This History Professor Graded Marco Rubio's Cuba Report. He Got an F.

"It was shocking on every page to see the way in which the State Department's report was reiterating the same claims, and many of them very fraudulent claims that had been leveled against American solidarity activists in the 1960s and 1970s," said Teishan Latner, associate professor of history at Thomas Jefferson University and author of Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992.

"None of this was actually supported by evidence," he said.

"The problem for Rubio and the problem for those trying to [criminalize] this kind of solidarity is that, you know, solidarity is not a crime," Latner added.

"And so the Rubio report allows Washington to criminalize American social justice movements and to lay the groundwork for a possible military action against Cuba," he said.

"Hi everyone. Welcome to Belly of the Beast. My name is Yohan Rodríguez, and today we are going to be speaking with Teishan Latner," said Yohan Rodríguez, journalist with Belly of the Beast.

"Teishan. Thank you for having us," he said.

"My pleasure," Latner replied.

"Teishan, recently you presented your latest book about Cuba at the International Fair of Havana. What can you tell us about your book?" Rodríguez asked.

"The book was originally published in 2018. It was the result of my doctoral dissertation. I was working on it for years, doing research here in Cuba, interviewing Cuban colleagues, doing research around Cuba, in the United States, in archives, primarily in the United States. And it was finally published this past January in Cuba. This is obviously a huge honor for me, but it's also very important for me to have the opportunity to engage directly with Cuban readers," Latner said.

"The purpose of the book was to analyze the long term relationship between the Cuban Revolution and the US left, and by the US left, I mean the various movements for social justice that were active from the 1960s through the present day. It was also not a topic that had been extensively researched previously," he continued.

"And so I chose to focus on five, we could say, case studies. And so the first case study was about the Brigada Venceremos, right, which is very well known here in Cuba, but hadn't been the subject of a lot of scholarly attention. And I used that chapter as a way to explore the broader relations between Cuba's revolution and social movements in the United States," Latner said.

"And for the second chapter, I looked at the CIA and FBI campaigns to criminalize travel to Cuba by US activists. The next chapter was about Americans who were hijacking planes to Cuba, right. Some of them were U.S. activists and leftists. Some of them were apolitical adventurers. And they landed in Cuba. And the Cuban state had to figure out what to do with these people," he added.

"The fourth chapter was about something that most people know very little about. It's the existence of Cuban American progressives and leftists inside the United States who wanted to normalize relations with Cuba," Latner said.

"The fifth chapter, it was about American political exiles in Cuba. And many of them are better known. They range from individuals such as Assata Shakur, who really became an international icon and a symbol of resistance, to American political exiles in Cuba who are much less known," he continued.

"For example, Charlie Hill," Latner added.

"Recently, the U.S. State Department published a report called Cuba: The Capital of the 21st-century Communism, which covers a lot of the history that you write about in your book. What was your first reaction to this report?" Rodríguez asked.

"Yeah, I mean, it was shocking. I haven't read the entirety of the report, I have to confess, but I've read much of it, and it was shocking on every page to see the way in which the State Department's report was reiterating the same claims, and many of them very fraudulent claims that had been leveled against American solidarity activists in the 1960s and 1970s," Latner said.

"So there was the claim, for instance, that the Venceremos Brigade was being trained in guerrilla warfare, right, or that they were being recruited as spies, or that they were being trained in the tactics of violent protests. You know, these are claims that were never proven. And in my own investigations for the book, it became very clear that none of this was actually supported by evidence," he said.

"The problem for Rubio and the problem for those trying to criminalize this kind of solidarity is that, you know, solidarity is not a crime. Right. And also supporting the Cuban Revolution, right, if one is a U.S. American, is also not a crime. Associating with those that various politicians in the United States do not like is also not a crime," Latner said.

"It's noteworthy as well that in the 60s and 70s, when Marco Rubio was not Marco Rubio, when the FBI and the CIA were making these claims against the Venceremos Brigade, no members of the brigade were ever charged with any crime that I know of, that I was able to find. None of them were ever convicted of anything related to their travels to Cuba," he continued.

