidos por parte del Gobierno de Cuba]), que caracteriza a la isla como alineada con “numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States, including the Government of the Russian Federation (Russia), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Government of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah” [numerosos países hostiles, grupos terroristas transnacionales y actores malintencionados adversos a Estados Unidos, incluyendo al Gobierno de la Federación Rusa (Rusia), la República Popular China (RPC), el Gobierno de Irán, Hamás y Hezbolá] y como parte de un “transnational apparatus for the support of terrorism and the destabilization of lawful governments in the region” [aparato transnacional para el apoyo al terrorismo y la desestabilización de gobiernos legítimos en la región]. El informe reproduce este lenguaje de la orden ejecutiva casi textualmente.
La plantilla venezolana. La contribución analítica más notable de Backer en 2026 es su identificación de la “solución venezolana” como el modelo operativo que se aplica a Cuba. El 3 de enero de 2026, Estados Unidos extrajo por la fuerza a Nicolás Maduro de Venezuela para enfrentar acusaciones penales. Trump describió las consecuencias en términos transaccionales: “Once the attack ended, the attack ended, and they said, ‘let’s make a deal.’ More people should do that” [Una vez que terminó el ataque, terminó el ataque, y dijeron, ‘hagamos un trato.’ Más gente debería hacer eso]. Los objetivos clave de la política en Venezuela no eran la transformación del régimen en el sentido institucional sino la eliminación de externalidades adversas —migración, narcotráfico, actividad de pandillas y la expulsión de la presencia iraní y de Hezbolá del hemisferio. El secretario Rubio articuló este marco: Estados Unidos esperaba que Venezuela “stop the drug trafficking” [detuviera el narcotráfico], pusiera fin a los “gang problems” [problemas de pandillas], “kick the FARC and the ELN out” [expulsara a las FARC y al ELN], y dejara de “cozy up to Hezbollah and Iran in our own hemisphere” [acercarse a Hezbolá e Irán en nuestro propio hemisferio].
La conexión con la represión doméstica de pandillas. Este encuadre es fundamental para comprender el énfasis del informe del Departamento de Estado en las conexiones de Cuba con organizaciones criminales transnacionales y redes terroristas. La Estrategia de Seguridad Nacional de 2025 identifica a las “terrorist organizations, transnational criminal networks” [organizaciones terroristas, redes criminales transnacionales] como amenazas primarias, y los objetivos para el Hemisferio Occidental incluyen específicamente “suppressing narco-terrorist gangs and cartels” [reprimir pandillas narcoterroristas y cárteles]. El análisis de Backer sugiere que la guerra doméstica de la administración Trump contra las pandillas criminales transnacionales y su política exterior hacia Cuba y Venezuela están conceptualmente unificadas dentro del mismo marco transaccional. Ambas se entienden como impactos adversos sobre los intereses estadounidenses que requieren remediación contundente —la distinción entre la represión “doméstica” de pandillas y la presión “exterior” sobre regímenes se disuelve dentro de la jaula cognitiva mercantil. El presunto albergue o cooperación de Cuba con redes criminales y terroristas transnacionales se convierte en la justificación para tratar al propio Estado cubano como análogo a una empresa criminal que requiere acción coercitiva.
“Cuba is Next” [Cuba es la próxima]. A finales de marzo de 2026, Trump declaró “Cuba is next” [Cuba es la próxima] durante un discurso en Miami en el que promocionaba los éxitos militares estadounidenses en Venezuela e Irán. Backer lee esto dentro de la plantilla venezolana: Estados Unidos aplica apalancamiento mediante el suministro petrolero (los aranceles de la orden ejecutiva sobre estados proveedores de petróleo), negocia directamente con elementos del establishment militar cubano (las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, o FAR), y señala que un “trato” está disponible si Cuba remueve a su actual presidente y elimina sus relaciones externas más objetables. Para el 16 de marzo de 2026, reportes indicaban que la administración favorecía “a Venezuelan style predicate” [un predicado al estilo venezolano] —derrocar a un testaferro “while keeping in place the repressive Communist government that has ruled Cuba for more than 65 years” [manteniendo en su lugar al gobierno comunista represivo que ha gobernado Cuba por más de 65 años].
Las publicaciones de blog de Backer rastrean estos acontecimientos en tiempo real, incluyendo “On the Brink or Blip? Cuba Prepares for…” (31 de enero de 2026), “Al imperio que nos amenaza le decimos: ¡Cuba somos millones!” (19 de enero de 2026, sobre el discurso de Díaz-Canel de pie de guerra), y publicaciones anteriores sobre la “Americas First Foreign Policy” [Política exterior de las Américas Primero] de Rubio (31 de enero de 2025) y la remoción de la lista de terrorismo por Biden (14 de enero de 2025). Estos ensayos de blog documentan el vaivén de la designación terrorista de Cuba —removida por Biden el 14 de enero de 2025 (después de que Cuba liberara a más de 500 prisioneros), reinstaurada por Trump el 20 de enero de 2025— como evidencia en sí misma de cómo la política hacia Cuba funciona como instrumento transaccional más que como una determinación jurídica estable.
El informe del Departamento de Estado como instrumento de política. Desde la perspectiva analítica de Backer, el informe del Departamento de Estado es en sí mismo un instrumento —un documento político diseñado para justificar acciones de política específicas (aranceles a países que suministran petróleo a Cuba, sanciones al ICAP y organizaciones relacionadas, negociaciones con el liderazgo militar cubano para una “solución venezolana”) más que una evaluación neutral del Estado cubano. El informe proporciona la narrativa de amenaza ideológica que legitima la coerción transaccional que la orden ejecutiva operacionaliza. En esta lectura, la exhaustiva catalogación del informe sobre las conexiones cubanas con Rusia, China, Irán, Hamás, Hezbolá y el FPLP cumple una función política específica: establece el predicado jurídico y político para tratar a Cuba como parte del mismo nexo criminal-terrorista transnacional que justifica las operaciones estadounidenses en Venezuela y la represión doméstica de pandillas. ### 8. Lo que el análisis omitió: El lado estadounidense del espejo
El análisis precedente—tanto el del informe como el nuestro—aceptó la invitación implícita del informe a enfocarse en Cuba. Eso fue un error parcial. Al centrar a Cuba como único agente activo, oscurecimos dos dimensiones del problema que son igualmente esenciales para cualquier resolución: el papel de Estados Unidos como participante receptivo y transformado en la relación, y el proceso de subversión mutua que opera en ambas direcciones simultáneamente.
A. La corrupción del sistema estadounidense
La corriente política más significativa del informe del Departamento de Estado no es su relato sobre el espionaje cubano o las redes guerrilleras—esos son tropos familiares de la Guerra Fría. Su corriente casi superficial, la que otorga al documento su carga política contemporánea, es la proposición de que la proyección ideológica cubana ha corrompido el sistema político estadounidense en sí mismo. El informe no se limita a argumentar que Cuba dirigió espías o financió terroristas. Argumenta que la ideología cubana—el tercermundismo, la revolución racial, el antiimperialismo, el rechazo civilizatorio de Occidente—fue estratégicamente sembrada en las instituciones estadounidenses durante seis décadas, donde echó raíces, evolucionó, se hibridó con agravios autóctonos y, en última instancia, se volvió indistinguible de los compromisos políticos domésticos de porciones significativas de la izquierda estadounidense.
Esto ya no es una historia sobre intervención—una mano extranjera que penetra desde el exterior. Es una historia sobre corrupción—un sistema cuyas respuestas inmunitarias internas han sido tan degradadas que el patógeno extranjero ahora se reproduce autónomamente dentro del huésped. El Weather Underground fue moldeado por el contacto cubano; pero Black Lives Matter, los DSA, el activismo universitario y la organización anti-ICE se presentan como el fruto maduro de aquella siembra anterior—que ya no requiere control operativo cubano porque la ideología se ha vuelto autosustentable dentro de las instituciones estadounidenses.
Esto tiene dos consecuencias políticas inmediatas que el informe no enuncia explícitamente pero que su estructura hace inevitables:
Primero, alimenta directamente la narrativa más amplia de la Administración Trump sobre la corrupción sistémica en la democracia estadounidense—el “estado profundo,” la captura institucional de universidades, medios de comunicación, organizaciones sin fines de lucro y agencias gubernamentales por actores ideológicos hostiles al orden constitucional estadounidense. Cuba, en este relato, es un vector entre varios (junto con los movimientos progresistas domésticos, la teoría crítica académica y la influencia extranjera de China y otros) a través del cual se introdujo la corrupción. El informe provee el capítulo cubano de una historia más amplia sobre cómo las instituciones estadounidenses fueron puestas en contra del pueblo estadounidense.
Segundo, y más específicamente, el informe identifica a los opositores políticos organizados de la administración actual—la izquierda estadounidense, las organizaciones progresistas sin fines de lucro, las organizaciones socialistas, los sindicatos de orientación izquierdista y, por clara implicación, elementos del propio Partido Demócrata—como los portadores de esta corrupción. No son meramente opositores políticos con diferentes preferencias de política pública; son, en la lógica del informe, la expresión sintomática de una infección extranjera del cuerpo político que lleva décadas. Los exalumnos de la Brigada Venceremos que se convirtieron en líderes sindicales, profesores y funcionarios gubernamentales; las delegaciones de los DSA que intercambian información con la Embajada cubana; los miembros del Congreso que escribieron a Castro en nombre de Assata Shakur—todos se presentan no como actores políticos ejerciendo sus derechos dentro de una democracia pluralista, sino como la evidencia viviente del éxito neocolonial cubano dentro del sistema estadounidense.
