Historian Grades Marco Rubio’s State Department Report on 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.