August 26 — Belly of the Beast
Marco Rubio’s State Department accuses Cuba of fueling “far-left terror” in the United States and recruiting solidarity activists to “turn America against itself.”
According to Teishan Latner, a leading scholar of U.S.-Cuba left solidarity, the claims are the same ones the FBI and CIA made in the 1960s and 1970s. They were as spurious then, he says, as they are now.
This week, Belly of the Beast journalist Yohan Rodríguez speaks with Latner about how the State Department twisted his scholarship into a sweeping McCarthyite conspiracy theory to criminalize U.S. social justice movements and justify possible military action against Cuba.
When the State Department released its report “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” last month, historian Teishan Latner recognized the material — some of it seemed to be drawn directly from his own writing.
Latner, a history professor at Thomas Jefferson University, has spent over a decade researching the ties between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. left. His 2018 book on the subject, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992, is the first multi-decade scholarly account on the subject.
According to Latner, the State Department report regurgitates false claims the FBI and CIA made about U.S.-based activists in the 1960s and 1970s, when the agencies alleged that U.S. solidarity delegations served as a recruiting pipeline for Cuban intelligence.
“There’s no evidence that Cuba has actually successfully recruited anyone who has been a member of a U.S. solidarity brigade,” Latner said.
Asked how he’d grade the report if a student submitted it as a paper, Latner said: “It would probably be a very poor grade, especially on the basis of evidence.”
While the report may be laughable as a work of scholarship, Latner says it serves a political purpose: to crack down on progressive organizations and leaders, and to strengthen the case for the administration’s hostile policy against Cuba.
Watch Belly of the Beast journalist Yohan Rodríguez’s interview with Latner HERE.