El marco analítico de Backer ayuda a identificar lo que está sucediendo aquí pero no lo aborda completamente por sí mismo. Su concepto de constitución mutua—que las políticas estadounidenses y cubanas se refuerzan mutuamente—captura la dinámica a nivel estatal. Pero la afirmación más profunda del informe trata sobre la corrupción societal: que segmentos críticos de la ecología política estadounidense respondieron a, utilizaron, evolucionaron con, y fueron utilizados por la proyección ideológica cubana de maneras que han alterado permanentemente el panorama político estadounidense. Solo el último elemento (“fueron utilizados”) es el objeto explícito del informe. Pero los otros—que los estadounidenses respondieron a la ideología cubana porque esta abordaba agravios domésticos reales, que la utilizaron como marco para sus propios proyectos políticos, que ambos lados evolucionaron juntos en una relación dialéctica—están igualmente presentes en el registro histórico y son igualmente importantes para comprender el presente.
Desde una perspectiva de América Primero, este es posiblemente el “problema de Cuba” más significativo—no las operaciones de inteligencia de la isla ni sus alianzas con Irán, sino el grado en que la ideología sembrada por Cuba se ha vuelto autóctona en la vida política estadounidense, ya no extranjera sino naturalizada, ya no una intervención sino un rasgo permanente de la ecología política doméstica. La ironía neocolonial es completa: el mayor éxito de la revolución anticolonial fue colonizar la propia imaginación política del colonizador.
B. La dialéctica del cambio de régimen mutuo
La segunda dimensión ausente es el proceso de las interacciones entre Estados Unidos y Cuba entendido como una dialéctica simétrica en lugar de un asalto unidireccional. Tanto Cuba como Estados Unidos quieren un cambio de régimen en el otro. Ambos han perseguido activamente ese objetivo desde 1959. Y ambos emprenden ese objetivo buscando corromper la integridad sistémica del otro, así como participando en la política de poder tradicional de los estados—recalibrada para las sensibilidades de finales del siglo veinte y principios del veintiuno.
Estados Unidos ha perseguido el cambio de régimen cubano a través del embargo, las sanciones, el aislamiento diplomático, el condicionamiento explícito de la Ley Helms-Burton de la normalización a la eliminación del sistema marxista-leninista, el apoyo a organizaciones del exilio, la radiodifusión, los programas de promoción de la democracia, el Programa de Libertad Condicional para Profesionales Médicos Cubanos (que incentiva la deserción de médicos) y—más recientemente—la coerción de plantilla venezolana mediante la denegación de petróleo y la negociación directa con las FAR.
Cuba ha perseguido el cambio de régimen estadounidense—no en el sentido de derrocar a un presidente, sino en el sentido de transformar los fundamentos ideológicos de la vida política estadounidense—a través de los mecanismos que el informe cataloga: el cultivo de activistas, los programas de intercambio académico, las redes de solidaridad, la educación política, el turismo revolucionario, las relaciones con los medios de comunicación y la explotación estratégica de las tensiones raciales, de clase y religiosas dentro de la sociedad estadounidense.
Esta dialéctica involucra intermediarios en ambos lados. Para Cuba: la prensa y su subvención dentro de Estados Unidos, las iglesias y las redes de teología de la liberación, los comités de solidaridad, la explotación del agravio racial, las instituciones académicas y la proyección cultural del romanticismo revolucionario. Para Estados Unidos: la comunidad del exilio cubano y su infraestructura política en Miami, Radio y TV Martí, los programas de democracia de USAID, la explotación de la desesperación económica entre los profesionales cubanos y—más recientemente—el cultivo directo de las FAR como agente potencial de transformación interna. Ambos lados operan a través de capas de indirección: blogueros en Cuba, influenciadores en Estados Unidos, ONG y fundaciones en ambas direcciones, organizaciones religiosas que sirven como puentes.
Y ambos lados participan en lo que podría llamarse una dialéctica de transformación socavante—cada uno buscando no simplemente debilitar al otro sino transformar al otro en algo más cercano a su propia imagen, o al menos en algo que ya no amenace su propia integridad sistémica. Estados Unidos quiere que Cuba se convierta en una democracia de mercado (o al menos que deje de ser un estado marxista-leninista revolucionario). Cuba quiere que Estados Unidos se convierta—o al menos que contenga dentro de sí—una poderosa base comprometida con el antiimperialismo, la justicia racial enmarcada en términos tercermundistas y la deslegitimación de la hegemonía global estadounidense.
Dentro de esta dialéctica, ambos lados despliegan caracterizaciones del otro que son simultáneamente descripciones precisas de patologías reales y armas estratégicas en el conflicto:
• Cuba se involucra en lo que equivale a esclavitud estatal de su pueblo—vendiendo su trabajo, a la manera de Corea del Norte, para recaudar los ingresos que su sistema en bancarrota es incapaz de producir en cantidades que excedan las necesidades de quienes desvían los primeros dólares para su propio uso. La caracterización del informe de los cubanos viviendo en “something akin to modern slavery” [algo semejante a la esclavitud moderna] no es mera retórica—describe un sistema en el cual el estado captura el valor excedente del trabajo de sus ciudadanos en el extranjero mientras esos ciudadanos no tienen capacidad significativa de rechazar, negociar o salir.
• Estados Unidos es—en la contra-narrativa cubana y en el análisis de muchos en el Sur Global—el gran explotador imperialista contemporáneo sin corazón, el gran barón ladrón global cuyas actividades alimentan los elementos porcinos de una población que se vuelve gorda, perezosa, decadente e inútil. Esto no es meramente propaganda cubana; es una caracterización que resuena precisamente porque captura algo real sobre la relación entre el consumo estadounidense, la explotación laboral global y la distribución de los costos y beneficios de la globalización.
El genio—y la tragedia—de la relación Estados Unidos-Cuba es que la caracterización que cada lado hace del otro contiene suficiente verdad para sostenerse indefinidamente, mientras que la autocaracterización de cada lado contiene suficiente autoengaño para impedir la resolución. Cuba es tanto un proyecto ideológico revolucionario como un estado que esclaviza a su pueblo. Estados Unidos es tanto una democracia constitucional como una potencia imperial cuyo alcance global genera los mismos agravios que la ideología cubana explota. Ningún lado puede reconocer su propia patología sin socavar su legitimidad en el conflicto.
Esta dimensión procesual—la dialéctica de cambio de régimen mutuo, corrupción mutua, caracterización mutua y autoengaño mutuo—es lo que ni el informe del Departamento de Estado ni el análisis crítico inicial capturaron adecuadamente. El informe ve solamente la agresión cubana; el análisis inicial vio principalmente la complicidad estadounidense en el mantenimiento de la miseria de Cuba. El panorama completo requiere ver ambas cosas simultáneamente: un proceso de sesenta y siete años de subversión mutua en el cual ambos lados han logrado corromper al otro sin lograr transformarlo.
9. Lo que ambos relatos comparten—y lo que permanece sin resolver
A pesar de sus profundas diferencias en tono, método y conclusión, ambos relatos convergen en ciertos puntos que no deben ser oscurecidos por los desacuerdos analíticos:
• La privación material es real. El sistema político-económico de Cuba produce privaciones severas y persistentes para su población. El informe caracteriza esto como esclavitud moderna impuesta por un régimen depredador; Backer lo caracteriza como un “estado estable de miseria” en el cual la privación es estructuralmente funcional para un régimen comprometido con un modelo ideológico inviable. Ambos coinciden en que el pueblo cubano sufre.
• El control estatal generalizado es real. El estado cubano ejerce un control integral sobre la actividad económica, el despliegue laboral y la asociación cívica. La monografía de 2018 reconoce la subordinación de toda actividad económica a la dirección política, la hostilidad hacia la acumulación privada autónoma y el uso de la discrecionalidad administrativa como instrumento de control.
• Las operaciones de inteligencia cubanas han sido reales y consecuentes. Ninguno de los dos relatos niega que Cuba ha mantenido un aparato de inteligencia sofisticado y efectivo dirigido contra Estados Unidos. La monografía de 2018 de Backer reconoce el “internationalism—both diplomatic and military—that allowed Cuba to punch well above its weight” [internacionalismo—tanto diplomático como militar—que permitió a Cuba golpear muy por encima de su peso].
• Los programas internacionales sirven múltiples propósitos simultáneamente. Ambos relatos reconocen que las misiones médicas cubanas, los intercambios educativos y las redes de solidaridad son simultáneamente humanitarios, comerciales, ideológicos, diplomáticos y estratégicos. El desacuerdo radica en cuál dimensión domina y si las demás son genuinas o meramente cobertura.
• La relación Estados Unidos-Cuba ha sido mutuamente constitutiva. El statu quo ha servido a las élites de ambos lados más que a los cubanos comunes. Cuba obtiene justificación narrativa para la represión doméstica; Estados Unidos obtiene una demostración del fracaso socialista y un blanco permanente para la política de sanciones.
• Las relaciones exteriores de Cuba con adversarios de Estados Unidos son reales. Ambos relatos aceptan que Cuba mantiene relaciones operativas significativas con Rusia, China e Irán. [102] [103] [104] El ensayo de 2025 de Backer reconoce que Cuba siempre ha sido sostenida por patrocinadores externos—primero la Unión Soviética, luego Venezuela, ahora China y otros—precisamente porque un sistema insostenible “marks a convenient killing ground at the borderlands of empire” [marca un terreno de muerte conveniente en las tierras fronterizas del imperio]. [102] [105] [106]
10. La dicotomía de caracterización: agudizada
La pregunta fundamental que separa ambos relatos es una de caracterización—y vale la pena enunciarla con máxima precisión:
La tesis del informe del Departamento de Estado: Cuba es, en su raíz, un aparato de inteligencia y subversión que ha operado continuamente desde 1959 con el objetivo singular de destruir a Estados Unidos y la civilización occidental. Su ideología es un arma; sus programas humanitarios son cobertura; sus redes de solidaridad son organizaciones fachada; sus relaciones internacionales son alianzas de conveniencia en una guerra revolucionaria. El “estado” cubano es incidental a la operación cubana. El informe lo declara explícitamente: Cuba es “less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation” [menos un estado-nación que una operación de inteligencia y subversión totalizadora]. [107] De ello se sigue que el compromiso diplomático es ingenuo, la presión es imperativa y la categoría analítica apropiada para Cuba está más cerca de un servicio de inteligencia hostil que de un estado soberano.
