The hidden agenda behind clout-chasing DSA comrades’ Cuba push

Cuba’s communist dictatorship may be living on borrowed time as the island’s power grid crumbles — but the Democratic Socialists of America is making “solidarity” with the regime its issue of the moment.

On Friday, the DSA sent 20 of its members there as part of the lefty “Nuestra América Convoy,” aiming to “show the world that Cuba is under siege, but they are not alone.”

They relaxed in luxury Havana hotels and rode in air-conditioned buses to meetings with Communist Party officials.

A wrecked economy and a grim 67-year history of repression that’s made more than a million Cubans flee in just the last five years doesn’t seem to be something to cheer about.

But the DSA continues to embrace this failure as just another cause through which to expand its network of aligned organizations and local chapters — and to fundraise, too.

Of course, the group that claims Mayor Zohran Mamdani as one of its own is all-in on the Cuban regime’s ideology.

Their shared Marxist worldview sees the United States as uniquely evil, blaming it for Latin America’s misfortunes through what the DSA describes as the “sordid history of imperial violence the US had brought” to the Caribbean.

Nor is Cuba an isolated case: For Marxists, all “struggles” are connected — so standing with Cuba’s authoritarians, they believe, advances DSA goals like freeing Palestine and bringing down capitalism.

The DSA claimed in January, for example, that Washington “manufactured a devastating economic blockade that still cripples Cuba’s economy and impoverishes millions of people.”

In other words, its woes have nothing to do with the failed experiment of dictatorial socialism.

Cubans themselves appear to see it differently.

They’ve been protesting in the streets, vandalizing government buildings and calling for an “end to the Dictatorship” — as Havana responds with beatings and further repression.

But the DSA is weaponizing the headlines to drum up sympathy for socialism, while expanding its influence.

As my colleague Stu Smith reported last week in City Journal, it’s using shady tactics to advance its agenda, masking other activities through a network of shadowy fronts.

For example, the DSA’s Cuba Solidarity Group last month laid out a plan to spin up a front group, modeled on the notorious anti-Israel “Jewish Voice for Peace,” as a means of reshaping American public opinion on Cuba.

“We need to organize in the same way and be inspired by people like Jewish Voice for Peace,” said CSG co-chair Danny Valdes in a February “emergency call.” “We need to do the same for Cuban-Americans.”

“You don’t have to be a communist or a socialist” to join, Valdes said, just “Cuban American.”

But he let slip the group’s larger purpose, as a “springboard to organize more people.”

DSA member Bob Schwartz handles DSA’s Cuba fund-raising effort through a partnership with the tax-exempt Global Health Partners nonprofit, where he serves as executive director.

He’s equally candid about his goals: “We’d like to do this as a DSA brand,” Schwartz said at a February meeting, “because it also helps to build local chapters.”

As well, the DSA actively solicits donations for its “Venceremos” (“we will win”) fund, asking people to pledge to “support the struggle to dismantle US empire.”

Money transfers to Cuba are heavily regulated under US sanctions, so DSA organizers tell the gullible to donate funds to the DSA instead, promising to buy crucial medical supplies — which it donates to a Cuban regime whose officials are notorious for diverting resources to themselves. 

In other words, they portray Cuba’s blackouts and desperate poverty as one more reason for a DSA donation.

Leftist influencers have been central to advancing the DSA’s Cuba agenda, spinning up a sense of momentum in a bid to reshape public opinion.

Hasan Piker, the self-avowed Marxist streamer, antisemite and Mamdani pal, joined Friday’s convoy, and comedian and DSA member Kate Willett said she was “coordinating a group of journalists/creators” to go along, including members of Code Pink.

But it’s all an illusion: Not only are many of these organizations led by DSA members, most are also part of the broader Progressive International coalition, whose board includes Fidel Castro’s niece.

From the very earliest days of the Cuban Revolution, the island’s autocratic tyrants have depended on useful idiots like the DSA to advance their interests abroad.

And while DSA-endorsed candidates keep peddling propaganda that boosts the brutal regime, most of the time they do it from the safety of the United States, which they continue to blame for refusing to include Cuba in the very capitalist system they deem to be “exploitation.”

To the DSA, any implementation of socialism is success — and the real-world consequences don’t matter.

Adam Lehodey is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.