The State Department’s report on Cuba casts left-wing and anti-war organisations as foreign-influenced threats, laying the groundwork for the criminalisation of dissent.

The Trump administration is laying the groundwork for blacklisting and criminalising all left-wing, progressive, anti-war and anti-imperialist dissent.

The State Department’s 100-page report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States”, along with Donald Trump’s assertion that “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure”, lays the groundwork for dictatorship.

Elections will be sabotaged in the name of “national security”. Left-wing dissent will be criminalised in the name of “combating terrorism”. Democracy will be snuffed out in the name of protecting “freedom”.

Trump, who has lately taken to issuing warnings about a communist plot to take over America, posits that an island of 9.6 million people – nearly 90 per cent of whom live in extreme poverty amid extended blackouts due to decades of US economic warfare – is an existential threat.

These accusations are not meant to be rational. They, like the charge that our elections are manipulated, are transparent excuses to go after institutions and individuals that are seen as threatening Trump and the Republican Party’s absolute grip on power. While Cuba has supposedly “carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history”, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure”.

Under the heading “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” the State Department report assembles a disparate collection of organisations belonging to Cuba’s “ideological network”.

For example, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), founded as a ecumenical social justice organisation by the Presbyterian Church, is described as part of a Cuba “solidarity network” which “facilitates radical agitation within the United States”. I am an ordained Presbyterian minister. I can assure you the Presbyterian Church is not facilitating “radical agitation”.

The report lists a wide variety of organisations on whose behalf IFCO has acted as an intermediary – perfectly legally – facilitating tax-exempt donations and handling grant management, compliance and reporting.

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG)........

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