La contra-tesis de Backer: Cuba es un estado-partido leninista rígido pero ideológicamente coherente—uno que ha desarrollado mecanismos sofisticados para la supervivencia doméstica (el estado estable de miseria) y la proyección internacional (ALBA, diplomacia médica, redes de solidaridad)—pero uno cuyo activismo no puede reducirse al espionaje sin vaciar de todo significado las categorías de ideología, organización política y soberanía estatal. El comportamiento internacional de Cuba es simultáneamente ideológico, estratégico, comercial, humanitario e interesado—un complejo de motivaciones irreductible a una sola dimensión. [108] [109] [110] [111] Además, Estados Unidos ha sido no meramente el blanco de Cuba sino su antagonista co-constituyente—y los instrumentos de política estadounidense (incluido el propio informe del Departamento de Estado) no son documentos analíticos neutrales sino elementos en una contienda política en curso. [112] [113] [114]
11. La ambigüedad que persiste
Y sin embargo, la dicotomía, por más nítida que sea, no se resuelve completamente. Varias ambigüedades genuinas permanecen—y una dimensión adicional exige atención a la luz de la iniciativa más amplia de la administración sobre “terrorismo político.”
La Conferencia Ministerial del Departamento de Estado de julio de 2026 sobre el Resurgimiento del Terrorismo Político provee el marco institucional dentro del cual el informe sobre Cuba alcanza su plena significación política doméstica. Esa conferencia—y la arquitectura de políticas que representa—establece una posición administrativa explícita de que la violencia política de izquierda y el activismo radical constituyen una categoría distinta de terrorismo, una con orígenes extranjeros identificables y apoyo extranjero continuo. El informe sobre Cuba es el texto genealógico de esta posición: traza el linaje de los movimientos contemporáneos de izquierda estadounidenses a lo largo de sesenta y siete años de cultivo, reclutamiento y siembra ideológica cubana. Leído dentro del marco de “terrorismo político,” el catálogo del informe de organizaciones fachada cubanas, redes de solidaridad y organizaciones activistas no es meramente erudición histórica—es un documento de selección de objetivos para una campaña antiterrorista en curso dirigida contra los opositores políticos domésticos de la administración.
Esto crea una cuarta ambigüedad más allá de las tres identificadas a continuación: el informe puede ser simultáneamente (a) un relato legítimo de operaciones reales de inteligencia e influencia cubanas, (b) un instrumento político diseñado para deslegitimar a la oposición doméstica caracterizándola como terrorismo patrocinado por el extranjero, y (c) ambas cosas a la vez—que es precisamente lo que lo hace tan difícil de evaluar y tan políticamente potente.
Con ese encuadre en mente, varias ambigüedades genuinas adicionales permanecen:
Primero, la frontera entre la convicción ideológica y la cobertura operativa es inherentemente difícil de localizar desde el exterior. Un representante del ICAP que genuinamente cree en la solidaridad internacional y un representante del ICAP que es un oficial de inteligencia de la DI pueden verse idénticos en su conducta exterior. Ambos relatos reconocen esto—el informe lo trata como prueba de amenaza; Backer lo trata como evidencia de que los estados totalitarios difuminan la línea entre estado, partido y sociedad civil de maneras que desafían las categorías liberal-democráticas. [115] [116]
Segundo, ambos relatos coinciden en que la debilidad material de Cuba no equivale a inofensividad. El informe concluye que “to mistake Cuba’s poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely” [confundir la pobreza de Cuba con inofensividad es malinterpretar la amenaza por completo]. [117] Backer, desde una dirección completamente diferente, coincide: la influencia ideológica de Cuba siempre ha excedido su capacidad material precisamente porque la ideología, no el poder material, es su producto primario. [118] [119]
Tercero, ninguno de los dos relatos ofrece una teoría persuasiva de cómo el pueblo cubano—a diferencia del estado cubano—se beneficia de la situación actual. La solución del informe (presión máxima hacia el colapso del régimen) y la alternativa cautelosa de Backer (una apertura transaccional gestionada, posiblemente a través de las empresas económicas de las FAR, avanzando hacia una “variante caribeña de Democracia Socialista China”) ambas reconocen que el sistema actual sirve pobremente a la población cubana. [120] [121]
La respuesta a la pregunta de caracterización tiene enormes consecuencias para la política estadounidense. Si el informe está en lo correcto, entonces Cuba es una amenaza de inteligencia que requiere supresión, y cualquier compromiso diplomático meramente provee recursos a un aparato hostil. Si Backer está en lo correcto, entonces el propio informe—y el régimen de órdenes ejecutivas que apoya—puede inadvertidamente reforzar el mismo sistema que dice oponerse, alimentando la narrativa de asedio que legitima el gobierno continuado del Partido mientras el pueblo cubano permanece atrapado en su estado de miseria gestionada. La posibilidad de que ambas caracterizaciones capturen verdades parciales—que Cuba sea tanto un estado ideológico genuino como un estado que instrumentaliza cada institución para obtener ventaja estratégica—puede ser la conclusión más intelectualmente honesta, aun cuando provee la base menos satisfactoria para la formulación de políticas.
References
1. I. The Revolutionary State 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. It is irregular and covert – even at the peak of its military power, Havana never possessed the capacity to defeat the (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 3)
2. infrastructure designed to turn America against itself. In contrast to every other aspect of Cuba's failed state, this model has yielded remarkable success. For over half a century, this small island nation with a chronically failing economy has operated at the center of a vast hemispheric network. The Cubans trained and armed tens of thousands of left-wing guerillas, oversaw violent insurgencies that plunged multiple continents into chaos, and backed deadly extremist attacks across the United States. The island itself became the premier safe harbor for fugitive American terrorists – fleeing justice for bombings, armed robberies, and murders – (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 4)
3. 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, (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 4)
4. history. The Cuban campaign against America is unique. It is irregular and covert – even at the peak of its military power, Havana never possessed the capacity to defeat the United States in a conventional armed conflict. Instead, 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. In contrast to every other aspect of Cuba's failed state, this model has yielded remarkable success. For over half a century, this small island nation with a chronically failing economy has (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 4)
5. The struggle had expanded from a class war to a much larger civilizational conflict, demanding not just economic equality, but social, cultural, and even spiritual transformation. Its advocates spoke the language of a single planetary struggle – stretching from the battlefield to the classroom – between the West and the Third World. In their telling, the revolutionary agent was no longer the industrial proletariat, but the colonized nations and peoples of the Global South. The principal antagonist of world history was no longer "capital," but Western civilization itself. As the socialist magazine Jacobin approvingly recounted earlier this year, (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 11)
6. arrests, and $100 million in property damage. 19 As a result, the Cuban regime is inextricably tied to a much larger radical network that it has constructed across the Western Hemisphere. For more than six decades, communist Cuba has been the foremost sponsor of revolutionary leftism in the Americas. Nearly all of the notable Marxist guerilla movements in our hemisphere since 1959 have received some form of support from Havana. Cuba established itself as the nexus of Latin America's revolutionary left in the immediate wake of the Tricontinental Conference, when the conference's 27 Latin American delegations formed the (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 17)
7. as many as 130 bombings between 1974 23 and 1983. In the mid-1970s, Ríos also reportedly helped to organize the Macheteros, a parallel guerilla cadre that launched its own wave of bombings, robberies, assassinations and other attacks across both Puerto Rico and the United States. In 1979, a cell of AK-47-wielding Macheteros militants staged an armed ambush of a U.S. Navy bus, killing two sailors and wounding nine others. Less than three years later, a Macheteros ambush on four sailors from the U.S.S. Pensacola claimed another American life. FBI files later described extensive contacts between Macheteros leaders and (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 21)
8. Almost immediately after taking Havana in January 1959, Castro began plotting armed assaults against neighboring governments – launching expeditions against Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama in just that year alone. Throughout the 1960s, his regime backed guerilla groups in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, and the Caribbean. In Uruguay, Cuba trained and armed the Tupamaros – a Marxist guerilla group that carried out deadly attacks against domestic and foreign officials, including the kidnapping and execution of an American security adviser. In Argentina, Castro advised, backed and funded the Montoneros, which launched a campaign of political (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 18)
9. president, Gustavo Petro, was a member of M-19 himself. 20 The Sandinistas The Sandinista Revolution was one of Havana's great victories in the hemisphere. In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) – named for Augusto Sandino, a Nicaraguan folk hero who led a guerilla war against U.S. occupation in the early twentieth century – overthrew Nicaragua's Somoza regime and established a revolutionary junta. Cuba was the patron of the insurgency, supplying what one 1979 NSC memo described as "an unbelievable amount of arms" to the leftist militants. It also served as a training site, safe haven, and (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 18)
10. oversees all U.S. military activities in Latin America. Victor Manuel Rocha (Getty Images) 34 For roughly 50 years – from 1973 until his arrest in December 2023 – Rocha was a Cuban spy. He was first recruited in 1973 while in Chile, five years before he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen………………… (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 32)
11. stream of disinformation crafted by the Cuban regime. The Dirección de Inteligencia (DI), known until 1989 as the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI), is Cuba's main foreign intelligence agency. To this day, it remains one of the most effective human-intelligence operations in the world. Over the past six decades, the agency has played a central role in a dazzling array of operations, from infiltrating universities and organizing revolutionary movements in the United States to training Palestinian terrorists in South Yemen. Several high-ranking American intelligence professionals who worked against DI have been outspoken about the threat that the agency (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 28)
12. 33 Victor Manuel Rocha (1973 – 2023) In December 2023, the Department of Justice charged Victor Manuel Rocha, then 73 years old, with "secretly acting for decades as an agent" of the Cuban government. In April 2024, he was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland called Victor Rocha's case "one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent." Rocha, a Colombian-born naturalized U.S. citizen who grew up in Harlem, serves as a (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 31)
13. devious and ruthless, but because they're so good." – James Olson, former Chief of Counterintelligence at the CIA8 "The Cuban intelligence service has always been against the United States…Exclusively. All the other countries where they work, they do it to direct the activity against the United States." – Gerardo Peraza, former senior Cuban intelligence official9 On June 6, 1987, Major Florentino Aspillaga Lombard drove a government-issued Mazda across the Czechoslovak border and presented himself at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna. He had served with distinction in the highest ranks of Cuban intelligence, receiving a personal commendation from Fidel (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 27)
14. Venceremos Brigade's 50th anniversary delegation in Havana. 40 41 V. Revolutionary Tourism "Name any disturbance in the United States – on campus, in the streets, anywhere – and I'll name you the leaders of it who have been to Cuba." – Unnamed State Department official, 197011 Venceremos Brigade The Venceremos Brigade – described in one Senate report as among "the most extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States" – has brought some 10,000 American activists to Cuba since its first contingent in 1969. Its participants have included well-known elected officials, (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 38)
