Cuba’s American allies

The U.S. Department of State released a report in July 2026 on the malign influence of communist Cuba, including how its revolutionary ideology has uniquely influenced America’s domestic radicals for decades. The report profiled some of the most notable pro-Cuba activist groups in the United States, citing the Capital Research Center’s work on these organizations in multiple places.

Given ongoing geopolitical developments and what appears to be a dramatic socioeconomic collapse on the island, it is worth examining this constellation of pro-Cuba activist groups—including some not mentioned in the State Department report—in more detail. These nonprofits operate within the U.S. tax-exempt sector, and some are funded by major American philanthropies. Should the Cuban people ultimately achieve the political and economic freedoms which have been denied to them for generations, posterity will not look kindly upon those who profess solidarity with what has long been among the most ruinous and repressive regimes on the planet.

The American Left and Cuba

It is worth briefly reflecting on exactly what these groups are defending. Cuba is a Marxist-Leninist one-party state with one of the worst political and civil rights records on the planet.

The American far-left has always looked abroad for ideological lodestars—political movements (whether in or out of government) that it could promote as alternatives to capitalist liberal democracy, or at minimum point to as beacons of revolutionary resistance to what it saw as Western imperialist dominance. During the Great Depression and into the Second World War, the Soviet Union held pride of place in the American Left’s collective heart. The reputation of the world’s dominant Marxist-Leninist state, however, was tarnished by (among other things) the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, public revelations of the Stalinist horrors of the 1930s, and Soviet postwar conduct in Eastern Europe—notably the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

The Vietnam War was the central geopolitical catalyst for American activists during the second half of the 1960s, and at times this manifested as outright support for the communist North Vietnamese. For a brief period in the early 1970s, many on the American left embraced the Marxist presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile, which was abruptly terminated by Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Attention turned in the 1980s to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and by the 2000s to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Today, the Palestinian cause has galvanized the Left in a way that has no present global parallel.

Throughout these decades of waxing and waning affections, one foreign regime has remained singularly constant: Cuba. Virtually from the moment that Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries seized control of the island in 1959, Cuba’s distinct brand of anti-imperialist communism in the so-called Global South has captivated the American Left’s imagination. An American radical from 1969 who was somehow transported to 2026 might be confused by many of global dynamics surrounding him. But he would still very much understand Cuba.

In mid-2026, the U.S. Department of State released a 100-page report entitled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, chronicling the country’s unique role in both international anti-American machinations and domestic radicalism. Certain sections of the report drew upon the Capital Research Center’s past work on activist groups such as the National Lawyers Guild and the Venceremos Brigade. These groups, alongside others within the broader constellation of pro-Cuba organizations, operate within the U.S. tax-exempt sector. Accordingly, their finances and funding sources can be examined, at least to some degree.

It is worth briefly reflecting on exactly what these groups are defending. Cuba is a Marxist-Leninist one-party state with one of the worst political and civil rights records on the planet. Independent private journalism is constitutionally prohibited, and dissident reporters face state harassment and arbitrary arrest. The Cuban economy—the product of decades of collectivist mismanagement—is in an ongoing state of collapse, with electrical blackouts and shortages of basic goods a fixture of life. Virtually the entire population lives below the international poverty line, with some scholarly estimates concluding that household necessities cost at least fourteen times the average Cuban salary. Hunger and sickness are increasingly breeding desperation.

Cuba has also actively propped up leftist militants and authoritarian governments around the world for many decades. One of the more striking details which emerged from the United States’ 2026 capture of Nicolas Maduro in Caracas was the number of Cuban troops who were killed while protecting the erstwhile Venezuelan dictator. Cuba’s adept intelligence service has long been engaged in extensive espionage against the United States, and today the island is said to host both Russian and Chinese signals intelligence stations. For two-thirds of a century, Cuba has held the unbroken distinction of being the United States’ primary antagonist in the Western Hemisphere.

This is the true nature of the regime which the groups profiled in this report hold up as one of the world’s guiding political lights. It can be difficult—even for dyed-in-the-wool ideologues—to publicly champion the Cuban regime in the face of such overwhelming evidence of its myriad failures. Instead, the dominant message from these groups is more often one of opposition to U.S. sanctions. This serves at least two clear purposes. For Cuba, it represents a concrete foreign policy objective which American domestic advocacy might plausibly help bring to fruition. For the activists themselves, it offers an attractive platform—one which allows them to avoid confronting the catastrophe of communism by scapegoating the United States for Cuba’s problems, while also fitting neatly within the broader anti-American narrative that is so central to their worldview.