"And I think in many ways, I mean, I can't, as a historian, I'm loathe to try to protect the future, but we'll see whether or not actual criminal charges against U.S. activists who are traveling to Cuba actually come into being, or stick, as criminal charges," Latner said.

"But in reading Rubio's report, it was enormously clear that they were reiterating, you could almost say regurgitating, the same claims and some of the same material that had been circulating in the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI and the CIA both produced copious reports that claimed to, let's not say prove, because I don't know if even they themselves would have used that terminology, but they tried to demonstrate a linkage between American solidarity movements and the Cuban revolution," he added.

"What do you think the United States is trying to achieve with this policy and the recent report from the State Department?" Rodríguez asked.

"It's designed to lay the groundwork to manufacture consent, we could say, for a possible military action against Cuba," Latner said.

"It's also designed to lay the groundwork, rhetorical, legal and otherwise, for the criminalization and repression of American social justice activists who are working in solidarity with Cuba, but much more broadly. It comes in the context of, you know, electoral victories for left wing and progressive candidates in the United States. There is the sense of a panic right within the political establishment in the United States, obviously within the Republican Party, but also within the centrist core of the Democratic Party, that this is something that has to be contained, to be tamped down," he continued.

"And so the Rubio report, you know, allows Washington, allows the Trump administration, to do all of that at once, right, to criminalize American social justice movements and to lay the groundwork for a possible military action against Cuba, at the same time," Latner said.

"Some people said that the report was written by AI. What was your impression about it?" Rodríguez asked.

"There's been a lot of allegations and suggestion that a lot of the reports that have been coming out of various government agencies in the Trump era are written with the assistance or are augmented by AI. As a professor, I read a lot of writing that is produced by students that are using AI," Latner said.

"And so, you know, I can't prove that it was written with the assistance of AI, but it bore some of the hallmarks. The other thing that was very curious about the report is that it seemed to be echoing, we could say, scholarship that has been written on this topic in English in the United States. You know, I thought that I recognized my own scholarship and writing in various places in the report," he said.

"It's worth noting also that if someone, like in the State Department, is interested in researching the historical relationship between Cuba and the US left, there's not a lot of published information on this, right, to actually research that topic," Latner continued.

"You have to use the published scholarship that's there. And my book is one of the only pieces of scholarship that actually did that. And that's one of the reasons I began to wonder if they had actually used it in producing their report," he added.

"If a student of yours gave you this report as a paper, what grade would you give them?" Rodríguez asked.

"It would probably be a very poor grade, especially on the basis of evidence," Latner said.

"The report makes a lot of allegations that relies very heavily on innuendo, guilt by association. It's not very heavy on citations and footnotes. In other words, it doesn't have a lot of evidentiary basis. If the intention of the report is to prove guilt by association, or to suggest that Americans who are acting in solidarity with Cuba are guilty of a crime because they have traveled to Cuba, or because they have expressed, you know, a protest or dissatisfaction with American policy toward Cuba, then it doesn't do a very good job," he said.

"From a historical perspective or from a scholarly perspective, it's not a strong report. I mean, it doesn't have a strong evidentiary basis," Latner continued.

"It doesn't have a lot of footnotes or citations. If a reader wants to assess whether or not the claims are actually based in evidence, then there's not a strong basis to do that. As historians, we are trained to follow the evidence, to look at government documents, oral histories, newspaper articles, all the different things that we as historians use to try to get a sense of what was happening in the past and to analyze it," he said.

"And we then come to conclusions, right? We come to interpretations. Those interpretations vary, according to the historian. No one is really able to do that on the basis of what the State Department has produced, which is really based in innuendo. It's based in guilt by association claims. The reader is not able to actually follow the trail of those allegations," Latner said.

"This idea of guilt by association and innuendo is very strong in the report, right? It says, for instance, that a particular activist or a particular politician traveled to Cuba and then participated in protest activities in the United States. Well, there's a sort of a circumstantial claim that might be able to be made, but that's certainly not, you know, proof," he continued.

