Author: Translating Cuba

, re-educate, or liquidate resistance. Democracy, which presupposes contested elections, independent judiciary, and protected private spheres, cannot survive that claim indefinitely.

Contemporary Western Marxists understood the difficulty and shifted the battlefield. György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School recognized that economic determinism alone was insufficient in advanced societies. Cultural hegemony—control of the universities, media, churches, the family, and the language of everyday life—became the necessary precondition for political power. Once the cultural means of production are captured, socialist moralism can be presented as common sense and dissent as pathology. The project remains totalizing; only the sequence has changed. Democratic forms are retained as long as they advance the hegemony and discard it when they impede it.

This is why the Democratic Socialists of America should be read carefully. Their program is not a Nordic-style welfare state. It is the gradual dismantling of the liberal-democratic and republican architecture that makes markets and limited government possible. The analogy to Lenin’s entryism is not hyperbolic. A disciplined minority seeks to capture a major party, redefine its vocabulary, and use electoral success as a platform for deeper institutional transformation. The rhetoric of “democracy” functions as camouflage. The United States is currently undergoing the threat of this Trojan horse offensive.

Confusion with social democracy or Christian Democracy is therefore a category error. Both of those traditions operate inside a market economy and a constitutional order that protect private property and political pluralism. They tax, regulate, and redistribute to varying degrees—sometimes heavily—but they do not aim to abolish the price system or to re-engineer the human person. Otto von Bismarck introduced the first modern welfare provisions precisely to undercut socialist agitation while preserving the existing order. The Nordic countries remain capitalist economies with high labor-market flexibility, private ownership of most capital, and robust democratic competition. Their success is evidence that markets plus transfer payments can coexist with democracy. It is not evidence that socialism can.

The distinction is acutely significant for any society contemplating a democratic transition, including Cuba. A post-communist Cuba that adopts a welfare-state model within a market framework and genuine multiparty competition would not be socialist. A Cuba that retains the party’s monopoly on the commanding heights of economy and culture, merely rebranding itself democratic socialist, would remain dictatorial under a new label. The former preserves the possibility of course correction; the latter does not.

Socialism’s moral appeal is real. Many of its advocates are sincere in their desire to reduce suffering. Sincerity, however, does not alter the institutional logic. To enforce a comprehensive redesign of political, social, cultural, and moral life requires instruments of power that democratic societies rightly constrain. Those instruments, once normalized, do not remain limited. “Democratic socialism,” therefore, names a temporary and unstable hybrid. The democracy is the packaging; the socialism is the product. History shows which element prevails.

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its operations via banks and intermediaries in Panama and other jurisdictions. Loyal Cuban communist émigrés have established ostensibly legitimate businesses abroad that maintain a symbiotic relationship with the dictatorship, enjoying privileges in exchange for services rendered. These soft-power assets, valued in the billions, form an external ecosystem that allows the regime to weather financial pressure. Targeting GAESA’s holdings in Panamanian banks and similar offshore networks would be a logical next step, but even expanded economic measures will not be decisive by themselves.

The regime’s indifference to the suffering of ordinary Cubans further limits the coercive power of sanctions. The dictatorship has never treated the welfare of the Cuban people as a constraint on its survival. A society pushed to the brink of famine would not compel the leadership to relinquish power. The dictatorial elite has repeatedly demonstrated that it prioritizes its privileges and ideological projects over the basic needs of the population it rules. Economic hardship is always absorbed by the people, never by the decision-makers in Havana.

Political timing also appears to shape the current approach. With midterm elections approaching, the Trump administration may be exercising caution. The American communist movement, operating today primarily under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America, is engaged in a determined effort to capture the Democratic Party. This effort represents a contemporary expression of the “march through the institutions” long advocated by Gramscian Marxists. Given the documented historical and ongoing ties between Cuban communism and elements of the U.S. radical left, the continued existence of a Marxist regime in Cuba is not merely a foreign-policy problem. This is an American domestic issue as well. Restraint before the midterms may reflect an effort to avoid providing political ammunition to these forces.

After the midterm elections, however, the United States must adopt a more resolute posture. Economic warfare, however rigorously applied, is insufficient. The Castro regime retains external assets and networks capable of sustaining it through a single presidential term. If the objective is genuine freedom for the Cuban people and the elimination of a hostile danger to the American republic, policymakers must recognize that nothing short of concrete military action will achieve the necessary systemic change. A palace revolution that merely rearranges personnel while leaving the communist structures intact would be cosmetic. Any authentic transition to a democratic order would have to criminalize Castro-Communism from the outset and dismantle its institutional foundations.