National Network on Cuba

The network openly supports the country’s communist government, as illustrated by an official statement released upon the death of Fidel Catro in 2016, which [. . .] ended by promising that “Fidel will live eternally in our hearts. Eternal Glory to Commander Fidel!”

The principal umbrella organization for pro-Cuba activism in the United States is the National Network on Cuba, which was founded in 1991. It operates as a coalition of activist groups who advocate “for an end to Washington’s hostility towards Cuba.” In doing so, it works directly with the  Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), a Cuban state-sponsored entity which the United States recently sanctioned for its connections to Cuban intelligence. ICAP is currently headed by Fernando Gonzalez Llort, a convicted spy who was imprisoned in the United States for fifteen years. The State Department’s 2026 report claimed that ICAP has helped organize and host “practically all of the [American] delegations and tours…that have crossed the Florida Straits since the early 1960s,” and characterized the institute as “the central nexus of the entire Cuban intelligence and influence network.”

The National Network on Cuba’s 2026 bylaws appear to state that the group operates not as an independent tax-exempt nonprofit, but rather “alongside the Future is Ours Fund fiscally sponsored by the Alliance for Global Justice”—a 501(c)(3) charity covered in more detail below. The network collects modest organizational and individual dues from its members, which range from $25 to $120 annually. It has also received at least $6,500 worth of grants since 2019 from Arc of Justice, a private foundation that was until recently headed by Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin. The National Network for Cuba is governed by five co-chairs. Calla Walsh, an American far-left extremist who has become notorious for her full-throated endorsement of the Iranian government and its terrorist proxies, was a National Network for Cuba co-chair as of 2023.

The National Network on Cuba’s organizational objectives include countering “disinformation and destabilization campaigns against Cuba,” promoting “the achievements of the Cuban people,” participating in “material aid and solidarity campaigns” in support of Cuba, and pressuring the United States to adopt a conciliatory foreign policy towards the country. The network openly supports the country’s communist government, as illustrated by an official statement released upon the death of Fidel Catro in 2016, which declared that “we are mourning the death of Fidel, the Giant, the great Revolutionary, who for more than half a century has guided humanity in the fight for a better world.” The statement ended by promising that “Fidel will live eternally in our hearts. Eternal Glory to Commander Fidel!”

The National Network on Cuba’s four-week political education course features material contrasting the supposed democratic virtues of Cuba with those of the United States, as well as promoting the country’s alleged achievements in medicine and anti-imperialist internationalism. An associated reading list includes at least five works by Fidel Castro and/or Che Guevara, and the group suggests that those interested in learning the truth about Cuba should get their news from far-left outlets such as the Progressive International, the communist publication People’s World, and the Venezuelan government-funded television network Telesur. The National Network on Cuba also recommends studying how “Cuba speaks for itself” in Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba.

On its website, the National Network on Cuba maintains two separate lists consisting of dozens of member organizations, which only partially overlap with one another. All members must affirm their agreement with the network’s objectives and are required to “meaningfully contribute to the Cuba solidarity movement in the United States.” Membership in the National Network on Cuba may therefore be taken as proof of organizational sympathy with the communist country.

Many network members are small and/or minimally active. Some worth briefly mentioning include the  Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the West Virginia Mountain Party (a state affiliate of the Green Party), and CovertAction Magazine. The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, which seeks the “total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism,” is also a member. So is the International Action Center, which was founded in 1992 by Ramsey Clark, who once served as U.S. Attorney General during the Johnson administration.

Other members of the National Network on Cuba, however, are larger and more influential. Some have activist histories dating back to the 1960s or even earlier—the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was founded in 1915. Several of these groups deserve particular attention for their continued influence upon the American Left, especially with respect to U.S. foreign policy.

Code Pink

. . . though she described living in Cuba as feeling like she had “died and went to heaven,” [Medea] Benjamin was deported after writing an article that was critical of the government.

