For decades after the Cuban Revolution’s victory in 1959, influential anticommunist circles in the United States claimed that Cuba’s communist government sowed social division and allied with left-wing groups to help defeat Washington during the Cold War.

This right-wing rhetoric has been revived in the Trump State Department’s July 20, 2026, report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” In it, the administration seizes on the history of a movement called the Tricontinental – an alliance of liberation movements from around the world founded in 1966 – to make the unsubstantiated claim that the U.S. left is currently engaged in a Cuban conspiracy to destroy the U.S.

As a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Virginia, I wrote the first scholarly book on the Tricontinental movement, “From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity.”

The State Department’s report summarizes large portions of that book’s arguments without citation, particularly in its attention to the Tricontinental’s historical relationship with the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The report also misrepresents a larger body of scholarship on the relationship between Cuba and the left wing in the U.S. The State Department didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether it had used my book as a source.

But while the report preserves the structure of my book’s historical arguments, it twists its interpretations and conclusions. The effect is to support the Trump administration’s false claim that Cuba has “backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil.”

The birth of a movement

The Tricontinental was officially known as the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, or OSPAAAL. It was formed in 1966 when self-determination movements........

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