"Certainly nothing that would be admissible in a criminal trial that that activist is actually committed any crime at all," Latner added.

"This is important if it's going to be used as the basis to both criminalize American solidarity movements with Cuba and also to lay the groundwork to manufacture consent for a U.S. military campaign against Cuba," he said.

"And the worry about Rubio's report, of course, is that it is laying the groundwork rhetorically," Latner concluded.

"Based on your research, have Cuba actually influenced the U.S. left?" Rodríguez asked.

"We can say that the Cuban revolutionary project has been enormously inspirational to many people around the world, not just in the United States, but in many other places, and many who have worked for social justice around the world have been inspired by Cuba's example," Latner said.

"Is Cuba trying to actually influence U.S. leftists to destabilize or commit crimes in the United States? There's no evidence of that at all. But there is a lot of evidence of a long standing relationship of solidarity between Cuba and Cuba's revolutionaries, and ordinary Cubans, and leftists and social justice activists in the United States," he said.

"There's this fundamental contradiction in the sense that Cuba is imagined as a failed state, or accused of being a failed state, even as the United States does everything in its power to overthrow it and to make living conditions so terrible that a society is unable to function," Latner continued.

"And at the same time it imagines Cuba is so politically powerful, so politically influential, that it actually has the ability to influence, to even pull the strings as the metaphorical puppet master inside the United States, to influence and control American social movements," he said.

"I want to say one other thing, actually, about the way in which American solidarity activists have related to Cuba and related to the Cuban revolutionary project, because one of the things that Rubio and Cuba's critics often say is that American solidarity activists are entirely uncritical, right, that they imagine Cuba as some kind of utopia, right, as a society that has no internal contradictions, that has no problems. And again, as someone who has studied the American solidarity movement for a long time and as someone who has participated myself, I can say for sure that that is not the case, right. So American solidarity activists, however, what they try to do is understand Cuba's fight historically for sovereignty, for self-determination, and to fight politically so that Cuba has the space to be able to determine its own future," Latner said.

"Outside of political meddling, outside of the external influence, we could say, right, of Washington and of the United States. So it's important to say this, right, because one of the things that has often been said about American solidarity activists is that they are controlled by Havana. Right. That they have no agency of their own," he continued.

"And that's, of course, not fair to us Americans. Right. It's also paternalistic to them. We Americans also have the ability and have the right to make up our own mind about Cuba and Cuba's political process," Latner said.

"We don't have any evidence of actual foreign interference if we're talking about American solidarity activism or American social movements or American leftists. What the Rubio Report discusses is the existence of Americans who have spied for Cuba. That is true. It is not true that these are American spies that have been recruited from American solidarity delegations to Cuba," he added.

"They are U.S. Americans who decided to become spies for Cuba because of their sense of injustice about American foreign policy toward Cuba. And they looked at American foreign policy toward Cuba, and they decided that they wanted to help, in their own words, help Cuba defend itself against U.S. imperialism. There's no evidence that Cuba has actually successfully recruited anyone who has been a member of a U.S. solidarity brigade," Latner said.

"And that's important to say, because that's one of the things that the Rubio report alleges. It's also one of the claims that was made by the FBI and by the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s, when they said that the Venceremos Brigade was a feeder movement for spies, for Cuban trained spies in the United States. And one of the arguments that I make in the book is that, well, if you're looking for a U.S. spy, someone who can spy for Cuba, a U.S. spy for Cuba needs to be able to penetrate U.S. intelligence agencies, penetrate the U.S. government," he continued.

"Well, from the CIA's perspective and from the FBI's standpoint, the State Department's perspective, the last person that they're going to hire is someone who traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. Right. So it's not a strong argument in the sense of common sense, but it's also not supported by any evidence at all," Latner concluded.

"Do you think that right now in the U.S., being part of the left movement could be dangerous for the life right now?" Rodríguez asked.

"It's hard to say," Latner said.