Multiple groups connected to the far-left activist network centered around pro-China megadonor Neville Roy Singham and his wife Jodie Evans are members of the National Network on Cuba. Perhaps the most well-known of these is Code Pink, which Evans co-founded and on whose board she serves as president. Another Code Pink co-founder, Medea Benjamin, is currently the organization’s treasurer.

On top of the modest grants it has made directly to the National Network on Cuba, Benjamin’s private foundation Arc of Justice is also a major Code Pink funder. It contributed $982,930 to the group from 2022 through 2024. Much of the rest of Code Pink’s traceable funding has come from donor-advised funds. Through 2023, this notably included the GS Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management, which is known to have been used by Singham until that same year. Other large funders in recent years have included the Tides Foundation and the Singham-associated Justice and Education Fund. Code Pink is organized as a 501(c)(3) charity, and it reported total 2025 revenues of $1.79 million.

Code Pink has always been a strident backer of Cuba, explaining on its website that many of the group’s members have “spent years as activists in solidarity with the people of Cuba.” Benjamin herself lived on the island from 1979 to 1983, and her first marriage was to a Cuban basketball coach. She worked for a time at a communist newspaper on the island, and though she described living in Cuba as feeling like she had “died and went to heaven,” Benjamin was deported after writing an article that was critical of the government. She has since returned to the country numerous times, including through regular delegations organized by Code Pink.

The central theme of Code Pink’s message on Cuba is that the United States must immediately cease its “aggression” against the island, and the group blames the U.S. embargo for seemingly every socioeconomic difficulty the Cuban people face. Even amidst large anti-government protests during the summer of 2021, Code Pink sided with the pro-government position that the United States was responsible for Cuba’s dire economic circumstances. It suggested that a coordinated American propaganda campaign had been initiated prior to the protests in order “to target the Cuban government and blame it for the hardships the Cuban people are facing.”

The People’s Forum projects

The People’s Forum specifically instructs those who wish to make a tax-deductible contribution to its associated “Let Cuba Live!” campaign not to write the word “Cuba” in the donation memo line.

Though the group itself is not listed as a National Network on Cuba member, at least two fiscally-sponsored projects of the People’s Forum—another increasingly prominent organizational component of the Singham-Evans network—are. One of these is the Hatuey Project, which delivers medications and related equipment that are in short supply on the island—a situation which it blames on “sixty years of an inhumane blockade.”

The other is the Venceremos Brigade, which is historically one of the most important pro-Cuba groups ever organized in the United States. Formed in 1969 by members of Students for a Democratic Society, the brigade’s original purpose was to bring contingents of American leftists to Cuba so that they could labor in solidarity with the country by harvesting sugarcane. Since then, approximately 10,000 brigadistas have traveled to the island. Those who join the Venceremos Brigade must affirm its points of unity, which include participating “in the struggle against capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and colonialism,” and understanding that “the imperialist policies of the US government which constrain Cuban development and seek to overthrow socialism in Cuba are the foreign arms of a system which at home dehumanizes, criminalizes, exploits, and punishes with impunity masses of oppressed people.”

Notable Venceremos Brigade alumni include two of the three most recent mayors of Los Angeles (Democrats Karen Bass and Antonio Villaraigosa), labor organizer and Clinton administration official Karen Nussbaum, and May 19th Communist Organization member Susan Rosenberg. The cost to travel with the 53rd brigade contingent—which was said to have consisted entirely of “African, Indigenous, and Palestinian participants”—during the winter of 2025/2026 was $1,900. This is approximately ten times (or more) the average annual salary in Cuba. In August 2026, the Venceremos Brigade and the National Network on Cuba jointly organized a special trip to celebrate Fidel Castro’s 100th birthday.

The People’s Forum itself was founded in 2017, and it is organized as a 501(c)(3) charity. In 2024 it brought in $7.08 million, though its revenues have fluctuated significantly from year-to-year. Since its establishment, the People’s Forum’s dominant funders have been the GS Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management, the People’s Support Foundation, and the United Community Fund—all of which are linked to Singham. Combined, these three grantmakers have given more than $30.4 million to the People’s Forum.

