by Jacob G. Hornberger

August 5, 2026

The communist threat from Cuba has returned with a vengeance. According to a Washington Post article entitled “State Dept. Again Deems Cuba a Threat Amid Talk of U.S. Push for Regime Change,” the Trump administration recently issued an official report “alleging that a multi-decade Cuban influence campaign in the United States has had ‘remarkable success’ in infiltrating ‘the highest reaches of the U.S. government,’ backing ‘left-wing terrorism on American soil’ and turning ‘America against itself.’”

Yikes! The Reds are coming to get us … again! Is it time to send the troops back into Vietnam to prevent the dominoes from falling to the commies? Is the international communist conspiracy still centered in Moscow? What about the terrorists? And the Muslims? And the drug dealers? And the illegal immigrants? Should we put those on the back burner?

The report points out that Cuba has been secretly infiltrating the United States again — or actually never stopped. According to the report, Cuba’s communist regime is the secret force behind the Democratic Socialists of America, who are experiencing considerable electoral success. And it doesn’t stop there. Apparently the Cuban Reds are also behind political upheavals like the George Floyd riots and the rise of Antifa.

OMG! Every night since I read about that official report, I’ve been looking under my bed for a Red. I was taught to do that during the old Cold War racket back in the 1950s and 1960s.

The threat to America — and specifically to “national security” — that communist Cuba supposedly posed to America was at the core of the Cold War racket. It began with the Cuban Revolution in 1959, continued to the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989, and, well, according to that official report, actually never ended. And don’t forget: Cuba is only 90 miles away from Miami — a communist dagger pointed at America’s neck. What could be scarier than that?

Don’t forget: that was what the CIA’s invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 was all about — to protect America from a Red takeover by removing Cuba’s communist regime from power and replacing it with another pro-U.S. right-wing dictatorship.

That was almost immediately after President Kennedy assumed the presidency. To garner his approval of its plan, the CIA convinced Kennedy that no U.S. military support for the invasion would be necessary because, CIA officials told him, the Cuban people were ready to revolt against the new regime and were ready to support the CIA’s invasion.

It was a lie — a knowing, intentional, and deliberate lie. The CIA knew that the overwhelming majority of the Cuban people supported the new regime, not only because it succeeded in ousting the ruthless, crooked, and corrupt pro-U.S. dictator, Fulgencio Batista, from power but also because the new regime was declaring its independence from decades of U.S. governmental control.

The CIA figured that once its invasion started to go down to defeat, the new, young, inexperienced U.S. president would have no choice but to change his mind and save the day with a U.S. military invasion that would bring about regime change in Cuba. In other words, the first action that the CIA took after Kennedy took office was a covert action directed against him.

It didn’t work. As the CIA’s invasion was going down to an ignominious defeat, Kennedy refused to change his mind. It was embarrassing military defeat that the CIA has never forgotten. In fact, there is little doubt that the CIA is chomping at the bit for President Trump to order an invasion of Cuba so that the CIA can get its revenge for the defeat that Fidel Castro and his communist forces meted out to the agency more than 60 years ago.

That was the start of the war between JFK and the U.S. national-security establishment that would culminate on the streets of Dallas on November 22, 1963. Kennedy vowed to destroy the CIA, which, for its part, considered him to be a coward, traitor, appeaser, and incompetent for his inaction at the Bay of Pigs.

Soon after the Bay of Pigs defeat, the Pentagon joined the CIA’s war against Kennedy with a campaign of continued pressure against him to initiate a full-scale military invasion and war of aggression against Cuba. For example, as Douglas Horne points out in his book JFK’s War with the National-Security State: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated, in April 1962 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Lemnitzer, presented Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara with a memorandum entitled “Cuba,” which is remarkably similar to the official report that U.S. officials recently published about Cuba. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if current U.S. officials cribbed from that old Cold War report.

Consider just one excerpt from the Cold War report and see if it doesn’t fit perfectly within the renewed threat that U.S. officials say that the U.S. is now facing from the Cuban Red regime:

The United States cannot tolerate permanent existence of a Communist government in the Western Hemisphere. The present regime in Cuba provides Communism with a base of operations for espionage, sabotage, and subversion against Latin America. The stability of some governments in Latin America is already threatened by the overt and covert actions of the Cuban government….

In view of the increasing military and subversive threat to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere posed by the Communist regime in Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention be adopted by the United States. They also recommend that such intervention be undertaken as soon as possible and preferably before the release of National Guard and Reserve forces presently on active duty….

That breathless exhortation was followed by the Pentagon’s proposal called Operation Northwoods, which advocated a deadly and destructive false-flag operation that would provide Kennedy with a fraudulent pretext for invading Cuba. The Pentagon succeeded in keeping that infamous proposal secret from the American people for more than 30 years, until the Assassination Records Review Board forced its disclosure in the 1990s.

To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he rejected Operation Northwoods and refused to succumb to the pressure that the Pentagon and the CIA were putting on him to invade Cuba.

But the U.S national-security establishment didn’t give up. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it did everything it could to pressure Kennedy into bombing and invading Cuba. Thanks to JFK’s refusal to succumb to that pressure, the world was spared an all-out nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

However, given that JFK made a deal with the Soviet Union to leave Cuba permanently in communist hands, he confirmed what the U.S national-security establishment had believed about him ever since the CIA’s defeat at the Bay of Pigs — that he was a coward, traitor, appeaser, betrayer, and incompetent who was leading America to disaster at the hands of the Reds.

Kennedy’s fate was sealed, especially when he openly declared war on the U.S. national-security establishment with his Peace Speech at American University in June 1963, where he vowed to end the Cold War racket and move America in an entirely different direction by adopting a policy of peaceful coexistence with the communist world, something that the U.S. national-security establishment was convinced was an impossibility.

And here we are today, more than 30 years after the ostensible end of the old Cold War racket, once again facing Pentagon and CIA idiocy over the grave threat to “national security” ostensibly posed by the Red regime in Cuba, a weak, impoverished, hollowed-out, starving, and ill Third World country being squeezed to death by socialism and the brutal, cruel, and ruthless decades-old Cold War U.S. economic embargo and its relatively new deadly oil blockade.