On July 20 the State Department published a report called "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism." It laid out how Havana has spent six decades running spies and building friendships inside the United States. Less than three weeks later Aaron Coy Moulton, a historian at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, called it a conspiracy theory. A red scare in new paper.

Moulton brought up Cuban spying twice and then dropped it. He wrote that the report offers no "new insights into Cuban intelligence operations." He wrote that it "seems absurd" that Cuba could afford to meddle in American politics now, "if it ever could."

His article never mentions Victor Rocha. It never mentions Ana Belen Montes or Kendall Myers. The words espionage and spy do not appear in it anywhere. He picked the weakest paragraph in a hundred-page report, knocked it down, and called the whole thing a fantasy.

Cuba got a United States ambassador. He pleaded guilty two years ago.

Rocha called America the enemy for forty years

Victor Manuel Rocha spent twenty-one years in the American foreign service. He ran Latin American policy on the National Security Council, the White House staff that runs foreign affairs, with Cuba on his desk. He served at the American mission in Havana. He was the United States Ambassador to Bolivia. After he retired, he advised the four-star general in charge of American military operations across Latin America.

He worked for Cuban intelligence the whole time.

In 2022 the FBI sent an undercover agent to meet him, posing as a Cuban handler. Rocha talked. He called the United States "the enemy." He said what he had done for Havana was "more than a grand slam." He pleaded guilty in April 2024 and drew fifteen years, the most the charges allowed. Attorney General Merrick Garland called it "one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent."

He is not the only one. Ana Belen Montes was the top Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's spy shop. She handed Havana the names of four Americans working undercover. She took no money for it. The FBI says she did it out of pure ideology. Kendall Myers spent thirty years passing Havana what crossed his desk at the State Department. He drew a life sentence and died in federal prison this March.

Then there was the killing. On February 24, 1996, Cuban fighter jets shot two small civilian planes out of the sky over the Florida Straits. Four men died. Three were American citizens. The fourth had come over from Cuba on a raft. A federal jury found that a Cuban intelligence officer living in Florida, Gerardo Hernandez, knew the shootdown was coming and helped clear the way for it. He got life. He served sixteen years. Then Obama sent him home to a hero's welcome in Havana in December 2014, as part of the deal to reopen relations.

None of that appears in the article calling this a conspiracy theory.

Venona ended this argument thirty years ago

Americans were told for two generations that Soviet spies inside their government were a paranoid fantasy. Then the National Security Agency declassified Venona in 1995.

Venona was a secret Army program that cracked Soviet spy cables during and after World War II. The government sat on it for fifty years. When it opened, the historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr counted 349 people living in the United States who had worked secretly for Soviet intelligence. By 1948, they wrote, the cables showed Moscow had spies "in virtually every major American government agency of military or diplomatic importance."

Alger Hiss was one of them. He was a senior State Department official who sat at the table in 1945 when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carved up Europe, and he helped write the charter of the United Nations. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were another two. They were executed in 1953 for handing American atomic secrets to Moscow, and the left has spent seventy years insisting they were framed. Julius ran the ring. Klehr writes that Ethel talked her own sister-in-law into pushing her husband to spy. Recruiting for a spy ring is being in the spy ring.

The modern answer to all of this is to change the subject to Joe McCarthy. His lists were sloppy. Plenty of names he read out loud never showed up in the Venona cables. So one narrow correction gets used to erase the whole record, and everyone agrees the fifties were a hysteria and moves on.

That is the exact trick Moulton runs on the Cuba report, and it fails for the same reason. McCarthy's critics said the spying was a fantasy. They were wrong about the thing itself. McCarthy said the spying was real, and even Klehr grants him that: the senator was "wrong about many, if not most, of the individuals he attacked," but he "was right about the massive extent of Soviet espionage." Getting names wrong inside a true story is a smaller failure than being wrong about the story. McCarthy came closer to the truth than the men who spent seventy years sneering at him, and closer than the professors still doing it.

Historians like to answer that McCarthy's recklessness is what let real Communists play the victim. That gives him far too much credit. Communists did not need McCarthy to teach them how to claim an injury. The whole theory runs on grievance. They are victims of the rich, of empire, of colonialism, of the embargo. Marxism is a machine for turning other people's failures into your own wound, and it was running a century before anyone in America heard McCarthy's name.

Havana still runs it today. The lights go out, the shelves go empty, and the blame goes to Washington.

Beijing ran the same play on a sitting congressman

A woman named Christine Fang worked Bay Area politics from 2011 through 2015. American counterspies concluded she was working for China's spy service. Axios reported that she raised money for Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell and got an intern placed in his House office. The FBI warned him off her in 2015 and he cut her loose.