Sanctions remain a justified and useful instrument. They are morally defensible and can weaken the regime’s capacity to repress and project power. But they cannot, by themselves, produce the decisive outcome required. The external ecosystem of front businesses, offshore finance, and ideological allies provides the dictatorship with resilience that pure economic pressure cannot overcome. Once the domestic political calendar permits, the United States should move beyond calibrated financial measures and prepare the concrete tools necessary to end Cuban communism. Only then will the strategic goals articulated in 2025 and the moral imperative recognized in the July 2026 report be fully realized.

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new hosts among the far left in the United States itself. It should not be forgotten that the Cuban communist revolution geometrically fortified what we today know as the “New Left” and cultural socialist precepts.

From the 1960s onward, Cuban intelligence cultivated symbiotic relationships with domestic communist and terrorist networks inside the United States. These were not romantic gestures of solidarity. They were operational partnerships. Training, funding channels, propaganda coordination, and intelligence sharing created durable pipelines between Havana and American radicals. The result is not ancient history. It is a living architecture of influence that continues to shape narratives, recruit cadres, and erode institutional trust. When a foreign power maintains decades-long access to the domestic far left—supplying it with ideological oxygen, tactical experience, and a sense of international legitimacy—that power becomes a force multiplier for America’s adversaries. China, Russia, and Iran understand this. They cultivate Cuba precisely because Havana offers something they cannot easily manufacture: intimate, long-cultivated access to the American radical ecosystem.

Communist Cuba’s value to those powers is not limited to rhetoric. The island hosts sophisticated signals-intelligence facilities operated by Russia and China. These installations sit ninety miles from Florida and are designed to intercept sensitive American communications. Hosting such capabilities is not neutrality. It is active participation in the intelligence war against the United States. Add to this Cuba’s alignment with Iran, its support for transnational terrorist groups, and its role as a logistical and ideological node, and the picture clarifies. Havana, as a matter of fact, functions as a force-projection platform for America’s principal enemies, one that operates below the threshold of conventional conflict yet above the threshold of mere nuisance.

The sophistication of Cuban intelligence itself has been underestimated for too long. The services provided by the Castro regime have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to run agents inside American institutions, to harvest sensitive information, and to shape cultural and academic discourse. Their tradecraft is patient, culturally fluent, and ideologically disciplined. They punch far above the island’s economic weight because they are not constrained by the need to produce consumer goods or maintain a modern industrial base. Their product is influence and information. In an era when information and internal cohesion are decisive, that product is strategically lethal.

The Trump administration’s decision to raise communist Cuba to Priority 1 and the subsequent creation of a dedicated CIA task force simply align resources with reality. The unit—staffed with case officers, analysts, cyber specialists, and covert influence experts—exists to generate the intelligence and operational options necessary to exploit fractures inside the Cuban dictatorial elite and to pressure for the collapse of the kleptocratic Marxist dictatorship. Increased intelligence assets on and around the island are not theater. They are the minimum required to understand a regime that has spent 67 years perfecting the arts of secrecy, denial, and asymmetric warfare. Without current, granular knowledge of Castro-Communist intentions, capabilities, and internal dynamics, any policy—diplomatic pressure, economic isolation, or contingency planning—operates in the dark.

Critics will claim this is overreach, a revival of Cold War paranoia, or a distraction from “real” threats. The opposite is true. Ignoring a dedicated revolutionary state that systematically cultivates domestic subversion, hosts adversary intelligence bases, and serves as a transmission belt for anti-American ideology is the true strategic malpractice. Priority rankings exist to force the intelligence community to allocate scarce resources against the most consequential dangers. Cuba’s military is modest. Its capacity to damage the American body politic from within is not.

Communist Cuba has never been a status-quo power. It has been a permanent revolutionary project directed against the United States and the civilization that produced it. Elevating it to Priority 1 is not an exaggeration. It is overdue recognition that the threat Havana represents is measured not in divisions and warheads, but in the depth of its penetration, the durability of its ideological networks, and the strategic value it provides to America’s most determined enemies. The classification is correct. The only remaining question is whether the resources and resolve that accompany it will be sustained long enough to make the regime confront the consequences of its own history.

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Author Julio M. Shiling

articulated by Polybius and Cicero, the English constitutional inheritance, and later thinkers such as Montesquieu, the Founders possessed no romantic illusions regarding human nature. They understood that political liberty required both moral virtue and institutional restraint, for unchecked power invariably corrupts and fallen human nature cannot safely be trusted with unlimited authority. They understood that concentrated power inevitably invites corruption because ambition is an enduring characteristic of mankind. The constitutional architecture of separated powers, federalism, checks and balances, judicial review, and representative government reflected what James Madison described as the necessity of enabling government to control the governed while obliging it to control itself. Constitutional government was therefore less an expression of optimism than of political realism rooted in Natural Law.

The third foundation was classical liberalism. Individual liberty, equality before the law, private property, free enterprise, religious liberty, and limited government established the sphere within which citizens could pursue human flourishing. Yet American liberalism differed significantly from its later European counterparts. It did not understand liberty as radical autonomy detached from moral obligation. Rather, freedom existed within an objective moral order inherited from both biblical revelation and natural law philosophy. In this respect, America’s liberalism remained tempered by Christianity and republican virtue.