"We don't have any examples of American solidarity activists with Cuba losing their lives as a result of that kind of work, but it's certainly a very dangerous historical moment in the United States," he continued.

"Solidarity activists returning from Cuba, especially through Miami, have received various forms of harassment and repression. They have had their cell phones seized," Latner said.

"They've had their devices and computers seized and searched. They've been interrogated and confined. None of them that I know of, right, have been charged with any criminal acts. Right. So it's important to recognize that this is harassment," he added.

"It's a form of intimidation. It is designed to intimidate U.S. Americans against standing in solidarity with Cuba, if they so choose. It is not something that has actually resulted in criminal charges yet. But there is a fundamental contradiction, right, in the sense that the Trump administration claims that Cuba is a dictatorship. It claims that Cuba is a police state," Latner said.

"And yet the Trump administration is using precisely those mechanisms against Americans that expressed dissatisfaction with U.S. policy toward Cuba. So I think the connection, the contradiction, is very, very clear," he continued.

"There is very much a sense of fear. And it's, of course, that fear that the Trump administration and that Rubio is trying to cultivate with a report like this, which, you know, makes claims that sound very serious, and they are the kinds of claims that would allow a law enforcement agency, perhaps, to engage in violent raids against the homes of activists, perhaps," Latner said.

"And so there is that sense in the United States that it is a dangerous time to stand up for one's principles with regard to Cuba, with regard to Palestine, with regard to many of the other issues that people in the United States are concerned about right now. But the Rubio report is very much trying to cultivate this fear," he continued.

"And what I've heard, actively, and I'm not an activist primarily myself, I'm an academic, I'm an educator, but what I've heard activists saying is that it's also very important not to allow the Rubio report to accentuate this fear. U.S. Americans have a right to politically organize. U.S. Americans have a right to stand in solidarity with Cuba if they choose to. And they have a right to do that without the fear that they will be persecuted or imprisoned, or, God forbid, physically harmed by the Trump administration, by the police, or by ICE," Latner concluded.

"When did Cuba become part of your research?" Rodríguez asked.

"I first became involved with Cuba in 1998. I was a humble intern for Global Exchange, which is a human rights organization," Latner said.

"Global Exchange at that time was led by Medea Benjamin, who is now among the leadership of Code Pink. I was working, as an intern, for a program called the Reality Tours Program to Cuba. It was a program that was designed to give U.S. Americans from all walks of life, students, teachers, retirees, the opportunity to travel to Cuba legally and evaluate Cuban society with their own eyes, whether through the lens of health programs or cultural programs or agriculture," he said.

"And it allowed U.S. Americans to have conversations with everyday people in Cuba, and to witness Cuban social projects, to travel around the island," Latner continued.

"I didn't know a lot about Cuba when I first began doing that work. I became fascinated by Cuba in some ways as a result of the experiences of these Americans who were coming back from Cuba, that had these incredible experiences, and they wanted to tell everyone they knew about it," he said.

"And I didn't actually realize that that would be the start of what has become a lifelong engagement with Cuba and the Cuban political project. I traveled to Cuba physically for the first time as a member of the Venceremos Brigade in 2004. I worked a little bit with the brigade for a couple of years afterward, helping them screen potential participants," Latner said.

"I traveled back to Cuba in 2006 just as a tourist, and I began doing research in Cuba seriously in 2012, 2013, and since then I've been traveling to Cuba several times a year. I've traveled to Cuba perhaps 40 times now, sometimes staying for months at a time. So it's been very much a lifelong engagement," he added.

"What got your attention on Cuba that made you think, well, I want to do research about this country, about these people?" Rodríguez asked.

"I think I became interested in researching Cuba for the same reason that many people become interested in Cuba more broadly, even beyond just the question of research. I was interested in what it meant for a small nation in the Caribbean to chart its own course, independent of U.S. influence, independent of U.S. domination, for five decades. At that point, when I first became involved in Cuba, I was also interested in the way in which Cuba, with little material resources, was able to have an outsized footprint in terms of global health," Latner said.