15. communications network" to stay in touch with other cells. Fomenting a revolution within the United States has always been an explicit ambition of Cuban programs like the Venceremos Brigade. Cuban intelligence agents in the United States reportedly used the Brigade to arrange for some young Americans to receive on-island weapons training from Cuban military officers, training select groups in "guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of arms and explosives." Caucus documents distributed to Brigade committees across the 44 United States outlined efforts to recruit U.S. military veterans – or even active-duty soldiers – to travel to Cuba to (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 42)
16. The Black Alliance for Peace called Shakur's legacy a "blueprint for internationalist solidarity." Black Lives Matter Grassroots published a statement honoring "Mama Assata" – "our beloved comrade, mother, warrior, truest revolutionary, and lover of the people" – and claiming the U.S. government "cornered her, framed her, caged her, made her a fugitive, then named her a terrorist." The group's statement praised the Black Liberation Army and Castro for having "rescued" Shakur and provided her with "protection and sanctuary." Shakur's influence has always been infused into BLM's public language. A quote from Shakur's autobiography – "it is our duty (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 61)
17. Cuba's role in forming this militant Third Worldist consciousness among black radicals was not just ideological but institutional. The regime worked doggedly to build close political relationships with many of the leaders of the Black Power movement as it solidified its place as the world revolutionary capital. (According to some sources, Robert Williams himself was present at the Tricontinental Conference in 1966). Carmichael attended OLAS as an honorary delegate, and received a personal tour of the island by Castro behind the wheel of a jeep. The Cuban leader heaped praise on Carmichael, reportedly introducing him to a 400,000-person (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 56)
18. National Network on Cuba One of ICAP's major U.S. counterparts is the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a coalition of more than 60 American groups – including the Democratic Socialists of America, National Lawyers Guild, CodePink, and Communist Party USA – which is formally committed to lobbying for an end to the U.S. embargo and other "imperialist" policies against Cuba. NNOC functions as another key node for coordination between the Cuban regime and the American far left, partnering with ICAP every year to coordinate U.S. delegations to Cuba and conduct "solidarity" conferences in which American activists meet with (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 68)
19. the priority objectives" for Cuban intelligence. ICAP ultimately serves as the organizational node for the wide range of civil society groups, left- wing activist organizations, and NGOs that collectively comprise a major arm of the Cuban network in the United States. The size and scale of these organizations serve as a force multiplier for Cuba, providing it with far more power, influence and reach than it could ever leverage on its own – and serving as a mechanism by which a sprawling, seemingly decentralized network can be mobilized in service of the Cuban revolutionary state. After decades of (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 67)
20. IFCO is also the sole U.S. administrator of the scholarship program at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in Havana, offering full-ride scholarships to low-income American students and affiliates of Cuban-aligned solidarity networks at U.S. universities. ELAM graduates are immersed in Cuban revolutionary ideology and introduced to a broader network of U.S.-based activists as well as members of foreign terror networks such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The "one condition" of the IFCO scholarship is that graduates return to the United States. Today, ELAM graduates are reportedly working in over 30 U.S. states. (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 72)
21. American Peoples: A Staff Study, 89th Cong., 2nd sess. 67 ICAP The central nexus of the entire Cuban intelligence and influence network is the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (English: The Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples) – or "ICAP." Founded in 1960 by Fidel Castro, ICAP ostensibly exists to promote goodwill toward Cuba through a global infrastructure of "friendship" and "solidarity" organizations and deep, longstanding ties to U.S. universities, student groups and activist movements. ICAP, which claims to have more than 2,000 solidarity organizations across over 150 countries, serves as the main organizing hub of (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 65)
22. resistance to American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Thirty-four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba and Russia still maintain strong economic and political ties, which have only deepened amid rising U.S.-Cuba tensions. Today, the relationship is better described as a strategic partnership – one that not only poses a direct threat to the American homeland, but challenges U.S. power and security interests across Latin America. For modern Russia, the Cuban network serves as a key vector for destabilizing and subverting U.S. interests within America's immediate sphere of influence, allowing it to project power into the (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 89)
23. fully restore its intelligence footprint in Florida. Over the past few decades, however, Havana has leveraged those capabilities to build alliances with a new coalition of anti-American regimes, movements, and actors. Even as it expands and revitalizes its network within the next generation of American left-wing activists, it has also forged new partnerships – or deepened and repurposed old ones – with other foreign governments and movements around the world. China and Russia have both reportedly tripled their intelligence agents on the island over the past three years. The threats posed by Cuba's network within America is therefore (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 88)
24. China maintains a persistent intelligence-gathering presence in Cuba, benefiting from its proximity to – and penetration of – the United States. Correspondingly, Cuba benefits from its relationship with China via foreign assistance, canceled debts, and tens of billions of dollars in investments. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that China and Cuba had entered into a secret agreement regarding the construction of a new Chinese SIGINT facility in Cuba in exchange for several billion dollars, providing Beijing's intelligence services with the capacity "to scoop up electronic communications throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 90)
25. Iran also has sought to expand its formal strategic partnerships with Cuba in recent years, including a series of agreements surrounding trade, telecommunications, information technology, port services, and the use of Cuban naval infrastructure. Like Russia and China, Iran has forgiven debts and extended generous lines of credit to Cuba amid efforts to deepen political, commercial, security and intelligence cooperation. In keeping with its "anti-imperialist" posture, Cuba has long supported the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iranian-backed terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – offering them not just (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 91)
26. enemy of the United States that has arisen since. Today it serves as the connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition, a staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside our own borders. 100………………… (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 98)
27. occupying regime, held hostage by their own state. Cuba's assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory.It was a revolution against Western civilization itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. That is the campaign Castro launched in 1959, and it is the campaign his heirs are waging still. And in the institutions of the modern American left – in its universities and its nonprofits, its street (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 98)
28. name you the leaders of it who have been to Cuba." – Unnamed State Department official, 197011 Venceremos Brigade The Venceremos Brigade – described in one Senate report as among "the most extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States" – has brought some 10,000 American activists to Cuba since its first contingent in 1969. Its participants have included well-known elected officials, labor leaders, academics, activists, and a long list of other influential U.S. progressives. Since its creation, the Brigade has served as a tool for the Cuban regime to sponsor (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 40)
29. advance the revolutionary vision of the "New Cuba." In 1966, Castro convened the Tricontinental Conference. Among the organizations represented in the audience were the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Viet Cong, Puerto Rico's leftist Pro-Independence Movement, South Africa's African National Congress, and the Zimbabwe African People's Union, whose guerillas – including cadres trained in Cuba – would join forces with ANC militants to carry the African revolution into Rhodesia the following year. The Tricontinental magazine that was born from the conference became a major global influence in its own right, publishing quarterly issues brimming with radical essays, poetry and (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 16)
30. American Peoples: A Staff Study, 89th Cong., 2nd sess. 67 ICAP The central nexus of the entire Cuban intelligence and influence network is the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (English: The Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples) – or "ICAP." Founded in 1960 by Fidel Castro, ICAP ostensibly exists to promote goodwill toward Cuba through a global infrastructure of "friendship" and "solidarity" organizations and deep, longstanding ties to U.S. universities, student groups and activist movements. ICAP, which claims to have more than 2,000 solidarity organizations across over 150 countries, serves as the main organizing hub of (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 65)
31. in driving recent U.S. protests and street unrest. National Lawyers Guild The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is one of the most persistently relevant – and insidious – organizations in Cuba's U.S. network. The association of extreme-left lawyers and radical street activists has played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today……………… (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 73)
32. present at the Tricontinental Conference in 1966). Carmichael attended OLAS as an honorary delegate, and received a personal tour of the island by Castro behind the wheel of a jeep. The Cuban leader heaped praise on Carmichael, reportedly introducing him to a 400,000-person crowd in Havana as "one of the most distinguished pro-civil rights leaders in the United States." The next month, he hailed Carmichael's visit as "the strengthening of relations between the revolutionary movement of Latin America and the revolutionary movement inside the United States," predicting that the revolution in America would come from its "Negro sector." (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 56)
33. and provided her with "protection and sanctuary." Shakur's influence has always been infused into BLM's public language. A quote from Shakur's autobiography – "it is our duty to fight for freedom" – is emblazoned in large text on the front page of BLM's website, and was credited by BLM co-founder Alicia Garza in 2014 as a key influence in her "organizing work." Assata's Daughters, a Chicago-based BLM offshoot, is a police-abolitionist activist group that claims to "develop and train" young black activists "in the spirit of Assata." (Its youth program introduces children ages 6-13 "to Assata Shakur and (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 61)
34. Cuba's role in forming this militant Third Worldist consciousness among black radicals was not just ideological but institutional. The regime worked doggedly to build close political relationships with many of the leaders of the Black Power movement as it solidified its place as the world revolutionary capital. (According to some sources, Robert Williams himself was present at the Tricontinental Conference in 1966). Carmichael attended OLAS as an honorary delegate, and received a personal tour of the island by Castro behind the wheel of a jeep. The Cuban leader heaped praise on Carmichael, reportedly introducing him to a 400,000-person (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 56)
35. Today, Cuban agents and operatives maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history. 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 on American college campuses – can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence. 99 From its perch off the coast of (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 97)
