The Liberal American Friends of the Communist Cuban Regime
Inside Universities and Nonprofits, A Pro-Communist Propaganda Push is in Full Swing
The Cuban regime remains a stalwart of the communist ideology that waxed during much of the twentieth century. Thanks to China, that ideology is waxing again today. Unsurprisingly, America’s internationalist post-Cold War elite has been as open to engaging with Cuba as it is with China. Until the Obama Administration, however, America’s politically active Cuban community limited this possibility.
President Trump reversed Obama’s Cuban “opening” . Now, its “re-opening” is being managed in subtler ways by the Biden Administration, looking to mobilize Latinos increasingly disaffected from the Democratic Party. Liberal operators also support this re-opening behind the scenes, working through higher education and nonprofits to make villains of Cuban resisters and heroes of those who support the regime.
Their strategies reveal a possible playbook for other pushes in the same direction with China. Worse, their success shows the corruption of the national networks of which they’re part—as well as the need for active pushes against them from the ground up.
(READ MORE: “Democracy” Redefined by Universities and the Media to Empower Bureaucrats)
A Pro-Cuba Scholar Comes to Florida with an “Objective” Argument
The first iceberg from the pro-Cuban-regime glacier surfaced a little more than a year ago. Florida International University (FIU), in Miami, invited Professor Susan Eckstein to discuss her new book, Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America. In the book, Eckstein, a professor at Boston University and past president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), traces what she calls the “unique opportunities granted Cubans, but not Haitians, who also fled horrific conditions,” thanks to American immigration laws crafted to encourage anti-communist resistance.
Eckstein’s visit made a stir in Miami, among people who suffered under regimes not simply awash in criminality and violence like Haiti but de jure or de facto totalitarian, where all aspects of a person’s life are under state control. A crowd came out for this discussion, listened to Professor Eckstein’s arguments, and answered vocally. She responded by labeling much of the event “premised on disinformation” and protesting that “I didn’t intend for the book to be political.”
This last statement is clearly inaccurate. Over her multi-decade, influential career, Professor Eckstein has consistently demonstrated political intention favoring Cuba’s current regime, an intention shared by close colleagues in important positions across academia and nonprofits, some with links to government.
An Agenda That’s More Than it Seems
One marker of Professor Eckstein’s agenda is the content of Cuban Privilege, which ignores the fact that the US has always had preferential immigration based on politics. For example, the 1965 immigration act established caps on immigration from the Western hemisphere, including Haiti, to appeal to a wider range of countries opposed to the USSR. Another marker of Eckstein’s agenda is her most influential book, Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro, described by its publisher as “the definitive history of Castro’s communist regime,” an assessment backed by booksellers like Barnes & Noble. As a mostly supportive reviewer noted, the book “leans toward the more positive view of Castro’s Cuba, emphasizing the revolution’s socioeconomic achievements” and argues that “the population has a real influence on government behavior” (a claim even the reviewer criticized).
Yet another book of Eckstein’s, How Immigrants Impact their Homelands, praises immigrants who act as “agents of globalization” and does damage control for globalization’s worst effects like labor outsourcing. A genuine globalist superstar with ties to Cuba co-edited the book: Adil Najam, the former Dean of the Frederick Pardee School at Boston University where Eckstein teaches, and the current President of the UN-and-USAID-funded Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).
WWF has put funding into Cuba since the 1980s, and puts other efforts into Cuban connections in the name of environmental improvement. These goals have disquieting undertones—e.g. WWF’s blog noting that “Cuba now has the lowest deforestation rate in Latin America and the lowest human population growth rate,” and “these statistics are a source of pride and encouragement to Cubans engaged in the conservation struggle.” (Emphases added.) According to WWF, these beneficial outcomes come from the fact that “[Cuba’s] one-party regime transformed all aspects of society,” including “a drive for environmental conservation rare in Latin American countries.”
The Bigger Networks Pushing for Ties with the Cuban Regime
A related marker of Eckstein’s political intentions, and a window into her broader networks of influence, is an open letter she signed addressed to Barack Obama just after he won the presidency in 2008. The letter argued that “Cuba has begun a process of transition that should be supported . . . through . . . dialogue . . . .” :Exactly the “support” and “dialogue” President Obama opened six years later, leading to normalization of diplomatic relations. This is also the “support” that President Biden is moving towards again, despite accelerating repressions on the island, and despite the regime’s links to Iran, Hamas, and China, and its backing from Hezbollah.
The letter Eckstein signed was sent under the aegis of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Eckstein, a past president, signed it along with nine other former presidents and the then-president. LASA is “the largest professional Association in the world for individuals and institutions engaged in the study of Latin America.” It also has political links to supporters of engagement with Cuba. Its current president, Jo-Marie Burt, is a senior fellow at The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), “a leading research and advocacy organization advancing human rights in the Americas.” WOLA receives funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, where WOLA’s president also worked.
WOLA has been a major backer of “normalizing” relations with Cuba. Its “Director for Cuba,” Marguerite Rose Jimenez, “served in the Obama Administration first as a White House Fellow focused on diversity and inclusion and then as senior policy advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce where she covered the Western Hemisphere” and where she “helped craft the Obama policy” toward Cuba. WOLA, in turn, works closely with the Center for International Policy, a Washington nonprofit which successfully urged the Obama Administration to forge closer ties to Cuba in the name of protecting the environment.
How Academia and Nonprofits Got Radicalized
LASA funds itself via an endowment initially seeded, in 1983, by the Ford Foundation. The Frederick Pardee School at Boston University, where Eckstein teaches and where Najam was the dean, is the project of a former RAND Corporation researcher who put his money back into the school. Ford and RAND were major players in the Cold War growth of America’s Washington-based foreign policy establishment. That establishment began with supporting foreign interventions abroad and ended with using international institutions to set universalizing “global norms” helping make people “equal” regardless of government, history, or ideology.
This is the real function of Eckstein’s project: re-casting groups with specific histories vis a vis the United States as “privileged,” then pushing to constrain those privileges in the name of universal ideals. It’s not a coincidence that the Cuban “privileges” Eckstein wrote about are exactly the ones the Obama Administration began to cut away, with support from nonprofits like WOLA.
But movers like Eckstein have a new set of allies—democratic socialists, socialists, and communists who have always believed in reducing the power of representative governments in favor of a global, “peaceful” world. These groups have more power in universities and nonprofits than ever before. One of them is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has an instructive link to the Pardee school through one of the school’s several notable internationalist-progressive alumni, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. DSA also, both directly and through its youth organization, YDSA, intersects with the Cuban Regime.
Read more coverage by Restoration News about America’s Adversaries
