AN academic has revealed how he was “worried” after learning that he was cited in an official US State Department report which is seen as justifying the siege on Cuba.
Antoni Kapcia, emeritus professor of Cuban history at Nottingham University, told The National he was shocked to find that a US foreign office report quoted a piece he had written about the influence of the country’s communist revolution.
He suspected that the report had been written by AI and said he was grateful it had not mentioned his name – the article itself is also not properly cited, unlike others in the document – as he said it could have prevented him from travelling to the country in future.
Prof Kapcia’s piece about the global reach of the Cuban revolution and the enduring image of the country as a bastion of “anti-imperialism” against America was cited in a report from the State Department published on Monday entitled: “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism”.
In it, Prof Kapcia’s piece is referred to without citation: “As the socialist magazine Jacobin approvingly recounted earlier this year, it was Cuba that ‘was seen by many in the Third World as the ideal site for radically rethinking anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonisation ’. What Cuba was proposing, Jacobin writes, ‘was essentially a decolonisation of Marxist thought’.”
This is almost faithful to the words in the academic’s piece for the left-wing magazine Jacobin published in February, though the State Department report adds in a stray “was” in the first quotation.
Prof Kapcia said that the report was “McCarthyism”, referring to the 1950s crusade against communism led by Joseph McCarthy, who is seen to have persecuted left-wingers using the organs of the state.
Prof Kapcia said: “It was McCarthyism, it was Cold War stuff. That everything left of an already right-wing centre in the US was subversion and they are all in cahoots with the Cubans. It was classic Cold War stuff.
“It confirms, for me, that the US has never stopped in anything other than the Cold War umbrella; they never changed.”
He expressed concern that he may have been barred from entering Cuba – which is suffering under a deadly blockade by the US – in the future.
Prof Kapcia added: “It worried me. It is probably AI anyway, but they can misquote you. And if that gets to friends in Cuba I could well find myself with a reputation of almost having jumped ship and joined the siege that they’re put under.
“It worried me more for the potential Cuban reaction. I mean I’d love to be cited by a State Department report as something wrong, that would be perfect because I would then know I’m right.
“So I wasn’t bothered about that, I was more bothered that if the people in Cuba and not least the people who grant visas saw that, they’d think, ‘Oh right, we’re not going to give him a visa again.’”
The State Department report effectively links Cuba to anti-establishment movements in the West, such as the Black Lives Matter campaign as well as prominent campaigners such as Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer.
In a section headed “front groups and fellow travellers”, the State Department names the “insidious” National Lawyers Guild and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a loose grouping of left-wing politicians and activists who count New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among its members.
The report said: “Today, it [the DSA] maintains a fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime – not because the group is controlled by Cuban agents, per se, but because that commitment is now simply the de facto policy orthodoxy on the American far left.”
The report goes on to describe Cuba’s “assault” against the US – though the country has never attacked its neighbour, though America famously failed to topple its government during the Bay of Pigs invasion – and warned readers against mistaking “Cuba's poverty for harmlessness”.
It added: “Today it serves as the connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition, a staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside our own borders.”
Prof Kapcia’s colleague at Nottingham University, Par Kumaraswami, a founding member of the Cuba Research Forum who recently returned from a visit to the island nation, said the report was being used as a screen for the US’s deadly blockade on Cuba.
Since a strict new sanctions policy was introduced in January blocking fuel imports, infant mortality rates – which Prof Kumaraswami described as previously having been the “pride and joy” of Cuba – have doubled, according to the UN.
She added: “They have imperialist tendencies and they think that if they discredit the left wherever they can find it, as they have done in Venezuela, I think it’s a Cold War strategy, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to invade and take over these country.
“I think it is about controlling the discourse about what the world should be.”
