The State Department Just Published an Enemies List

Calling out agitprop as a former spokesperson — and as a concerned, engaged citizen.

In 1996, an American guitarist named Ry Cooder flew to Havana with record executive Nick Gold and sat down with a room full of Cuban musicians nobody outside Cuba had heard of in decades — Compay Segundo, Eliades Ochoa, Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González. Cooder played slide guitar. They played son with its core blend of Spanish strings and African percussion, and bolero. The resulting album, Buena Vista Social Club, won a Grammy, sold six million copies, and introduced the entire world to a Cuban musical tradition that had been quietly waiting fifty years for someone north of Havana to record. Wim Wenders made a documentary about it. My husband had the CD playing on repeat.

Nobody involved in this musical exchange was accused of being a foreign agent. It remains one of the most successful cultural collaborations in the history of the U.S. embargo — proof of what happens when Americans and Cubans are simply allowed to be in a room together, making beautiful music.

I open with this memory because it's the version of U.S.-Cuba people-to-people engagement the State Department's new report has no use for. If Ry Cooder's sessions are what happens when cultural exchange works, the report I want to talk about is what happens when a government decides to activate the State Department in advance of U.S. mid-term elections.

On July 20, the State Department released a hundred-page document titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. The U.S. government’s latest allegations that Cuba is behind “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history” and that its leaders pose “a unique threat to American homeland security” probably comes as a surprise to most Cubans.

This isn’t a country flexing global influence from a position of strength. The national grid collapsed entirely on March 16, killing power for all 11 million residents at once. About one million Cubans currently lack reliable access to water because the delivery trucks don’t have enough diesel to run. Refrigerators are failing and food is rotting. Cuba’s health minister has said the fuel blockade is pushing hospitals toward catastrophe. It is a dire humanitarian crisis, seemingly one the Trump Administration is encouraging.

One Cuban physician managed to get a message out to an American tourist they had met a number of years ago. “We are going through the worst crisis our country has ever experienced. We have spent entire weeks without electricity, without water, without communication, without internet, and without phone service….food is now our highest priority. We can no longer even think about buying clothes or shoes. Even getting medications has become a serious problem - not only because of the shortages, but also because of the extremely high prices on the black market. But we have to endure and keep moving forward.”

Cubans are banging pots and pans — a common form of protest in Latin America called cacerolazo — in the streets over food shortages. In at least one town, protestors torched the local Communist Party office. That’s the government the State Department has just spent a hundred pages describing as “the capital of 21st century communism” - a title that implies a seat of ideological power.

The State Department framed the report as a foreign policy assessment. What a joke. The White House clearly deployed the State Department as a (dare I say) communist-era agitprop tool in the months leading up to our mid-term elections.

For example: buried in a chapter about Assata Shakur — the convicted cop-killer who fled to Havana in 1984 is this sentence: "On the campaign trail in 2025, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani refused to denounce a Democratic Socialists of America tribute to Shakur."

A very popular sitting American mayor. In a State Department report on Cuba.

He's not alone. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein counted at least 43 living Americans and organizations named in the document — among them Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Members of Congress Ayanna Pressley, Maxine Waters, and Ilhan Omar, Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman, Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Amazon Labor Union, the National Lawyers Guild, and Black Lives Matter. The alleged offense, in nearly every case, is the same: they disagreed with U.S. Cuba policy, or associated with people who did.

The State Department’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers promoted the Cuba report with a silly and almost indecipherable use of her official X account to weigh in on American culture wars:

ISO a translation app for her talking points… (Photo: Screenshot, official State Department X account for the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy)

“We won’t convince you (and won’t try) that but-for Cuba, nobody on BlueSky would believe depraved things.” Read that sentence twice. It’s an admission against interest. The Under Secretary is telling you, in her own words, that the report doesn’t actually establish causation, that the argument isn’t “Cuba caused this.” Rather, it’s “here’s a target, believe what you want about why.” That’s not a slip. It’s the method, stated plainly by the person whose job is to sell it.

Here's what I think is actually happening, and why the small notation on Mayor Mamdani specifically is doing so much work in this document. The Trump White House is rattled by his popularity — a young (Muslim) democratic socialist who won New York voters’ respect by running on affordability, and won decisively. He campaigned on a rent freeze, fare-free city buses, universal childcare, funded by taxing the wealthy — a municipal campaign platform, not a plan to transfer ownership of industry to the proletariat. But in politics, the easiest way to defang a popular platform is not to debate it. It's to make the label attached to it radioactive instead.

So the State Department report, and the rhetoric around it, never actually argues that a rent freeze and a bus subsidy are the same thing as the one-party authoritarian communism practiced in Havana. It just places Mamdani and other public figures and organizations in the same paragraph as a fugitive cop-killer, until the reader's eye stops distinguishing "supports fare-free buses" from "receiving direction from a hostile intelligence service." It's a much older trick than the current administration — it's the McCarthy-era conflation of any socialism with Soviet subversion, revived with a Caribbean backdrop instead of a Russian one. (Speaking of real threats to U.S. national security interests, but I digress.)

