(Zero Hedge)—A common pattern across America’s far-left organizations is alarming behavior that appears militant, resembling revolutionary movements more than civic advocacy. There is a historical explanation that is rarely discussed: for decades, Cuban intelligence has penetrated and influenced segments of the radical left, enabling influence operations with nation-killing objectives.
This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it speculative. The pattern stretches back more than half a century and follows a consistent arc: student activism, escalation into disorder, foreign ideological grooming, and institutional capture through nonprofits that later rebrand as “civil society.”
The story begins in 1968, when members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), including Mark Rudd and Bernadine Dohrn, were invited to Cuba. That trip resulted in the founding of the Venceremos Brigade, which publicly framed itself as a solidarity delegation but privately represented something more consequential. Multiple intelligence assessments and contemporary reporting alleged that SDS radicals requested formal training from the Castro regime, including instruction in explosives and sabotage. The objective was explicit: to move from protest politics to revolutionary struggle with foreign backing.
Upon his return to the U.S., Rudd was elected president of Columbia University’s SDS chapter and quickly presided over a wave of sit-ins, building takeovers, and riots that paralyzed campus life and captured national attention. After his expulsion, Rudd, alongside Dohrn, went on to become co-founders of the Weather Underground, a domestic extremist organization responsible for bombings and violent underground activity throughout the early 1970s.
The lesson Cuba learned from this period was very simple: American radicals could be trained, networked, ideologically shaped, and then sent back to do their dirty work.
Last week, we were honored to send a delegation of 40 DSA elected leaders & rank-and-file members from chapters big & small across the country to #Cuba, where they delivered hundreds of pounds of solidarity aid & learned about the achievements & challenges of Cuban socialism. pic.twitter.com/SD1hul0PB7
— DSA (@DemSocialists) October 20, 2025
Guess where Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass got her start in politics…
Did You Know:
Karen Bass got her start in politics in the Venceremos Brigade, a Marxist front group in the US funded by Cuba
She traveled to Cuba many times
The Venceremos Brigade directly spawned domestic terror groups the Weather Underground and May 19th Org pic.twitter.com/Pno87kL50S
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) January 25, 2025
Here’s what happened in Los Angeles this summer…
Fast-forward to 2025, and the same structure still exists, but it has been supercharged with vastly greater assets and manpower, fueled by billionaire leftists who operate what is now widely described as the protest industrial complex. This network is increasingly described as a color-revolution-style operation led by NGOs to undermine the Trump administration and ‘America First.’ What were once underground protest movements now operate openly and, in some cases, violently, supported by armies of “movement lawyers,” expansive national coalitions, and dark-money-funded NGOs. There was even the political assassination of Charlie Kirk this fall, a reality that even Deep State media outlets like The Atlantic were forced to acknowledge…
According to a defected Cuban intelligence officer and corroborating intelligence reporting, legacy Castro-aligned groups such as the Venceremos Brigade and the National Lawyers Guild have been controlled by Cuba’s Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) since at least the 1980s. That influence is exerted through ICAP (the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples).
ICAP is an official Cuban government organization, founded in 1960, that promotes international solidarity and cultural exchange. On paper, it organizes delegations, volunteer brigades, educational tours, and international conferences that oppose U.S. sanctions and support Cuba’s political system. It appears benign – almost quaint.
WATCH: Washington Post Reporter Says Democrats Won’t ‘Go Hard’ On Cuba Because They Agree With The Regime https://t.co/O8tP3Wb17a pic.twitter.com/tV2Uk9B9h3
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) July 19, 2021
But declassified CIA documents dating back to the Cold War describe a consistent operational method: foreign recruits were brought to Cuba for training in intelligence tradecraft or guerrilla sabotage and were received by DGI officers posing as ICAP officials. ICAP functioned as the intake valve – political cover for intelligence operations designed to cultivate long-term assets rather than short-term spies.
What exists today is not a single organization but a complex ecosystem.