The People’s Forum is stridently pro-Cuba. It lauds the communist country for having always “chosen to stand on the side of the oppressed people,” and claims that the Cuban people are being punished by the United States “for daring to build a world that values humanity over profit.” Cuba, according to the People’s Forum, is “a beacon to all those who strive for a better and more just world”—one which has “always extend[ed] its hand in solidarity to those in need.” A People’s Forum-sponsored petition accusing the Trump administration of committing terrorism against the Cuban people was signed by Hollywood figures such as Jane Fonda, Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Oliver Stone, and Susan Sarandon. The People’s Forum specifically instructs those who wish to make a tax-deductible contribution to its associated “Let Cuba Live!” campaign not to write the word “Cuba” in the donation memo line.

Manolo De Los Santos is the People’s Forum’s executive director. Though he was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in the United States, he later lived for a time in Cuba and stated in 2015 that in many ways he self-identifies as Cuban. More recently, he has described the communist country as “the light of our world during the long night of neo-liberalism & the pandemic of Capitalism.” De Los Santos co-edited one of the top-selling books published by the People’s Forum’s in-house bookstore 1804 Books: Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro. It was subsequently featured by Code Pink as part of its Cuba Study Group book club.

De Los Santos has met personally with Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel on multiple occasions, and Diaz-Canel even visited the People’s Forum during a 2023 trip to New York City. The following year, De Los Santos and Diaz-Canel held a forum discussion in Havana, in which the Cuban president professed admiration for the American activists in attendance who had come to show their solidarity with Cuba. Attendees were said to have chanted “Down with the blockade! The socialist world is the world we want!” and De Los Santos declared that Cuba “is the flag of our generation.” On another trip to the island which De Los Santos helped organize in 2023, he remarked to participants that they “in many ways are prisoners of the US empire and are subject to the violence of the US empire.”

Code Pink and the People’s Forum were also among the groups that helped organize the Nuestra America Convoy in March 2026, in which hundreds of activists brought approximately 20 tons of material aid to Cuba in an effort to break “the criminal US blockade” of the island and “stand up for the cause of Cuban self-determination.”

Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization

The current executive director of IFCO is Claudia De la Cruz, who [. . .] has been traveling to Cuba for decades, and claims that “returning to the U.S. becomes more gut wrenching each time.”

Another member of the National Network on Cuba that is closely connected to the Singham-Evans network, but whose history dates all the way back to 1967, is the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO). Its founding executive director was Rev. Lucius Walker, who was personally close to Fidel Castro and routinely made solidarity visits to Cuba. Walker died in 2010, and the Communist Party of Cuba’s official newspaper Granma remembered him as “a dear friend of the Cuban Revolution” who “professed great affection for the leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro.”

The current executive director of IFCO is Claudia De la Cruz, who (among other things) was a former co-executive director of the People’s Forum and the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s 2024 nominee for President of the United States. She currently sits on the board of Code Pink. De la Cruz has been traveling to Cuba for decades, and claims that “returning to the U.S. becomes more gut wrenching each time.” She has praised Cuba’s communist revolution for having “transformed the lives of its people in ways that were once unimaginable,” and blames the United States for trying “to force Cuba back into the very conditions from which the Revolution liberated it.” De la Cruz has written that the Cuban people fear “regressing to the decadence and misery that capitalism subjects people to” simply because “the U.S. cannot tolerate…Cuba’s example.”

Through its Pastors for Peace program, IFCO has organized solidarity trips to Cuba since 1992—at least 31 of them in total. These are intended both to provide material aid to the country, and to show the Cubans “that they have allies even in the ‘belly of the beast’ in the US.” People’s Forum executive director Manolo De Los Santos made his very first trip to Cuba in 2006 with Pastors for Peace, and was listed as IFCO’s Cuba-based program coordinator as of 2016.

IFCO also coordinates the enrollment of American students in the Cuban government-run Latin American School of Medicine, which was established outside of Havana in 1999 at the urging of Fidel Castro. IFCO promotes the school as evidence of Cuba’s contribution to “anti-racist solidarity with the peoples of the world” through the training of “revolutionary doctors.” The school offers full scholarships to international students, which were opened to Americans during a Congressional Black Caucus delegation to the island in May 2000. According to IFCO, nearly 300 U.S. citizens have received such scholarships since 2001.

IFCO is organized as a 501(c)(3) charity, and in 2024 it reported $1.45 million in total revenue. Funders which have made six-figures’ worth grants to IFCO between 2024 and 2025 include the John E. Fetzer Institute, Borealis Philanthropy, the Justice and Education Fund, the North Star Fund, the New York Women’s Foundation, NEO Philanthropy, the Surdna Foundation, and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York.