36. role in supporting major foreign terror networks. At the same time, the regime continues to operate an extensive hard intelligence network in the United States, with significant penetration into sensitive civilian and military institutions on American territory. The danger of this intelligence penetration is only compounded by Cuba's new alliances, as the island hosts a growing number of foreign military, intelligence, and terrorist installations on its own soil – posing a unique threat to American homeland security. These various threads can only be understood through the prism of the Cuban regime's ideological foundation, imbued by its founder with (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 97)
37. commercial, security and intelligence cooperation. In keeping with its "anti-imperialist" posture, Cuba has long supported the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iranian-backed terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – offering them not just the support of the regime itself, but also a waypoint for expanding their foothold in Latin America. 93 New recruits undergo training in a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) camp. (Getty Images) Iran features prominently in the so-called "Cubazuela" period, when Venezuela's post-Chavez dictatorship effectively operated as a Cuban client state whose (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 91)
38. intelligence agents on the island over the past three years. The threats posed by Cuba's network within America is therefore compounded by its network outside of it. The regime continues to act as a force multiplier for a much broader anti-American coalition, positioning itself as a staging ground for a wide range of foreign adversaries to conduct operations against the United States……………… (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 88)
39. posing a unique threat to American homeland security. These various threads can only be understood through the prism of the Cuban regime's ideological foundation, imbued by its founder with the singular goal of conquering the neighboring United States. Since 1959, Cuba has been – and without fundamental, radical reforms, will always be – less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States. Amid all this, the Cuban people themselves continue to suffer in hunger and darkness, forced to live in something akin to modern slavery under the occupying (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 98)
40. the United States in a conventional armed conflict. Instead, 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. In contrast to every other aspect of Cuba's failed state, this model has yielded remarkable success. For over half a century, this small island nation with a chronically failing economy has operated at the center of a vast hemispheric network. The Cubans trained and armed tens of thousands of left-wing guerillas, oversaw violent insurgencies that plunged multiple continents into chaos, (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 4)
41. to direct the activity against the United States." – Gerardo Peraza, former senior Cuban intelligence official9 On June 6, 1987, Major Florentino Aspillaga Lombard drove a government-issued Mazda across the Czechoslovak border and presented himself at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna. He had served with distinction in the highest ranks of Cuban intelligence, receiving a personal commendation from Fidel Castro himself. While stationed in Bratislava, running a Cuban front company, Aspillaga had decided – after years of growing disillusionment with Castro's regime – to defect to the United States. As he informed the awestruck U.S. officials in Vienna, (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 27)
42. prepared to give the Americans everything he knew. Aspillaga was "the most important Cuban agent ever to cross over to the CIA," as one Washington Post report put it the next year. But the even larger bombshell came next: after being flown to a U.S. Army base in Germany for debriefing, Aspillaga disclosed – and the CIA later independently confirmed – that virtually every spy the CIA had recruited inside Cuba since the 8 Will Grant, "The Cuban Spying Case That Has Shocked the US Government," BBC News, January 9, 2024………………… (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 27)
43. of Law & International Affairs 2026 VOLUME 14 NO. 2 THE CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE OF AMERICA FIRST—IDEOLOGICAL TRANSACTIONALISM AND THE CASE OF CUBA By: Larry Catá Backer* I. INTRODUCTION: SITUATING CUBA AND THE CARIBBEAN WITHIN AMERICA FIRST ................................................................57 II. THE COGNITIVE AND ANALYTICAL AGE THAT IS AMERICA FIRST .................................................................................................65 A. Cognitive Typologies Need Archetypes: The "Merchant" (商) and the "Bureaucrat" (⼠). ......................70 B. The Primary Sources .................................................................80 i. National Security Strategy of the United States for 2025 (November 2025) [NSS 2025]. ..............................81 1. Defining/Describing the Cognitive Cage of the National Security Mask of Economic Policy. ........87 2. What Should (Backer Final Formatted .pdf, Page 0)
44. "353 The nature of the connections were then described along with a conclusion that from this interconnected network of relations Cuba formed part of a transnational apparatus for the support of terrorism and the destabilization of lawful 349 Parts of this section drawn from Larry Catá Backer, Law at the End of the Day (Jan. 31, 2026); available [https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2026/01/on- brink-or-blip-cuba-prepares-for.html]. 350 Exec. Order. No. 14380, 91 Fed. Reg. 5085 Jan. 29, 2026) (Executive Order: Addressing Threats To The United States By The Government Of Cuba) available [https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/addressing- threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-cuba/] (Hereafter Cuba EO).. 351 The White House, Fact Sheet: President (Backer Final Formatted .pdf, Page 121)
45. 3 See Larry Catá Backer, "Taking Steps to Support the Cuban People": Mr. Biden Removes Cuba From List of State Sponsors of Terrorism and Cuba Frees 553 Prisoners, LAW AT THE END OF THE DAY (Jan. 14, 2025), https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2025/01/taking-steps-to-support-cuban- people-mr.html (on January 14, 2025, President Biden removed Cuba from the list of State sponsors of terrorism); see also Trump reinstates Cuba as state sponsor of terrorism, reversing Biden's decision, CBS NEWS Jan. 21, 2025), https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/trump-reinstates-cuba-as-state-sponsor- of-terrorism-reversing-bidens-decision/ (on January 20, 2025, President Trump reversed the recission and placed Cuba, along with North Korea, Iran, and Syria).……………… (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 3)
46. D. The Swinging Pendulum. .......................................................71 V. CONCLUSION: THE CUBAN ECONOMIC CONDITION— THE ABYSS IS DEFINED BY ITS CONTAINER...............................80 2025 Cuba's Stable State of Misery 13:2 3 ABSTRACT The general default position of much commentary on the State of Cuba's political model tends to be premised on an assumption of instability needing repair. For decades, some of the most creative minds on the planet have devoted a tremendous amount of creative capital on solutions to the Cuban problem. This contribution suggests that what appears to be a state of instability and flux is becoming a stable state of misery……………… (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 1)
47. Cuban regime has waged that campaign on every front. It has armed guerrillas, trained terrorists, sheltered fugitives, infiltrated the U.S. government, cultivated generations of American elites, built influence networks inside our institutions, and opened the Western Hemisphere to a succession of hostile foreign powers. It has sought to undermine, degrade and destabilize America with spies and soldiers, but also with students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells, but also with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks. with intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover, but also with ostensibly private exchanges, nonprofits, political organizations, and activist networks. This is what makes Cuba (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 95)
48. posing a unique threat to American homeland security. These various threads can only be understood through the prism of the Cuban regime's ideological foundation, imbued by its founder with the singular goal of conquering the neighboring United States. Since 1959, Cuba has been – and without fundamental, radical reforms, will always be – less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States. Amid all this, the Cuban people themselves continue to suffer in hunger and darkness, forced to live in something akin to modern slavery under the occupying (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 98)
49. Today, Cuban agents and operatives maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history. 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 on American college campuses – can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence. 99 From its perch off the coast of (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 97)
50. cultivate political influence inside the United States. Cuba did – and does – all these things and more; but the Cuban regime has never recognized the neat distinctions that so often structure the American government's understanding of foreign threats. To Havana, there is no hard line separating these functions. It has integrated all of them into a single revolutionary project, around which every single facet and function of the Cuban state is organized. Even as its economy teeters on the brink of collapse in the wake of decades of corrupt communist rule, the Cuban regime's fundamental objective remains (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 97)
51. Comunista Cubano (PCC)) and government after 2006. At the core of the essays is ideology. Ideology has always been treated pejoratively in the West, with the sort of dismissal one once encountered among early Christians with respect to the "mythologies" of the pagans they sought to persecute into extinction. And yet, a feel for Cuban ideology is essential in order to understand the forms and trajectories of the last great post-1959 Cuban transformation, as well as for its impact on the world. That impact will be felt both in the context of Cuban external relations, and in the (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 20)
52. excellent work on these essays that make up this book. Acknowledgements Introduction This book is about ideology. Ideology is the conceptual foundation for the individual and societal self-constitution………………… (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 4)
53. And most importantly, perhaps, it can be understood as the development of a Marxism and a Leninism created under the shadow of, and with a sense of constant threat from the United States, the most successful free market Western liberal state to emerge from the Second World War. Caribbean Marxism, then, is both proactive in its focus on naturalization within a "Latin" and "American" context; but it is also reactive in the sense that it is built with substantial defensive capabilities against the ideological projections of the free market democratic West. Caribbean Marxism is at once both isolationist (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 19)
54. embedding into the global order created around it. While its ideological position and the implementation choices it has made use many of the same words and concepts that are used elsewhere, they acquire a sometimes substantial difference of meaning when used in Cuba or in the West. Concepts like markets, private sector activity, democratic engagement, the role of labor, the role of the PCC, for example, are operationalized within the Cuban "experiment" in ways that are not necessarily compatible with their understanding elsewhere. It may be useful, then, to consider more deeply the principles that shape these internal (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 16)
55. Cuban engagement has been episodic and opportunistic. It has been (and continues to be) confrontational at times and always ideologically driven in large part, perhaps, because those strategies have worked well for Cuba on the international stage. Since the 1959 Revolution, Cuba has fought a number of wars on multiple fronts in the service of its national interests and internationally significant ideological campaigns. Virtually every lever of state power has been used in these efforts— including military, diplomatic, organizational, economic, media, cultural, religious and ideological efforts. Most of these have used the United States, and its socio-political, economic, (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 739)
56. Cuban state has undertaken two significant efforts. The first seeks to develop an alternative basis for inter- governmental management of trade through the Alternativa Bolivariana Para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA). (Backer & Molina 2010). The second, realized in large part within the ambit of the first, seeks an alternative basis of the organization of economic activity for the production of goods and provision of services. The basic theory and objectives of the grannacional generally, is offered as a new form of transnational public enterprise, one that is meant to provide a viable challenge to current conventional (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 742)