These three traditions together produced what Russell Kirk described as the permanent things—a civilization sustained not merely by institutions but by enduring moral truths. The Founding, however, carried within it a profound contradiction. A republic dedicated to universal equality tolerated human slavery. America’s original sin was not simply political inconsistency but an applicable failure that resulted in a moral contradiction. The Civil War constituted the nation’s Second Founding. Under Abraham Lincoln, the Union’s victory preserved constitutional self- government while abolishing slavery and moving the Republic closer to fulfilling the Declaration’s universal promise. Lincoln understood that the Declaration supplied the nation’s moral compass while the Constitution supplied its institutional framework. The Reconstruction Amendments therefore represented not a rejection of the Founding but its fulfillment.

The remarkable endurance of this constitutional order cannot be explained solely by institutional design. As Tocqueville recognized nearly two centuries ago, America’s constitutional success depended upon a vibrant moral culture nourished by churches, families, local communities, and voluntary associations. In modern lexicon, this is referred to today as a civil society. Political liberty rested upon moral self-government. The Constitution worked because Americans largely governed themselves before the government governed them.

The history of socialism in America illustrates this point. Throughout the nineteenth century, utopian communities, labor radicals, anarchists, and European socialist immigrants attempted to transplant collectivist doctrines onto American soil. Although prominent intellectuals—including Edward Bellamy, Henry George, Jack London, Helen Keller, and King Camp Gillette—expressed sympathy for various socialist ideas, these movements remained politically marginal. The constitutional culture, religious vitality, entrepreneurial spirit, and civic habits of most Americans proved inhospitable to revolutionary ideologies. Why has the situation changed so slowly but so dramatically during the past century?

One explanation is that the moral ecology sustaining the Republic has steadily weakened. Liberalism, itself a child of the Enlightenment, contained within it an impulse toward secularization. Once detached from its Christian foundations, liberty increasingly came to be understood as expressive individualism rather than ordered freedom. Consumerism, material prosperity, and technological progress filled many practical needs while leaving unanswered the perennial human longing for transcendence.

At precisely this moment, intellectual movements derived from Marxism underwent a profound transformation. Following the failures of revolutionary socialism in the West, thinkers associated with Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and later postmodern traditions shifted their attention from economics toward culture, education, language, law, and social institutions. What can adequately be diagnosed as cultural Marxism—a modern variation of Marxist ideology—weaponized these approaches and increasingly interpreted for society through the lens of relationships of power, domination, and identity rather than through the constitutional language of individual rights and equal citizenship.

Here Eric Voegelin offers a profound insight. Totalitarian ideologies, he argued, function as political religions. When transcendence is denied, human beings do not cease to seek ultimate meaning; rather, they relocate salvation into history itself. Politics becomes soteriology. The state, the revolution, the class struggle, racial justice, environmental redemption, or any number of secular causes may assume quasi-religious significance. The twentieth century tragically demonstrated the consequences of such ideological absolutism. Elements of today’s so-called “progressive” movement, including organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, reflect aspects of this intellectual inheritance that is antithetical to the foundational base upon which the United States was built.

America’s semiquincentennial therefore presents an opportunity for more than patriotic celebration. It invites national renewal. Such renewal cannot be accomplished merely through legislation or electoral victories. As Edmund Burke reminded us, society is a partnership extending across generations, sustained by inherited wisdom as much as by political innovation. Institutions cannot preserve themselves if the civilization that created them forgets why they exist.

Recovering America’s first principles requires restoring the moral and civic culture upon which constitutional liberty ultimately depends. Such renewal begins with recovering confidence in the nation’s Judeo-Christian inheritance, whose moral teachings long provided the ethical foundation of ordered liberty. It also requires strengthening serious civic education rooted in constitutional history, Natural Law, and the intellectual traditions of Western civilization, thereby cultivating citizens who understand both the rights and responsibilities of self-government. Freedom of conscience and religious liberty must remain vigorously protected, while families, religious communities, and other mediating institutions should once again be recognized as indispensable schools of virtue and civic character. Finally, publicly funded institutions should foster genuine intellectual pluralism and the free exchange of ideas rather than ideological conformity or political orthodoxy.

The American experiment has never rested upon the illusion that human beings are perfect. Quite the opposite. It has endured because it recognized both the grandeur and the frailty of the human person. Ordered liberty, limited government, constitutional restraint, and moral responsibility emerged from that realistic anthropology. If America is to flourish beyond its first 250 years, it must recover the philosophical synthesis that animated both its Founding in 1776 and its rebirth in 1865—a synthesis of Jerusalem, Athens, and Philadelphia, where biblical faith, republican prudence, and ordered liberty together formed the soul of the American Republic.

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