Global Exchange

Global Exchange’s trips to the island are promoted as acts “of solidarity and resistance.”

Prior to co-founding Code Pink in 2002, Medea Benjamin co-founded a group called Global Exchange in 1988. Though she was listed as a member of its board of directors as recently as 2023, she currently has no publicly apparent leadership role at the organization. Global Exchange is an internationally-oriented activist group which (among other things) organizes so-called “reality tours” to foreign countries, through which participants learn “about how we, individually and collectively, contribute to global problems,” and ways in which these problems might be addressed. Cuba is a common destination, and Global Exchange claims to have helped pioneer such trips to the island.

Global Exchange is a member of the National Network on Cuba, and it is far from a neutral tour provider. The group’s website declares that “for nearly 40 years” it “has stood in solidarity with the people of Cuba.” Global Exchange’s trips to the island are promoted as acts “of solidarity and resistance.” The itinerary for one 8-day tour hosted by the Cuban government-run ICAP in February 2026 (which cost $2435 plus airfare) included visits to healthcare and education facilities, political and economic discussions, and a meeting with the media outlet Belly of the Beast. A fiscally sponsored project of an American 501(c)(3) charity called the Center for Independent Documentary, Belly of the Beast’s content is unremittingly critical of U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba. When far-left online streamer Hasan Piker traveled to Cuba as part of the March 2026 Nuestra America Convoy, he partnered with Belly of the Beast to produce a short documentary about his experience.

Global Exchange operates as a 501(c)(3) charity, and it reported total revenues of approximately $3 million in 2025—the vast majority in the form of contributions and grants. This includes substantial philanthropic funding. In 2024, it received a $685,000 general support grant from the Lynn Handleman Charitable Foundation, plus another $400,000 from the George Soros-funded Foundation to Promote Open Society. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave Global Exchange $175,000 in 2024 to support two of its projects, while the Ford Foundation gave $125,000 the same year to support activists in the United States and Mexico.

National Lawyers Guild

Today, the National Lawyers Guild remains a stalwart backer of the Cuban regime. It has publicly affirmed its belief in “the benefits that socialism has brought to all the people of Cuba” . . .

Several members of the National Network on Cuba have organizational histories that predate the Cuban Revolution itself, and one of these is the National Lawyers Guild. Founded in 1937, the Guild almost immediately became closely aligned with the Communist Party USA. Its own material declares that the Guild has “supported the Cuban Revolution since its triumph on January 1, 1959.” Guild officers were among the earliest Venceremos Brigade participants in 1969 and 1970, and the group subsequently began organizing its own solidarity delegations to the island. Attorneys with the Guild have also traditionally been deeply involved in pro-Cuba legal work in the United States, including representing IFCO/Pastors for Peace and the Venceremos Brigade.

The National Lawyers Guild also has longstanding ties to the law firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman, P.C. (RBSKL), which has been the Cuban government’s only United States-based legal counsel since 1960. Che Guevara was said to have personally awarded Cuba’s business to the firm after besting partners (and Guild members) Leonard Boudin and Victor Rabinowitz in a game of chess. Rabinowitz, who was an avowed communist and politically devoted to the Cuban Revolution, served as the National Lawyers Guild’s president from 1967 to 1970. Another prominent Guild attorney, Michael Krinsky, currently heads RBSKL’s Cuba practice and was counsel of record representing the Cuban government’s interests in the 2026 U.S. Supreme Court case of Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Corporación Cimex, S.A.

Today, the National Lawyers Guild remains a stalwart backer of the Cuban regime. It has publicly affirmed its belief in “the benefits that socialism has brought to all the people of Cuba,” and has claimed that Americans are being intentionally misled about the communist country by the U.S. government and “corporate-controlled media.” In the Guild’s eyes, “Cuba stands as a beacon of global solidarity and a living example that another world is possible.” The group has committed itself “to support[ing] and learn[ing] from the incredible successes of the Cuban Revolution.” The Guild responded to the State Department’s July 2026 report on Cuba by accusing the federal government of engaging in “fascist repression” and attempting to “criminalize anti-imperialist solidarity.” In correctly asserting its First Amendment right to criticize the government without fear of retribution, the Guild neglected to mention that the Cubans themselves conspicuously lack any such rights.