ICAP sits at the center, functioning as a coordinating hub. Orbiting it is the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a deliberately loose coalition that links 77 organizations of activists, nonprofits, and campaigns while minimizing legal exposure or clear command structures. The National Lawyers Guild serves as the lawfare and agitation arm, training protesters, facilitating delegations, and litigating against U.S. institutions under the guise of civil rights.
Funding and infrastructure come from the Neville Roy Singham Network, a web of organizations tied to Chinese Communist Party-aligned capital that provides money, logistics, and professionalized organizing capacity. Public narratives are amplified by legacy anti-war organizations like CODEPINK and the ANSWER Coalition, which are also now under the Singham umbrella. They frame U.S. foreign policy as illegitimate while defending authoritarian adversaries. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) functions as the political activation channel, translating activist energy into electoral and legislative influence on behalf of the Cuban regime.
Viewed individually, each organization insists it is merely engaging in advocacy. Viewed together, the pattern is unmistakable.
Examine the leadership and membership of the National Network on Cuba and the picture sharpens further. Calla Walsh, founder of PalAction U.S. and Unity of Fields, served as a co-chair of NNOC. Manolo De Los Santos lived in Cuba for six years and maintains relationships with senior ICAP officials and Cuban political leadership. Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK lived in Cuba for five years, married a Cuban communist, and went on to build organizations centered around Cuba delegations. Groups as radical as Armed Queers of Salt Lake City appear inside NNOC membership rolls. The DSA has held meetings at the Cuban Embassy in New York City and subsequently traveled to Cuba, where it announced a formal partnership with ICAP.
🇨🇺 🇨🇳 These Cuba trips are run through ICAP, a shadowy Cuban intel front, and the Venceremos Brigade. Since 1970, at least 744 delegations have brought U.S. activists to Havana for a crash course in communist collaboration. Cuba used to be a proxy for the Soviets but lately it’s… pic.twitter.com/n4QePQ99UE
— Peter Schweizer (@peterschweizer) September 16, 2025
None of this proves espionage in the cinematic sense. It does not need to.
🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING 2: The 2025 May Day trip of SLC Armed Queers to Cuba: “Well, if we’re terrorists, we’re proud to be terrorists”
I’ve obtained a now-deleted video.
In it, Ermiya Fanaeian and an unidentified man named Connor talk openly about:
👉 Palestinian students at… pic.twitter.com/CBkStDYjEO
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) September 16, 2025
Come on now…
So here is @senwarren with the head of the Salt Lake City Armed Queers (she/her). Let’s see what a few hours of tracing lobby fund flows will reveal next. https://t.co/8TaLE0e4QA
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 17, 2025
Influence operations are not about secrets; they are about shaping norms, training protest foot soldiers, and aligning political instincts. By that measure, Cuba’s intelligence services have been extraordinarily successful. Entire segments of the U.S. radical nonprofit sphere now reflexively defend foreign authoritarian regimes and justify violence, while dehumanizing and demonizing half the country by calling them “Nazis” and “fascists.”
Here is the roadmap to Charlie Kirk’s assassination… pic.twitter.com/S4JPbPiFy8
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) September 12, 2025
The reason target profiling of Republicans was done by the radical left and Democrats is very simple:
Many of these organizations are conspicuously opposed to anything associated with America First, with some openly calling for the destruction of Western capitalism and even the end of the U.S. Strikingly, they all sing from the same radical Marxist songbook.
If you want to understand why the radical left appears to hate America and seeks to implode the nation from within, it is not difficult to see that these ideas are rarely developed organically. More often, they are shaped and reinforced by outside influences. This chart helps explain why the radical left has become so radical.
As per The Washington Times, “Cuba’s intelligence apparatus is training foreign nationals to wage war against the West.”
It’s already begun:
The Atlantic is absolutely correct: “Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise.” And perhaps we just unveiled why…
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Who would’ve ever thought that a Communist nation that is Soviet/Chinese puppet, that hates America and sits only 90 miles from Florida, would ever attempt to interfere with American government/culture in any way, shape, or form?
Just wondering…. how did Fidel and gang escape the long arm of the CIA for 60 years ? I mean Allende or the So. Vietnam President didn’t fair as well.