Latin American inaction in the face of Cuba's war against the United States and the Americas
By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 27/07/2026
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Titled "Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism," the U.S. State Department released a report on July 20th outlining Cuba's war against the United States and the Americas. This official document describes Cuba's ongoing conflict as a constant threat to the national security of the United States and all countries in the Western Hemisphere. The Cuban dictatorship has been waging this attack for over 67 years, yet now the inaction of most Latin American governments is being exposed.
The traditional concept of war is the “disagreement and breakdown of peace between two or more powers,” the “armed struggle between two or more nations or between factions within the same nation.” Contemporary warfare “is no longer limited to traditional methods, but encompasses political, economic, cultural, social, and cognitive dimensions, with terrorism as the central factor affecting security.” A seventh-generation form of warfare is “hybrid warfare, an approach that combines conventional and unconventional tactics, ranging from covert military actions to support for irregular forces, political and social manipulation, and disinformation.”
In "Hybrid Warfare in the Americas" (2025), I describe it as "an evolution of the traditional armed conflict between nations or groups, which now incorporates diverse elements to weaken the adversary without an open declaration of hostilities. It includes methods such as forced migration, drug trafficking, narcoterrorism, human trafficking, use of gangs, political agitation, candidate financing, reputation and physical assassination, dissemination of fake news, cultural penetration, terrorism…mechanisms that allow for 'plausible denial' by the aggressor…."
The report “Cuba, the Capital of 21st-Century Communism” depicts Cuba’s war against the Americas and begins with one of its conclusions: “Cuba’s attack on the United States was never, in essence, a dispute over economic policy, sovereignty, or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself, waged, in part, by the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to rebel against their own heritage.”
The report begins by stating: “For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. This campaign has infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government, recruited and trained generations of American activists, supported an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the longest-lasting and most damaging foreign intelligence infiltrations in U.S. history. The Cuban campaign against the United States is unique. It is irregular and covert….”
It cites an intelligence memorandum from September 1971 that states: “Almost all Latin American republics have felt interference [from Cuba] at least once… As soon as Castro assumed power in Cuba in January 1959, Havana became the center of subversive operations against other Latin American countries.”
It presents information that Latin American governments are aware of: “By the mid-1980s, Latin America was the scene of more acts of international terrorism against U.S. targets than any other region in the world, driven primarily by at least two dozen Cuban-backed Marxist groups. Estimates from the late 1980s indicated that Cuba had worked with some 27 leftist guerrilla groups throughout the region, totaling approximately 25,000 armed and trained members. In 1986, Latin America accounted for about 55% of all terrorist incidents against U.S. targets. By 1989, this figure had risen to an estimated 64%....In the first three decades of the Castro regime, at least 20,000 guerrillas from virtually every Latin American nation attended terrorist training camps in Cuba.” Current data may be far more complex.
The document covers espionage, revolutionary tourism, racial revolution, front groups and sympathizers, including the so-called Latin American democratic left, the anti-American international, and all these aspects affect Latin America. It defines the dictatorship by stating that “since 1959, Cuba has been and—without fundamental and radical reforms—will always be: less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and intelligence system as a subversive operation.”
Latin American leaders cannot ignore the message in the final paragraph: “To mistake Cuba’s poverty for harmlessness is to completely misunderstand the threat. Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger… Today it serves as a unifying force for a broader anti-American coalition, a stage where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with radical movements operating within our borders.”
The author is a lawyer and political scientist. He is the director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.
«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».