The National Lawyers Guild is organized as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, and it reported just $827,926 in total 2024 revenues. It also has an associated 501(c)(3) charity called the National Lawyers Guild Foundation, which raised $755,277 in 2024. More than half of foundation’s total expenses that year were in the form of grants paid directly to the National Lawyers Guild itself. Probably the most notable funder of the National Lawyers Guild Foundation in 2024 was the NoVo Foundation, controlled by Warren Buffett’s son Peter Buffett, which gave it $200,000 for the purpose of supporting an initiative called “Beyond Standing Rock.” Much of the remaining traceable funding that year came from donor-advised funds and a private foundation called the CS Fund.

Democratic Socialists of America

On a dollar-for-dollar basis, the DSA must accordingly be counted among the most influential left-wing activist groups in the country, especially when measured by its direct influence over the Democratic Party.

Of all the members of the National Network on Cuba, the one which today probably commands the widest name recognition is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Founded in 1982, the DSA’s membership has seen periods of both growth and contraction in recent years, though its history since 2016 has broadly been one of major ascendence. As of mid-2026, the group claimed an all-time high membership figure of 120,000. Even so, the DSA reported a relatively modest $6.38 million in total 2024 revenues—the vast majority of which came from membership dues. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, the DSA must accordingly be counted among the most influential left-wing activist groups in the country, especially when measured by its direct influence over the Democratic Party.

As part of an increasingly dramatic pivot towards far-left politics that the DSA has undergone over the past decade, the group has become institutionally pro-Cuba. At its 2019 national convention, the DSA approved a resolution formally declaring its “solidarity with the Cuban socialist struggle.” It also committed itself to joining the National Network on Cuba, which it described as an “organization dedicated to opposing acts of imperialist aggression against the Republic of Cuba.” The DSA has elsewhere pledged to support the continued existence of “an independent, socialist Cuba,” and it has accused the Trump administration of intentionally pursuing a policy of genocide against the island. In the DSA’s view, the United States—not the Communist Party of Cuba—is “the primary detriment to quality of life for Cubans, and the primary force of instability on the island.”

Beginning in 2022, the DSA has dispatched official delegations to Cuba, meeting with government officials and learning about “the achievements and challenges of Cuban socialism.” It considers these trips to be “one of the most powerful ways to counter U.S. propaganda about Cuba.” Another purpose is to establish formal relations with the Cuban government—DSA delegations have met with representatives from various ministries, and even with president Miguel Diaz-Canel. Recent DSA statements from 2026 have celebrated Fidel Castro as “a stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination for the Global South” and concluded with professions of “Long live the Cuban Revolution.”

Alliance for Global Justice

. . . the group’s website is effusive in its praise of Fidel Castro, characterizing the dictator as a moral beacon and strategic visionary who understood that overcoming capitalism’s “imperialist aggression” and “genocidal greed” was humanity’s single most important collective purpose.

Yet another member of the National Network on Cuba is the Alliance for Global Justice, which has traditionally served as fiscal sponsor for a range of far-left American activist groups. In this capacity, the Alliance provides administrative support to the sponsored projects—which do not have their own tax-exempt status from the IRS—in exchange for a fee. Before it was transferred to the People’s Forum sometime around the beginning of 2024, the Alliance for Global Justice was the Venceremos Brigade’s fiscal sponsor. The National Network on Cuba’s bylaws also seem to indicate that the Alliance functions as the network’s fiscal sponsor, in conjunction with an entity called the Future is Ours Fund.

The origins of the Alliance for Global Justice date back to 1979 and a pro-Sandinista organization called the Nicaragua Network. Today, the Alliance’s activism remains heavily focused on Nicaragua and Venezuela, though it has also expressed notably favorable views on communist Cuba. Material posted on the group’s website is effusive in its praise of Fidel Castro, characterizing the dictator as a moral beacon and strategic visionary who understood that overcoming capitalism’s “imperialist aggression” and “genocidal greed” was humanity’s single most important collective purpose. The Alliance also took major issue with a 2021 article published in the left-wing journal In These Times which—quite accurately—identified Cuba as having “the Western Hemisphere’s most undemocratic government.” The Alliance attacked this statement of fact as a “smear job on Cuba” and suggested that Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Haiti, and even the United States would be more deserving of the label.

