By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Forty members of the Democratic Socialists of America flew to Cuba last October. They brought school and medical supplies. They toured a hospital and a primary school. Both of the organization’s national co-chairs went, along with nine other members of its governing body.
One of them came from Denver.
DSA’s International Committee published photos of the October 2025 Cuba delegation at a primary school and hospital in Havana. (Source: international.dsausa.org)
That trip is now part of a 100-page report the State Department released Monday, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced it himself, writing on X that “the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States.”
An entire section of the report is about DSA.
What the report says
The report describes the October 2025 delegation as hosted by ICAP, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples, which the Treasury Department sanctioned eight months later, on June 4 of this year, as an instrumentality of the Cuban government.
ICAP was founded by Fidel Castro in 1960. It is currently run by Fernando González Llort, a convicted member of the Wasp Network spy ring who served 15 years in federal prison before returning to Cuba.
According to the report, ICAP and a state travel agency called Amistur handled logistics for the DSA delegations. DSA’s own page for the trip confirms it, thanking “our partners Amistur and ICAP for helping make this delegation possible.”
The report goes further back than 2025.
It says DSA’s official delegations to the island began in 2022, and describes a 2023 trip it says was reportedly hosted by the Communist Party of Cuba itself, with the stated goal of “establish[ing] formal channels of communication between various Cuban organizations, ministries and the DSA.”
Participants on that trip reported a two-hour private meeting with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
DSA confirms the 2022 start date on its own site, describing a September 2022 healthcare delegation as “its first official delegation to Cuba.” Its post about the October 2025 trip is headlined “DSA Sends Its Second Delegation to Cuba.”
Internal DSA caucus publications, meanwhile, describe an October 2023 delegation of 44 members, six of them from the national leadership, and confirm the Díaz-Canel meeting from the inside. One caucus reported that two delegates skipped it.
The report also points to DSA’s Venceremos Fund, which it says solicits donations to “support the struggle to dismantle U.S. empire.”
The fund is real and DSA runs it openly.
Its own donation page describes it as supporting the International Committee, and DSA says the money covers “DSA delegations abroad, bringing international organizers to the U.S., and direct humanitarian aid to victims of U.S. imperialism.”
The current campaign is raising $50,000 for medical sutures and rehydration kits, in partnership with a nonprofit called Global Health Partners.
The report says DSA’s Cuba Solidarity Working Group sought to bring more elected officials along, quoting an intent to “cultivate Cuba’s solidarity in up-and-coming politicians” and build a “pro-Cuba block basically of elected officials… especially at the federal level.”
What DSA says
Most of the underlying activity is not in dispute, because DSA has published it.
DSA’s International Committee posted its own account of the October trip.
“In October, DSA was honored to send a delegation of 40 DSA elected leaders and rank-and-file members from chapters big and small across the country to Cuba,” it reads. The page describes delivering “hundreds of pounds of solidarity aid” and meeting “Cuban workers, doctors, teachers, and artists who keep the country running despite the growing hardships imposed by the U.S. blockade.”
The committee describes its ongoing work in similar terms, organizing “to pass resolutions within labor unions, city councils, state legislatures, and DSA chapters nationwide, demanding an end to the blockade and the unjust designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.”
DSA joined the National Network on Cuba after a resolution at its 2019 convention. The organization said so at the time, in a statement on its website.
The report describes that same coalition as having more than 60 member groups, including the Communist Party USA, CodePink and the National Lawyers Guild.
The Denver connection
Denver DSA advertised a public event afterward, held on Nov. 13.
In the chapter’s own words, it was a reportback on “the 2025 DSA Cuba Delegation undertaken by one of our members.”
The listing said the chapter would “discuss how we can learn from this experience to strengthen Cuba solidarity work in Denver, push for an end to the blockade, and grow our internationalist movement at home.”
Denver DSA advertised a public reportback on the Cuba delegation, describing it as “undertaken by one of our members.” (Source: actionnetwork.org)
The chapter did not name the member.
A Metro DC chapter held a similar event, co-hosted with the Cuban Embassy.
RMV contacted Denver DSA and DSA’s national office for comment. This story will be updated with any response.
What the report does not claim
The report is careful on one point, and it is worth quoting in full.
“The DSA was not founded as a Cuban intelligence or influence front,” it reads. “It was born in 1982 as a fusion of socialist organizations and movements from both the Old Left and New Left factions.”
The report goes on to say DSA “was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government itself.” Instead, it argues, DSA “freely embraced the policy agenda and worldview of its own accord.”
That is the report’s actual claim. Not infiltration. Alignment.
Opposition to the embargo is not unique to DSA. DSA’s own statements note that the United Nations has voted to condemn the U.S. sanctions every year since 1992.
The report arrived four days after Rubio hosted representatives of more than 60 countries at the State Department for a ministerial on what he called the resurgence of political terrorism.
One more thing about the sourcing
The report’s DSA section carries no footnotes.
Other parts of the document do. A claim about the University of Havana’s exchange agreements with American universities, for instance, is sourced in a footnote to an Indiana State University alumni magazine. The section on the National Lawyers Guild cites its sources.
The pages about DSA do not.
The quotes from the Cuba Solidarity Working Group about recruiting elected officials, and the details of the 2023 trip, are not traced in the document to a named source.
Some of it holds up anyway.
The Venceremos Fund is on DSA’s own website. The 2022 and 2025 delegations are documented by DSA’s International Committee. The Díaz-Canel meeting appears in DSA’s own internal caucus writeups. City Journal reported the same “pro-Cuba block” quote in March.
Readers who want to judge the document can read it themselves. The State Department has posted it publicly.
The State Department report treats all of this as a warning. DSA treats it as a point of pride. The two sides are describing the same trip. DSA sent 40 people to Cuba in October. It says so. A Denver member was among them. The chapter says so. And afterward, Denver DSA met to build on it — one member’s trip, now a chapter’s project.