57. enterprises are still at a very early stage in development. But all of them share certain characteristics founded on their organizational framework: control by the state, a conflation of labor and capital as components of production and a focus on state policy for the production and distribution of goods and services in the service of state determined economic welfare maximization. Yet, these enterprises, arguably created as a challenge to the conventional global economic framework still must operate within the general parameters of human rights and other norms with respect to which international consensus has been developing, many with (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 744)
58. the production of goods and provision of services. The basic theory and objectives of the grannacional generally, is offered as a new form of transnational public enterprise, one that is meant to provide a viable challenge to current conventional global systems of economic organization. These ideas have been articulated as the "concepto grannacional" being given effect through the inter-governmental arrangements of ALBA. Grannacional economic activity, ideologically based, is divided into two categories. The first, proyectos grannacionales (PGs), are inter-governmental in character. These include efforts to create alternatives to dollar-denominated trade transactions grounded in the "sucre" (Venezuela July 9, (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 743)
59. Chávez's ideological and political campaign. (Id.). Thus, MBA functions at a variety of levels. It serves the ideological goals of the Cuban regime. It is an important means of advancing Cuban international relations. It serves as a template for Marxist-Leninist development models. It provides a different basis for state-to-state relations and commerce, based on government directed, non- reciprocal trade in furtherance of divergent objectives. Yet it is also a business. (Pérez & Haddad 2008). For Venezuela, Cuban doctors serve as a valuable input in the business of creating a viable public health sector. For Cuba, it serves as (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 778)
60. But the business of hiring out workers to outsiders—whether to directly advance state objectives, like the MBA program, or merely to serve the economic interests of foreign partners— essentially treats individuals like factors in the production of national wealth. That wealth is produced by the profit generated in those transactions. That profit is related to the differences between the compensation paid by the Cuban state to its employees sent abroad, and the amounts it charges its "clients" for the services of these individuals. "Loaned" individuals do not participate in discussions over the pricing of their services to third (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 779)
61. International missions have allowed Cuba to fulfill dual goals of capitalizing on its highly educated population as a source of export income while pursuing its humanitarian goals of international solidarity. Cuba's model of charging below-market rates for professional health services has expanded exponentially since 2003 in a win-win situation for poor countries with insufficient medical care. Revenues for services earned from international missions (as well as the licensing and export of Cuban biotechnology and medical treatment to foreigners in Cuba) have become a major source of hard currency earnings, surpassing tourism earnings every year since 2005. (Blue 2010). (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 777)
62. Cuban doctors, teachers and social workers became the human capital for a socialist state-building project, overseen and operated by Havana. As Chávez sought to consolidate control and beat back threats to his power, Cuban advisers built him an internal security regime using mechanisms that the Castro regime had spent the past few decades perfecting: launching purges and loyalty vetting, expanding internal surveillance, and transforming the military into the regime's inward-facing police force. A confidential arrangement between Havana and Caracas authorized Cuban officials to train Venezuelan troops and agents, overhaul the nation's intelligence services, and build a vast new (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 23)
63. through a series of successive compacts and agreements. Cubans supplied the personnel, expertise, and intelligence capabilities that helped Chávez build his new regime, exchanging Cuban doctors, trainers, technicians, and political operators for huge quantities of Venezuelan oil. This arrangement was a historic win-win for Havana: Not only was Venezuela's energy a critical lifeline for averting post-Soviet collapse; it also opened up new pathways for expanding Cuba's foothold in the nation. Tens of thousands of Cuban personnel poured into Venezuelan barrios, ministries, and social programs, forging patronage systems that tied poor communities to the new Bolivarian regime while giving (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 23)
64. through a series of successive compacts and agreements. Cubans supplied the personnel, expertise, and intelligence capabilities that helped Chávez build his new regime, exchanging Cuban doctors, trainers, technicians, and political operators for huge quantities of Venezuelan oil. This arrangement was a historic win-win for Havana: Not only was Venezuela's energy a critical lifeline for averting post-Soviet collapse; it also opened up new pathways for expanding Cuba's foothold in the nation. Tens of thousands of Cuban personnel poured into Venezuelan barrios, ministries, and social programs, forging patronage systems that tied poor communities to the new Bolivarian regime while giving (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 23)
65. Venezuelan petroleum production. (Oletta 2007, at 447). Importantly, Cuba also agreed to the provision, at no cost to Venezuela, of the services of doctors to serve in the health care sector in Venezuela.21 (Convenio 2000, art. IV). Under the terms of the Convenio, Cuba was to supply these medical personnel to work in underserved areas of Venezuela, and bear the costs of their salaries. These medical personnel were to provide medical services and training of locals. Venezuela was obligated to pay only the costs of food, lodging and internal transportation of the medical personnel supplied by Cuba.22 These (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 770)
66. proyectos grannacionales and empresas grannacionales. It then focuses on a specific grannacional-related project—the Misión Barrio Adentro (MBA), a socio-political barter project in which Cuba exchanges doctors and other health field related goods and services under its control for Venezuelan goods, principally petroleum. (Convenio 2000). MBA is analyzed as an example of the application of Cuban-Venezuelan approach to economic and social organization through the state. The MBA is also useful as an illustration of the difficulties of translating that approach into forms that might conform with emerging global expectations of economic conduct by private and state actors. The recent (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 746)
67. Bolivariana de Venezuela." (Convenio 2000, art. II). Venezuela agreed to provide petroleum among other goods and services. (Convenio 2000, Art. III). It has been reported that by 2005, the petroleum supply obligations of the Convenio amounted to 2.44% of Venezuelan petroleum production. (Oletta 2007, at 447). Importantly, Cuba also agreed to the provision, at no cost to Venezuela, of the services of doctors to serve in the health care sector in Venezuela.21 (Convenio 2000, art. IV). Under the terms of the Convenio, Cuba was to supply these medical personnel to work in underserved areas of Venezuela, and bear (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 770)
68. state-determined compensation for their services. While many thousands of individuals employed by the Cuban state abroad in this program have complied with their obligations, a number of doctors have not.25 "The need for hard currency and their inability to earn it legitimately is clearly a factor in individual health care workers' decisions to endure difficult two-year assignments abroad. When tens of thousands of health workers accepted temporary overseas posts, their absence was acutely felt at home. Though health indicators have not declined, Cubans who were used to the highest and most accessible doctor-to-patient ratios in the world are (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 780)
69. expanded medical presence abroad." (Blue 2009, 43). And it was among those doctors dissatisfied with the terms of their service that the possibilities of collision between Cuban medical internationalism and international human rights norms were realized. The issue of compulsion is at the heart of that collision. The loan system conflates notions of individual citizen duty and individual dignity with respect to labor. On the one hand, it appears that, as a formal matter, individuals are not formally coerced to serve the interests of the state's business and political dealings abroad………………… (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 780)
70. known regime opponents was especially forbidden. . . . Had they protested, the doctors explained, they would have been forced to return to Cuba where they would have paid for their insubordination. (Id………………… (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 786)
71. corporation, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). (Galliot 2010). The doctors told reporters at a press conference in a Miami suburb on Tuesday that they were forced to enroll in the programme with Venezuela due to dire economic circumstances and political pressure at home. According to several US and Venezuelan media sources, the plaintiffs described being held captive in crowded lodgings or with families affiliated with the Venezuelan regime, and forced to work seven days a week. "We were under strict surveillance at all times. We weren't allowed to go out when we wanted to or interact with Venezuelans other (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 785)
72. grannacional projects under these international norms. The very ideological foundation of the grannacional projects serves as the basis for conflict with normative standards in effect elsewhere. In a command economy in which there is no distinction between the political and economic sphere and where the line between obligations of citizens and of workers is blurred, the difference between a citizen's duty to the state and involuntary servitude can be quite thin. It is unlikely that international standards will bend to accommodate substantial deviations where the functional effect of state action appears to substantially impede recognized human rights, as (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 801)
73. ALBA. The result is potentially significant for Cuba. This is not to suggest that Cuba's system of bartering its labor force for goods and cash is in fact a violation of international norms. But it is to suggest that Cuba's economic activity—whether undertaken in its sovereign capacity or through enterprises—will be increasingly subject to attack on the bases of these norms. Those attacks will become more potent as Cuba emerges more vigorously within networks of global trade………………… (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 798)
74. stakeholders worldwide. (OECD 2004, at 3 (Forward)). The three include the Principles of Corporate Governance (OECD 2004), the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (OECD 2000), and the Guidelines on Corporate Governance of State- Owned Enterprises. (OECD 2005).33 Under these rule frameworks, corporations, including state owned enterprises are obligated to conform to international norms………………… (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 795)
75. the kind prohibited under international law. (Id.). Similar claims might be asserted under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) principles and the United Nations business and human rights framework —"Protect-Respect-Remedy" principles. The OECD is an intergovernmental organization representing most developed states. (OECD and, About OECD). It has developed three principle sets of norms for corporations that might be understood usefully in their constitutive role. These have become "an international benchmark for policy makers, investors, corporations and other stakeholders worldwide. (OECD 2004, at 3 (Forward)). The three include the Principles of Corporate Governance (OECD 2004), the Guidelines (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 794)
76. of this framework within the Human Rights Council. Yet, if read broadly enough, Cuba's barter system and notions of just trade, might contribute to a violation of the (Cuban) state's duty to protect and the state sponsored enterprises responsibility to respect human rights. To the extent that remedies are not available for complaints, both may also breach their obligations to provide a remedial framework for complaints. These emerging frameworks point to a more global future for Cuba as people seek to test the legitimacy of its singular and ideologically driven establishment of trade and commercial relationships and methods. (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 797)
77. The complainant argued that the basis of Cuban state labor policy, and its implementation in its economic regulations and commercial activities, violates ILO Convention Article 29 on forced labor ratified by Cuba in 1958. (Id.) The complainants echoed language from ILO documents that assert that the "prohibition of the use of forced or compulsory labor in all its forms is considered now a preemptory norm of modern international law on human rights." (Id.). The complaint suggested that the Cuban barter system, grounded in a state power to command behavior coupled with the use of that power to engage (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 794)