Swalwell was never accused of a crime, and no secrets moved. He may not have understood what was standing in front of him. The operation ran anyway, and by its last year he was sitting on the House Intelligence Committee. That is the whole point of the exercise.

The Chinese have not stopped. A Bronx man was convicted in May of running a secret Chinese police station out of a building in Manhattan's Chinatown. A former aide to New York Governor Kathy Hochul was charged with working as a Chinese agent, and prosecutors are trying her a second time after a jury deadlocked. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2020 that nearly half the bureau's five thousand open counterintelligence cases involved China.

Nobody calls the Chinese version a conspiracy theory.

Forty House Democrats would not condemn Cuba's prisons

Democrats have been building relationships with the Cuban government for fifty years, and they are still doing it.

The Cuban agency that hosts American visitors is run by Fernando Gonzalez Llort, one of the Cuban spies convicted alongside Hernandez in Florida. He served roughly sixteen years in an American prison. Havana rewarded him with the job of greeting Americans at the airport.

One of the groups he greets is the Venceremos Brigade, which has been sending American volunteers to work in Cuba since 1969. In 2023 the Brigade told a United Nations human rights body that what Americans hear about Cuban censorship "is simply not true," and that children under eighteen cannot be arrested in Cuba. Prisoners Defenders, the group in Madrid that keeps the count, counted forty children in Cuban prisons last month.

Karen Bass went on that trip in 1973. She is now the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, and in 2020 she was on Joe Biden's short list for vice president. When Fidel Castro died in 2016, Bass called his death "a great loss to the people of Cuba" and used the dictator's own title for him, Comandante en Jefe. She only backed off it four years later, when the vice presidency was on the line.

In July 2021 Cubans filled the streets in more than a dozen cities shouting for freedom, and the police filled the jails. The Democratic Socialists of America said nothing. Four months later the group announced that it rejected "any narrative that places blame squarely on Havana for the effects of a longstanding US embargo." It never mentioned the arrests, the trials, or the sentences. Last October the group sent forty of its leaders and members to Cuba, and its Washington chapter held a debriefing afterward paid for by the Cuban embassy.

In November 2021 the House took up a resolution condemning the Cuban government for the crackdown and demanding it release the people it had arrested. It passed 382 to 40. All forty no votes were Democrats, among them Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Jim McGovern. Ocasio-Cortez had condemned the Cuban government by name that July. She voted no anyway.

This February McGovern filed a bill to wipe out the embargo, the trade ban the United States has kept on Cuba since the Kennedy years. Twenty-seven Democrats signed on. Most of them are the same names.

Cubans in Havana are not props

In March an aid convoy flew 650 people from thirty-three countries into Havana. Medea Benjamin of the American group CodePink went. So did the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, with an endorsement from Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. Cuba's president met them personally and thanked them for their friendship.

So much for Cuba being too broke to reach into American politics. Havana did not need a budget. Americans flew down and paid for their own hotel rooms.

Cubans were furious. The journalist Yoani Sanchez wrote that her country is "not a theme park," and told the visitors to "go do ideological tourism somewhere else. Here we are suffering." A man named Ledian Espinosa watched them arrive and said the visitors got electricity and a party while Cubans got darkness and the secret police. A forty-five-year-old woman named Angela told Univision the Americans had come to wash the dictatorship's face, and then said the thing that should end this argument in the United States permanently. They "dare to try to explain your own reality to you."

That is what is happening here. Americans are using Cubans as scenery, and then flying home.

The government those Americans came to help held 1,306 political prisoners in July, forty of them children. The island has gone completely dark six times this year. Most Cubans get a few hours of electricity a day. Amnesty International, which nobody would mistake for a conservative outfit, wrote that Cuba's collapse has structural causes and "is not solely attributable to US government sanctions."

One of those prisoners is a rapper named Maykel Osorbo. He is serving nine years for writing a song. The song is called "Patria y Vida," Homeland and Life, and it turns Castro's old slogan, Homeland or Death, back on the regime. It became the anthem Cubans chanted in the streets in 2021. It won Song of the Year at the Latin Grammys, and Osorbo was in a cell the night it won. He is still in that cell. The Americans who flew to Havana in March were the guests of the government that put him there.

Democrats cannot see what is in front of them

This is the party that wants to run the country again in three months.

Its members took a delegation to Havana this spring. Its mayor in Los Angeles mourned Fidel Castro. Forty of its House members would not sign a piece of paper condemning a government for jailing teenagers, and twenty-seven of them want the trade ban lifted so Havana can have the money. When an American ambassador turns out to have spent forty years working for that same government, the answer from the academy and the press is that raising it at all is McCarthyism.

Americans keep being told that the danger to this country comes from the people who name the threat. It comes from the people who cannot bring themselves to say what Cuba is, standing in a blacked-out city, explaining to Cubans what their own lives are like.