The Alliance for Global Justice is a 501(c)(3) charity with revenues that have fluctuated significantly in recent years—a consequence of its fiscal sponsorship activities. Its most recent tax filings from 2025 reported $5.2 million in total revenue, down from the $10.7 million it reported in 2023. The Alliance’s sponsorship of the Movement for Black Lives and several other Black Lives Matter groups—which received an enormous influx of donations beginning in the summer of 2020—drove a massive one-year revenue spike at the Alliance, which reported bringing in over $56.4 million on its 2021 filings.

Institute for Policy Studies

IPS staff member Netfa Freeman has stated that he considers Cuba to be “much more democratic than the United States in a number of ways,” and praised various aspects of governance in the one-party state.

Another historically noteworthy member of the National Network on Cuba is the Institute for Policy Studies, which was founded in 1963—a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis and two years after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion—by two former Kennedy administration staffers with unorthodox ideas about how the United States should approach the Cold War. IPS scholar-activists (generally known as fellows) were broadly critical of American foreign policy towards the communist world and often sympathetic to the various manifestations of international socialism that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century. They tended to favor newer left-wing political movements originating in the Third World over the Soviet Union’s model of communism.

Cuba was one of the most conspicuous objects of the institute’s attention. In a profile of IPS published in the Winter 1984/1985 edition of World Affairs, author Joshua Muravchik wrote that the institute’s leadership all basically approved of “the general thrust of [Fidel Castro’s] socio-economic policies.” Longtime IPS fellow Saul Landau (who joined the institute in 1972) was a personal friend of Castro, and accompanied him on a journey through Cuba in 1968. Landau used footage from this trip to produce the sympathetic documentary film Fidel the following year, screenings of which provoked at least one violent confrontation with anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Landau did not consider Castro to be a dictator, and described him in the 1980s as “one of the most brilliant politicians in the world today.” In Landau’s view, there was no other government in Latin America which had done as much good for its people as communist Cuba, and he felt that Castro’s “successes far outnumber[ed] his failures.”

Today, Cuba remains a high priority for IPS analysis and commentary, and its membership in the National Network on Cuba would seem to indicate a continuing institutional affinity for the communist regime. IPS has hosted and its personnel have participated in events honoring Fidel Castro, and the institute is consistently critical of American foreign policy towards the island. IPS staff member Netfa Freeman has stated that he considers Cuba to be “much more democratic than the United States in a number of ways,” and praised various aspects of governance in the one-party state. As of October 2026, a search for the word “Cuba” returns 139 pages of commentary on the website of the institute’s Foreign Policy in Focus project, though the perspectives expressed in these posts can vary and do not necessarily reflect those of IPS personnel.

IPS is organized as a 501(c)(3) charity. In 2024 it had total revenues of $5.65 million, and the group receives considerable support from major philanthropic foundations. Its largest funders that year included the Freedom Together Foundation ($700,000), the Ford Foundation ($590,000), the Chicago Community Trust ($382,500), the Leonard & Sophie Davis Fund ($350,000), and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund ($250,000). Other significant funders included the Wallace Global Fund, the Tides Foundation, the Colombe Peace Foundation, the Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. As of late 2025, Jodie Evans sat on the institute’s board of trustees.

Other groups

Community Movement Builders aims to create local “liberated zones” where the “surplus-value” of labor cannot be “exploited by the outside capitalists.”

Several other listed members of the National Network on Cuba are worth mentioning, even if not all of them are especially focused on foreign policy activism. One of these is the Detroit Association of Black Organizations (DABO), whose website is largely devoted to its community work in health, housing, youth support, and other traditionally charitable undertakings. In April 2026, DABO chief executive officer Horace Sheffield III met with the Cuban Embassy’s deputy chief of mission in the United States, Tanieris Dieguez, and presented her with a welcome letter from his daughter, Detroit mayor Mary Sheffield (D). Dieguez was in Michigan to attend the National Lawyers Guild’s 2026 convention. DABO reported $5.24 million in 2024 revenues, over one-third of which was from government grants.

