03 World

A new State Department report contends Cuba has spent years quietly building a network of sympathetic American activist groups it can mobilize against U.S. policy, citing a recently circulated nationwide protest plan as evidence.

The plan, distributed in June as the “National Rapid Response Plan,” came from the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a U.S. coalition of more than 60 organizations. The State Department ties the coalition to Havana through the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, or ICAP, a Cuban entity sanctioned in June over alleged support for Cuban intelligence operations.

The document instructs organizers to launch “coordinated nationwide actions” within 24 hours of any U.S. strike on Cuba, aiming to make it “politically and materially costly for the U.S. government to wage war on Cuba.” The report calls the plan proof of Cuba’s “subversive capabilities on American territory.”

Organizers are told to converge on federal buildings, courthouses, military bases and ICE facilities. The plan seeks to “connect Cuba solidarity to anti-ICE/immigrant defense work happening nationwide” and points activists to a database mapping 1,335 U.S. military and law-enforcement sites in the Western Hemisphere.