78. the precedential value of the case may be limited. The court initially entered a default judgment against defendant (id., at note 3), because the Curaçao Dry Dock Company refused to defend the matter. Critical facts leading to the conclusion were never controverted or effectively put at issue either by the Cuban state or by Curaçao Dry Dock. The company eventually offered evidence, though it was only produced during the more limited damages phase of the proceedings (id., at 1357–58).31 Yet, despite these caveats, the sweeping language of the court does suggest the potential difficulties of exporting a labor (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 790)
79. by Cuba were not free individuals. (Id., 1359–61). The basis of these conclusions were drawn from a report prepared by the U.S. State Department (United States Department of State 2008), which the court took as uncontroverted because of the procedural posture of the case. Although the violations of international law were committed by the Cuban state, the company was exposed to liability on a complicity theory. The Defendant in this case, one of the largest drydock companies in the Western Hemisphere, with tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues, conspired with the (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 790)
80. either by the Cuban state or by Curaçao Dry Dock. The company eventually offered evidence, though it was only produced during the more limited damages phase of the proceedings (id., at 1357–58).31 Yet, despite these caveats, the sweeping language of the court does suggest the potential difficulties of exporting a labor barter system grannacional concept outside of the ALBA zone in a way that would minimize exposure to risk, for Cuba or its trading partners, for lawsuits and claims of this type. This is especially the case for non-ALBA trading partners, or entities involved in GP or EG (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 791)
81. both cases have been brought in the United States. From the Cuban perspective, the United States is in no position to neutrally judge the Cuban state's compliance with international human rights norms. But as important, the United States does not have a strong reputation for adhering to or imposing internally international human rights norms. To use the U.S. courts for the purpose of determining compliance of the Cuban state with international norms with respect to activity that occurs within the territory of a third country suggests a political motive and reduces the authority of the cases, at least (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 784)
82. imposing internally international human rights norms. To use the U.S. courts for the purpose of determining compliance of the Cuban state with international norms with respect to activity that occurs within the territory of a third country suggests a political motive and reduces the authority of the cases, at least outside the United States. And yet, the United States has served as the best site for the vindication of international human rights within the court system of a state………………… (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 784)
83. Despite its result, even in the United States, the precedential value of the case may be limited. The court initially entered a default judgment against defendant (id., at note 3), because the Curaçao Dry Dock Company refused to defend the matter. Critical facts leading to the conclusion were never controverted or effectively put at issue either by the Cuban state or by Curaçao Dry Dock. The company eventually offered evidence, though it was only produced during the more limited damages phase of the proceedings (id., at 1357–58).31 Yet, despite these caveats, the sweeping language of the court does (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 790)
84. We call for calm and condemn any violence].152 Note the care in the language that reinforces a nagging sense of complicity in the maintenance of a stable state of misery—the U.S. remains concerned; that concern runs deep in official circles. The concern is for the Cuban people but more so for a quite specific preservation of a set of civil and political rights—the right to assembly that is peaceful. At the same time the U.S. advances the ideal of such civil rights as bounded by calm (apparently transformative events occur only within the rarified space of discourse—except of (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 56)
85. an incitement, or more benignly an encouragement. Those who "stand with" presume to describe the objectives of the Cuban masses as a "clarion call"154 (again translated to the peculiar internal language of meaning that is meaningful only among elites in the U.S. and their press outlets) for battle—and the only battle of relevance to those "standing with" of course, is one that produces regime change.………………… (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 57)
86. It can be used as a strategic instrument to blunt the exercise of authority of public power, and it serves as a means of effectively projecting cultural power (including the legitimacy of the exercise of politics on the streets) elsewhere. Most importantly, it serves to develop a coherent counter-narrative to that grounded in "stability and prosperity" principles. In both cases, the great powers will continue to argue that prosperity is the ultimate objective and a necessary consequence, either attainable only through a privileging of stability (Marxist-Leninist states) or of the exercise of peaceful protests (the liberal democratic states). (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 58)
87. the basis for the justification of what comes after. And yet, those high principles that animate foreign powers do not transpose, except perhaps as rhetoric, to the situation in Cuba.………………… (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 58)
88. existential revolution against the United States. Amid all this, the Cuban people themselves continue to suffer in hunger and darkness, forced to live in something akin to modern slavery under the occupying regime, held hostage by their own state. Cuba's assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory………………… (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 98)
89. special" period23 appeared to have the opposite effect. It set into practice the conditions under which the state apparatus (and its ideological project) could survive and thrive in an environment of misery.24 Indeed, one might be tempted to wonder whether, from the first, a dynamic state of misery was the price that had to be paid for the ideological purification of the state. It was to the navigation of that stability and misery that the apparatus eventually appeared to dedicate itself by drawing on the moral implications of the political- economic model, and by colluding with internal and (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 9)
90. shadow of its quite useful relationship with the U.S. The third then considers the utility of periodic popular explosion as the disciplinary factor for gauging the limits of misery tolerable by the body politic. This inverts the usual discourse of popular protest as a means of governance rather than in its more usual construction as some sort of pre-revolutionary signaling of the end of the current hegemony of the political-economic model that has shaped Cuban governance since the mid-1970s. I………………… (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 2)
91. That stable state, in turn, suggests that control can be maintained as much based on basis prosperity as it can be based on reality of misery just challenging enough to keep a population well managed, and the political system reasonably well ordered. This article examines recent events in Cuba for hints about the nature and character of this stable state. These hints are organized into three parts. First, the ideological element, considers the morality of consumerism. This conceptual framework, developed over the decades by Fidel Castro and incorporated into the organic documents of the Cuban political economic model, (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 2)
92. ideological element, considers the morality of consumerism. This conceptual framework, developed over the decades by Fidel Castro and incorporated into the organic documents of the Cuban political economic model, helped shape an approach to the role of material goods in a "revolutionary" society in ways that made collective misery—at some level—both tolerable and strategically useful. The second looks to the political-economic element. That is, it considers how the underlying consumerist morality of the political-economic model finds expression in the practices and policies of the State apparatus guided by the Party and its own governance apparatus. The contribution considers (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 2)
93. Still, the overall policy framework remains unchanged. In Cuba, that involves the preservation of the stability of the State apparatus through the cultivation of the instability of everything else and the strategic use of misery.210 "The Cuban system's many dysfunctions do not necessarily mean that it will soon collapse. But they do mean that it is inherently unstable, and that its future is uncertain. At present, Cuba seems to have no alternative other than a continuation in one form or another of the current regime."211 The Cuban model may not be unique in that respect, but it may (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 77)
94. willingness of the state to ignore the unofficial sector. And, some alleged, more evidence of the stable state of this self-reflective system facilitated by foreign powers.35 The four elements—apparatus, mass protest, non-state sector regulation, and toleration of the unofficial economy—then serve as the experiential reality of the operation of stability in misery. The object is then quite straightforward: to begin to understand the cognitive basis for the stubborn resistance of the Cuban elites to the reforms that seem both inevitable by outsiders, especially among economists and political scientists and their disciples. The answer appears as straightforward: that starting (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 13)
95. complementarity since the start of the Special Period. Its object is clear—not to use the private sector to generate wealth, but rather to legalize portions of the non- state (unofficial) sector during periods of need. And need is measured against the maximum misery that can be tolerated from time to time………………… (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 77)
96. longer "capital," but Western civilization itself. 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." History, in the classical Old Left view, was the story of class struggle. The proletariat was a universal class – raceless and nationless, at least in principle. The Cuban regime, in contrast, claimed to be speaking for the colonized peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 11)
97. the Algerian insurgent, and the Colombian guerilla. In Cuba's telling, the oppressed peoples of the world – from Harlem to Hanoi – all shared one enemy. The same racist Yankee imperialism victimizing Africa, Asia, and Latin America was victimizing blacks and other minorities inside the United States. Che Guevara's famous call for "two, three, or many Vietnams" in his 1967 "Message to the Tricontinental" – urging his fellow revolutionaries to open up a hundred fronts of war against the American empire – was not merely addressed to the Global South, but to American radicals in the belly of (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 11)
98. language. The Cubans spoke it as their native tongue. Whereas the old Soviet left had been built around the party, labor unions, and Marxist theories of economic class struggle, the New Left was animated by Black Power, radical feminism, Third World liberation, and – above all else – the radical rejection of Western culture, history and identity in all its forms. As this report will show, it is nearly impossible to overstate the influence that the Cuban Revolution had on this shift, both in the United States and across the world. As the New Left student activist Allen (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 13)
99. American soil, it was Cuba where they found safe harbor. It was Havana, not Moscow, that emerged as the capital of the new ideology of revolution. The Soviets would, in time, support many of the Third Worldist insurgencies and revolutionary movements across the Global South, seeing the obvious strategic value in gaining new client states and weakening the global influence of the American capitalist bloc. But the Kremlin's 14 embrace of Third Worldism was always a marriage of convenience, conducted with an awkward ideological unease; the Soviets could never quite figure out how to square its wild-eyed doctrines (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 12)