Another National Network on Cuba member is Community Movement Builders, a 501(c)(3) charity which reported $3.9 million total revenues in 2024. Its funders have included Laurene Powell Jobs’ Waverley Street Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Windward Fund, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the New Venture Fund, and Borealis Philanthropy. Community Movement Builders was one of the primary organizational drivers of the Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta. The group aspires to an extraordinarily radical vision for the United States—one which might well explain its affinity for communist Cuba. It believes that “bourgeois representative democracy has failed to represent and execute the true will of the people,” and that “white supremacist power structures that control the land, economic, political and social institutions worldwide” must be destroyed. In the meantime, Community Movement Builders aims to create local “liberated zones” where the “surplus-value” of labor cannot be “exploited by the outside capitalists.”

The Cuba Study Seminar of the United Church of Christ is also listed as a National Network on Cuba member. The church has been sending delegations to the island since 1979, which are co-hosted by the ICAP and the Cuban Council of Churches. The seminar’s purpose evidently extends beyond the exclusively faith-based to encompass distinctly political matters. The 2020 delegation, for example, was intended to mix Bible study with an examination of “the revolutionary values of the Cuban social system.” Church materials from 2023 explained that seminar participants learned about how Cuban revolutionaries “had experienced enough of what they describe as the U.S. imperial power that had maintained dominion over them with its capitalistic corporate profit motives.”

Finally, several prominent members of the National Network on Cuba—including Code Pink, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Venceremos Brigade, and the National Lawyers Guild—are also members of a separate coalition called the Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect (ACERE). This coalition has particularly close ties to Code Pink’s leadership: Medea Benjamin was one of ACERE’s co-founders, and it currently operates as a fiscally-sponsored project of a 501(c)(3) called Environmentalism Through Inspiration & Non-Violent Action (ETINA), the president of which is Jodie Evans.

ACERE’s mission is to oppose what it calls the “cruel and unlawful” sanctions which the United States has placed upon Cuba, and to support the full normalization of relations between the two countries. The group claims that Cuba poses no security threat to the United States, and it blames American sanctions—not Cuba’s own communist regime—for driving both socioeconomic collapse on the island and anti-government protests against living conditions. According to ACERE, “what’s happening in Cuba right now is not a crisis born out of mismanagement by its authorities or of the economic system its citizens have chosen, it is a crisis born out of the callousness of U.S. policymakers who for too long have used the well-being of Cubans as a weapon to be wielded to force Cuba into submission.”

Final thoughts

Cuba is a tragedy, and the earnest hope of all those of good will must be for an end to the misery that authoritarian collectivism has wrought upon the island. Cubans, like all people, deserve the political and economic freedoms which communism has long denied them. Getting to that point is another matter entirely, and there is room for substantial disagreement on the specifics of American foreign policy. How do we achieve our objectives, and what are the risks, uncertainties, and potential externalities involved in attempting to do so? These are difficult questions, which lend themselves to a range of legitimate opinions.

That said, even among those who advocate for some measure of conciliatory détente with Cuba, there must be no ambiguity or apologism for the failures and abuses of its governing regime. It is one thing to argue that the scales of American policy should be weighted somewhat more heavily with carrots relative to sticks. Sloganeering in solidarity with a Marxist-Leninist one-party state against the supposed evils of American imperialism is something else entirely. The simple fact that the groups profiled in this report are free to do so without fear of state-sanctioned consequences illustrates this point rather starkly.

The Atlantic staff writer Robert F. Worth recently spent nine days in Cuba, observing what he called the “shocking” collapse of the country. He noted that during that entire time he did not encounter a single person who blamed the United States for the island’s dire circumstances. He did, however, hear plenty of anger directed at the communist authorities. “The real embargo is inside of Cuba,” one man told Worth. Another was far more blunt: “I sh*t on Fidel Castro’s mother.”

Worth also reported on how the United States was circumventing Cuban regime intermediaries in its humanitarian aid efforts by using institutions such as the Catholic Church as conduits. Indeed, he wrote that “the churches have taken on much of the Cuban state’s old role in keeping people alive.” Civil society reflects the best in humanity, no less in Cuba than it does in the United States. Nobody can predict what the immediate future holds for Cuba, and there is cause for both hope and concern. One thing, however, is certain: the welfare of the Cuban people will ultimately depend upon the American radical-left finding a different ideological lodestar.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/cubas-american-allies/