"And so I was interested in all of those questions as a researcher," he added.

"How does your work on African American history and the Black Power movement connect with the history or your research in Cuba?" Rodríguez asked.

"There's been a long standing relationship between what historians call the black freedom movement in the United States and Cuba more broadly, you know, prior to the 1959 Cuban Revolution," Latner said.

"There has been a long history of travel, of cultural and political exchange. My own research is about the black freedom struggle and its relationship with the Cuban Revolution, especially from the 1960s onward. And the primary example of this was always the Black Panther Party. There had always been other black radical organizations in the United States that were interested in Cuba's revolution, that were trying to understand it, that wanted to learn from it, you know, that criticized it," he continued.

"But the Black Panther Party was the most important. It was the largest expression of radical black power organizing in the United States. It was also avowedly socialist. The Black Panther Party was also internationalist, and the Black Panther Party was intensely interested in forging coalitions across racial lines, across class lines, across national borders. That is also the political outlook, one could say, of Cuba and Cuba's revolutionaries," Latner said.

"They were very much interested, both the Black Panther Party and Cuba's revolutionaries, in this idea of forging a movement, or forging a nation, based in interracial unity and based in class struggle. And so the Black Panther Party became the primary expression of that in the United States, in the eyes of the Cuban government and in the eyes of Cuban revolutionaries," he concluded.

"So Assata Shakur, she just passed away last year here in Cuba, and she was mentioned in your book and also in the State Department report. Do you think that maybe her story is used or instrumentalized as evidence of the alleged Cuba conspiracy?" Rodríguez asked.

"Assata Shakur was the best known of the U.S. political exiles in Cuba. There have been many others over the years, but she has always been a symbol not only of resistance to U.S. incarceration, but also for the State Department and the CIA and FBI. Assata was also a symbol of Cuba's provision of political asylum to U.S. Americans," Latner said.

"It's worth noting that the provision of political asylum is a right that is granted by the UN charter, by the UN Declaration of Human Rights," he said.

"So Assata is one of the best known U.S. political exiles in Cuba," Latner continued.

"Her presence in Cuba was instrumentalized by the Trump administration. And she is, you know, used as an example in the Rubio report. You know, most likely because she is the best known exemplar of the U.S. political exiles in Cuba. She's also a symbol, you could say, an icon of resistance around the world, not only in the United States," he said.

"And so if the Rubio Report is going to single out someone who can be a symbol of Cuba's provision of political asylum to U.S. Americans, Assata is the best person for them to use. So Assata was an important part of the book," Latner said.

"I met her for the first time in 2004, when I was in Cuba as a member of the Venceremos Brigade," he continued.

"She was attending a global event on the Cuban health system. And when I was doing research for the book beginning in 2012 and then '13, '14, 2015, the U.S. political exiles in Cuba, some of them became my research contacts, not Assata Shakur. She at that time was living essentially underground, even within Cuba, protected by the Cuban state, for reasons of her own security and safety," Latner said.

"Actually, I did not interview Assata for the book. I had to try to understand the nature of her exile and her life in Cuba through other means, by doing interviews, by talking to other people. But Assata became kind of a key part of the book. There's a whole chapter in the book which is about American political exiles in Cuba, and it's really formed around Assata's life and her political exile in Cuba, simply because she's so important, and it's so important to understand her presence in Cuba, to understand the experiences of the other political exiles that have been here in Cuba," he continued.

"Assata Shakur and Charlie Hill. All of these individuals who have been living in Cuba surfaced in the news. Sometimes they surfaced in the news in ways that were related to U.S.-Cuba relations or diplomatic exchanges. But the book was not particularly newsworthy. No, I never actually imagined that the content of the book would become so relevant to current events," Latner said.

"I mean, I think many people that studied Cuba never imagined that the greatest period of hostility between the United States and Cuba would actually take place long after the Cold War, 20 or 30 years after the Cold War, after the formal close of the Cold War. So the book has become newsworthy in ways that I never imagined," he concluded.