100. But Cuba's prominence is not limited to geography. Its arts and letters have had a global impact, its political philosophy has been influential at least in Latin America, and its now fairly ancient and quite public animosity to the United States has propelled it onto the world stage as a proxy (and target) for state and global actors who have constituted Cuba a metaphor for resistance to dominant power. But this external and quite influential face of Cuba--the face that is what foreigners recognize--has an internal dimension that is less often considered. Cuba has tended to look inwards (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 11)
101. structures of Caribbean Marxism as developed for Cuba. Ideology in Cuba remains less open to development with a greater fidelity to its original development and regional features--a fear and loathing of the United States, a focus on sovereignty and regionalism independent of developed states, the subordination of economic activity to serve political objectives, a rejection of the market and market mechanisms, a distrust of private sector activity absent tight management the state, adherence to the implication of class struggle in a rejection of even temporary wealth inequality, and a fidelity both to Leninist political organization (with all political (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 48)
102. the 20th century, suggested that Cuba was special. It was that territory that marked a convenient killing ground at the borderlands of empire—first between the liberal democratic and Soviet Empires, and then between the U.S. (and its dependencies) and China (and its). Lurking on the sidelines always were lesser states with ambitions—Venezuela, Turkey, Iran, Spain and the EU, and the like. Together, the struggles and intrigues of these blocs almost always ensured that unsustainable Cuba would always be sustained……………… (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 49)
103. fully restore its intelligence footprint in Florida. Over the past few decades, however, Havana has leveraged those capabilities to build alliances with a new coalition of anti-American regimes, movements, and actors. Even as it expands and revitalizes its network within the next generation of American left-wing activists, it has also forged new partnerships – or deepened and repurposed old ones – with other foreign governments and movements around the world. China and Russia have both reportedly tripled their intelligence agents on the island over the past three years. The threats posed by Cuba's network within America is therefore (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 88)
104. Iran also has sought to expand its formal strategic partnerships with Cuba in recent years, including a series of agreements surrounding trade, telecommunications, information technology, port services, and the use of Cuban naval infrastructure. Like Russia and China, Iran has forgiven debts and extended generous lines of credit to Cuba amid efforts to deepen political, commercial, security and intelligence cooperation. In keeping with its "anti-imperialist" posture, Cuba has long supported the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iranian-backed terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – offering them not just (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 91)
105. 132 Marc Frank, Cuba wins China debt relief, new funds, REUTERS (Nov. 27, 2022), https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-wins-china-debt-relief- new-funds-2022-11-27/; see also, Funaiole, et al., supra note 122. 2025 Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs 13:2 50 E. Vignette 8: The Hunger Games Part 3—The 'You've Got a Friend in Me' Edition. Some other folks might be A little bit smarter than I am Bigger and stronger too Maybe But none of them will ever love you The way I do, it's me and you.133 From almost the start of the defeat of the Batista dictatorship in 1959 to the (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 48)
106. Games Part 3—The 'You've Got a Friend in Me' Edition. Some other folks might be A little bit smarter than I am Bigger and stronger too Maybe But none of them will ever love you The way I do, it's me and you.133 From almost the start of the defeat of the Batista dictatorship in 1959 to the present day, the Cuban state apparatus and its economic system appeared to be on the verge of collapse.134 It is an impossible and unsustainable system—in and of itself. But the dictates and behaviors of post global empire, even in its (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 49)
107. goal of conquering the neighboring United States. Since 1959, Cuba has been – and without fundamental, radical reforms, will always be – less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States. Amid all this, the Cuban people themselves continue to suffer in hunger and darkness, forced to live in something akin to modern slavery under the occupying regime, held hostage by their own state. Cuba's assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory……………… (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 98)
108. Cuban state has undertaken two significant efforts. The first seeks to develop an alternative basis for inter- governmental management of trade through the Alternativa Bolivariana Para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA). (Backer & Molina 2010). The second, realized in large part within the ambit of the first, seeks an alternative basis of the organization of economic activity for the production of goods and provision of services. The basic theory and objectives of the grannacional generally, is offered as a new form of transnational public enterprise, one that is meant to provide a viable challenge to current conventional (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 742)
109. International missions have allowed Cuba to fulfill dual goals of capitalizing on its highly educated population as a source of export income while pursuing its humanitarian goals of international solidarity. Cuba's model of charging below-market rates for professional health services has expanded exponentially since 2003 in a win-win situation for poor countries with insufficient medical care. Revenues for services earned from international missions (as well as the licensing and export of Cuban biotechnology and medical treatment to foreigners in Cuba) have become a major source of hard currency earnings, surpassing tourism earnings every year since 2005. (Blue 2010). (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 777)
110. Chávez's ideological and political campaign. (Id.). Thus, MBA functions at a variety of levels. It serves the ideological goals of the Cuban regime. It is an important means of advancing Cuban international relations. It serves as a template for Marxist-Leninist development models. It provides a different basis for state-to-state relations and commerce, based on government directed, non- reciprocal trade in furtherance of divergent objectives. Yet it is also a business. (Pérez & Haddad 2008). For Venezuela, Cuban doctors serve as a valuable input in the business of creating a viable public health sector. For Cuba, it serves as (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 778)
111. Embargo mentality" as the ordering device for analysis. Conventionally understood, Cuban engagement has been episodic and opportunistic. It has been (and continues to be) confrontational at times and always ideologically driven in large part, perhaps, because those strategies have worked well for Cuba on the international stage. Since the 1959 Revolution, Cuba has fought a number of wars on multiple fronts in the service of its national interests and internationally significant ideological campaigns. Virtually every lever of state power has been used in these efforts— including military, diplomatic, organizational, economic, media, cultural, religious and ideological efforts. Most of (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 739)
112. 112 Larry Catá Backer, The Cuban Economic Condition—The Abyss is not an Empty Space, LAW AT THE END OF THE DAY (Aug. 3, 2023), 2025 Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs 13:2 42 obtains its purported independence and a stabilizing measure of discursive space in which it can blame all of its problems on capitalism, foreign interference and the U.S. as the once and only evil hegemon of choice.114 Foreign capitalist, Marxist-Leninist, and other monied or interested states (whatever their ideological camp) get what they think is a measure of leverage (though it is hard to (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 40)
113. constitution of post-global empire. Everyone loves to play. And there is a measure of stability in this playground of self- loving states with incompatible agendas except this: to use Cuba to its own discursive advantage. And Cuba has gotten good (not quite as good as the Argentines, but good enough) to play these monied states with agendas and the ability to pay for the privilege of appearing to advance them with and against themselves. Everybody wins. The lending states can continue to develop the narrative of Cuba as a state of crisis and its political economic model as (Backer_Formatted.pdf, Page 41)
114. America First 14:2 177 governments in the region. The United States would hold "holding the Cuban regime accountable for its malign actions and relationships, while also remaining committed to supporting the Cuban people's aspirations for a free and democratic society.……………… (Backer Final Formatted .pdf, Page 121)
115. the priority objectives" for Cuban intelligence. ICAP ultimately serves as the organizational node for the wide range of civil society groups, left- wing activist organizations, and NGOs that collectively comprise a major arm of the Cuban network in the United States. The size and scale of these organizations serve as a force multiplier for Cuba, providing it with far more power, influence and reach than it could ever leverage on its own – and serving as a mechanism by which a sprawling, seemingly decentralized network can be mobilized in service of the Cuban revolutionary state. After decades of (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 67)
116. embedding into the global order created around it. While its ideological position and the implementation choices it has made use many of the same words and concepts that are used elsewhere, they acquire a sometimes substantial difference of meaning when used in Cuba or in the West. Concepts like markets, private sector activity, democratic engagement, the role of labor, the role of the PCC, for example, are operationalized within the Cuban "experiment" in ways that are not necessarily compatible with their understanding elsewhere. It may be useful, then, to consider more deeply the principles that shape these internal (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 16)
117. Americans into instruments of their own nation's undoing. To mistake Cuba's poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely. Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger. Its power was always ideological, subversive, and parasitic – and it has proven remarkably durable, outlasting the Soviet empire that helped build it and grafting itself onto every new enemy of the United States that has arisen since. Today it serves as the connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition, a staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside (Cuba-Report.pdf, Page 98)
118. half century, these efforts have had mixed results. But they have had one singular success—they have propelled Cuba to a level of influence on the world stage far beyond what its size, military and economic power might have suggested.……………… (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 740)
119. Cuban engagement has been episodic and opportunistic. It has been (and continues to be) confrontational at times and always ideologically driven in large part, perhaps, because those strategies have worked well for Cuba on the international stage. Since the 1959 Revolution, Cuba has fought a number of wars on multiple fronts in the service of its national interests and internationally significant ideological campaigns. Virtually every lever of state power has been used in these efforts— including military, diplomatic, organizational, economic, media, cultural, religious and ideological efforts. Most of these have used the United States, and its socio-political, economic, (Backer_Cuba_2018.docx, Page 739)
120. aligned with the experiences and operations of FAR. The key is to get the language right--initially that may require working with the FAR's economic enterprises and negotiating a slow and well managed opening of transactional spaces within Cuba. That builds the meta-spaces for economic activity; consumer level activity and the legal structures for its development might have to start with a 344 This has been the well-known cornerstone of the Chinese win-win strategy. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, Toward a New Type of International Relations of Win-Win Cooperation (Mar. 25, 2015); available [https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyjh/202405/t20240530_11340848.html]. (Backer Final Formatted .pdf, Page 119)
a Marxist-Leninist system that is forward looking. Cuba must find its own if it is overcome the constraints and contradictions of the ideological dead ends it continues to embrace and retain, after the founding generation passes, its Socialist character and develop a Caribbean variant of Chinese Socialist Democracy. That path must draw on Cuba's own indigenous roots and be consonant with the political cultures of Latin America, within which its governance style remains situated. That requires a very different approach to the theoretical foundations of the Cuban Party and State, an approach to seek to do more than (Backer_Cuba_20
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