A former senior State Department official told me flatly they’d never seen such politicization in a national security report: "We would not write about the politics of the U.S. obsession with Cuba (on both sides). Only what was minimally necessary to express policy." Another former top official, more bluntly, commented on the report: "A disgrace and a danger."

According to multiple current sources at State, there's no record of this report having gone through the Department's official tasking system — the standard tracking process by which assessments like this get assigned, drafted, and cleared across the relevant regional and functional bureaus. That absence is itself a story. It means this wasn't the product of thoughtful analysis and consideration by career diplomats who are regional or intelligence experts. It was probably written and cleared by a small circle of political appointees at State and at the National Security Council, perhaps with outside input. Career diplomats are floored — by the sloppy writing, by the attempted history lecture, and most of all by how undisguised the attempt is to make a foreign policy report into an election-season blacklist.

Here's the tell in the report itself. Deep in its account of the 1950s, there's a passage describing how "blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions" helped shrink Communist Party USA membership from 75,000 in 1947 to under 5,000 by 1959. It's framed as history. It functions as a demonstration effect — a government document citing, approvingly, the efficacy of the tactic it's about to deploy on the next page, against a new list of names.

I've written before, on this newsletter, about the late journalist (and later head of the U.S. Information Agency) Edward R. Murrow — about seeing George Clooney play him on Broadway and walking out into the night thinking about how much of Good Night, and Good Luck fit the present tense.

This State Department report is the Trump Administration’s trial balloon to deploy the McCarthy playbook. Senator Joseph McCarthy's power was never really in his evidence, which was often scant or fabricated. It was in the act of naming: read a name into the Congressional Record, wave a folder, and let the person's neighbors, employer, and party do the rest. The accusation was the punishment. McCarthy said as much himself, in 1952: "Treason isn't like top seed, it doesn't just grow. It's created by men with faces and men with names." He believed the naming was the work — that identifying an alleged traitor was itself the accomplishment, evidence optional.

The late folk singer and national treasure Pete Seeger was hauled in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) for performing "If I Had a Hammer" at the wrong dinner. He gave the only answer that still holds up to such abuse: he refused to discuss who he'd sung with or for, on grounds that his associations and opinions didn't make him "any less of an American."

Folk singer Pete Seeger

Which brings me to the summit the Cuba report followed. A week earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened a Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism with featured speaker White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. The ministerial was broadly labeled, but it was in reality a focus on so-called left-wing extremism. (No Proud Boys, KKK or neo-Nazi history, no sir-ee.)

Rubio bumbled through his remarks, declaring the ministerial an “unprecedented event in an unprecedented moment in our history” before launching into a list of American history precedents. Miller as usual was riled up for the audience, calling left-wing violence a "fatal cancer" that, left unchecked, "always becomes a gulag.” Extraordinarily, he argued that violent leftists are visibly identifiable: "They're all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, or in their mannerisms. Every one of them…has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred." He invoked the Bible and claimed they are “coveting people who are morally superior, who are superior in the simple, truthful way they live their lives, people that they look at who are happy and ordered and peaceful and contributing to their communities.” What in the 1930s Germany do we have here, folks?

Heck, the president himself shared a video on Truth Social titled "DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM MUST BE CRIMINALIZED; LEADERS DEPORTED" — right-wing pundit Michael Savage, in the clip, calling for a revived House Un-American Activities Committee to go after Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, and for "every one of them" to be "criminalized and deported." Trump didn't add commentary. He didn't need to. Amplification is its own kind of naming.

I spent 26 years as a diplomat. I sat in rooms where we assessed foreign propaganda — Russian disinformation, Iranian state media, Chinese United Front tactics. And yes, how the Cuban government rounded up political dissidents, and threw independent librarians in prison for making banned books, newspapers, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights available to the public. I know agitprop when I read it.

Agitprop doesn't argue with you. It doesn't need to be true, only repeatable. It fuses a real grievance (yes, Cuban intelligence really did recruit American assets) with a much larger claim — therefore, your mayor, your congresswoman, your labor organizer is compromised — until the two are rhetorically inseparable. That's not a Cuba national security report. That's a blacklist in an election season wearing a Cuba report as a costume.

To be appalled by the State Department report does not require that you believe Cuba never ran intelligence operations against the United States, or that the Cuban people have not suffered deeply under its regime. Those are separate arguments, and the report deliberately blurs them. It asks you to notice whose names they list and associate with dangers to national security.

What a mess we have, fellow Americans. Edward R. Murrow closed his most famous broadcast by turning the camera back on his audience: the fault, he said, was not in the stars, but in ourselves. Seventy years on, someone is now re-posting a hundred-page federal document on Cuba instead of a folder waved on the Senate floor, but the invitation is the same — to let someone else do our thinking, and our naming of enemies, for us.

***

Meanwhile, I am reminded that I should head up to Mayor Mamdani’s 'hood to catch the production of Buena Vista Social Club on Broadway.

That’s this week’s Soundcheck. Keep it at eleven.