A US State Department report on Cuba has singled out former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC) in condemning those who support the socialist island.
The report, entitled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, asserts that the nation’s “ideological, subversive and parasitic” power serves as “the connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition” and a “staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside our own borders.”
A CSC statement said: “It reserves particular venom for the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), portraying an organisation established to build international friendship, host delegations and connect Cuba with solidarity movements as the centre of a sinister worldwide network.
“Cultural exchanges, friendship associations, sister-city links and visits to Cuba are all treated as forms of subversion and the report even celebrates the Trump administration’s sanctions against ICAP.
“In the State Department’s paranoid worldview, even friendship is a threat. Washington wants not only to blockade Cuba but to blockade friendship with Cuba.”
By naming the CSC and its solidarity brigades, the report also “attacks the many British trade unionists, MPs, students and campaigners who have travelled to Cuba over decades,” the campaign group said.
Mr Corbyn is named as being among “influential progressives” who joined the March 2026 Nuestra America humanitarian convoy, with the report’s authors adding that the “propaganda success of this system … was immediately visible in the way prominent Nuestra America participants framed the trip to their audiences after returning home to the United States.”
CSC said that on the trip, Mr Corbyn, left Labour MP Richard Burgon MP and CSC’s Natasha Hickman “delivered medical aid to a cancer hospital and witnessed first-hand the devastating human impact of the US siege.”
“The State Department cannot accept that people might support Cuba because of these realities,” it added.
“Instead, it portrays every friendship organisation, delegation and humanitarian campaign as part of a foreign influence operation. That is not serious analysis. It is cold war propaganda.
“The report also exposes the desperation of the Trump administration. Since January, it has tightened its economic war against Cuba still further, targeting oil supplies, foreign investment, finance, tourism and humanitarian aid.
“These measures have deepened shortages of food, fuel and medicines, contributed to worsening blackouts and had devastating consequences for public health.”
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