On July 20 the State Department published a report called “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” It argues Havana has spent decades running spies and nurturing influence inside the United States, and the response has been to call that claim a conspiracy rather than confront the evidence.

The report touched off a punchy response from Aaron Coy Moulton, who labeled the whole thing a conspiracy theory and said it offers no “new insights into Cuban intelligence operations” and “seems absurd” that Cuba could afford to meddle in American politics now. That dismissal skimmed over concrete cases that make meddling and infiltration more than just an academic claim.

Victor Manuel Rocha, a longtime U.S. foreign service officer, is a central example. He spent twenty-one years in the foreign service, worked Latin America policy on the National Security Council, served at the American mission in Havana, and was once the United States Ambassador to Bolivia.

Rocha admitted he worked for Cuban intelligence the whole time and pleaded guilty in April 2024, drawing fifteen years. When an undercover counterintelligence agent posed as a Cuban handler in 2022, Rocha called the United States “the enemy” and said what he had done for Havana was “more than a grand slam.” Attorney General Merrick Garland called it “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent.”

Rocha is not an outlier. Ana Belen Montes, the top Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, passed the names of undercover Americans to Havana out of ideology, according to investigators, and Kendall Myers spent thirty years funneling State Department material to Cuban handlers before receiving a life sentence.

The list of incidents also includes violence linked to espionage. In 1996 Cuban fighter jets shot two small civilian planes out of the sky over the Florida Straits, killing four men, three of them American citizens. A federal jury found that a Cuban intelligence officer in Florida knew of the plan and helped clear the way; he received a life sentence and was later exchanged and sent home in 2014.

The argument that espionage inside the U.S. is a paranoid fantasy was already settled decades ago by documents released in the Venona project. When Venona was declassified in 1995, analysts found hundreds of Americans who had worked for Soviet intelligence. Scholars John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr counted 349 people who had secretly assisted Moscow, and the cables showed spies “in virtually every major American government agency of military or diplomatic importance.”

That history complicates the reflex to dismiss any modern claims of infiltration as McCarthyism. Critics rightly point out McCarthy’s excesses, but being wrong about individuals does not erase the existence of widespread espionage. The point is not to revive every excess of the past but to recognize that Kremlin-style influence and penetration have historical precedent and modern echoes.

Similar operations have targeted American institutions from China. In the Bay Area, Christine Fang worked local politics and, according to counterintelligence findings, for Chinese intelligence, raising money for a congressman and placing an intern in his office; the FBI warned the lawmaker in 2015 and the relationship ended. Other cases include a covert police station operated for Chinese authorities in Manhattan and prosecutions of state and local operatives acting as undisclosed agents.

But only one of these foreign influence campaigns gets labeled a conspiracy by many on the left. The other, involving China, is treated as a real national-security problem. That inconsistency matters when it shapes how political parties respond to threats and how seriously they treat evidence of foreign meddling.

Democratic politicians and activist groups have long taken softer positions toward Havana. Fernando Gonzalez Llort, a Cuban spy convicted in the 1990s, now hosts American visitors on the island. Groups like the Venceremos Brigade have been sending volunteers since 1969 and have pushed narratives that downplay censorship and arrests in Cuba, even as independent monitors count political prisoners and document repression.

Notable Democrats have praised or defended elements of Cuba’s government. Karen Bass once called Fidel Castro’s death “a great loss to the people of Cuba” and used the title Comandante en Jefe; her stance only shifted when political stakes rose. In 2021 a House resolution condemning Cuba’s crackdown passed 382 to 40, and all forty no votes were Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Jim McGovern. Later, twenty-seven Democrats backed legislation to lift the embargo.

Americans who travel to Cuba as delegations or influencers often leave with staged goodwill and official access while ordinary Cubans face blackouts, arrests, and scarcity. Visitors get electricity and tours; residents get darkness and police raids. Cuban journalists and activists have pushed back, insisting the island is “not a theme park” and telling foreign visitors to stop doing “ideological tourism.”

On the island the human cost is clear: in July there were reports that the government held 1,306 political prisoners, including forty children, and the country has suffered multiple widespread blackouts this year. Amnesty International noted Cuba’s collapse has structural causes and is “not solely attributable to US government sanctions.” Still, those harsh realities rarely change Washington posture among certain political circles.

Artists and dissidents pay a high price for dissent. Rapper Maykel Osorbo is serving nine years for writing the song “Patria y Vida,” which became the anthem of the 2021 protests and won Song of the Year at the Latin Grammys while he remained in prison. Yet some American delegations accept embassy-hosted tours and praise, not protest, and that choice carries moral and political weight.

The debate now is not just academic. It is about whether the country will treat evidence of foreign influence and repression as a real threat or reduce it to a political charge. Calling every claim a conspiracy without wrestling with documented cases allows foreign regimes to keep operating, and it leaves Americans vulnerable while politicians argue over labels instead of results.