Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the United States “doesn’t want to be a communist country” and would not allow communist efforts to undermine American society, remarks he linked to recently declassified intelligence materials. He also highlighted Cuba’s government as a key source of what he described as ideological and influence operations in the hemisphere.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the United States would not tolerate communist efforts aimed at undermining American institutions or widening social divisions.
In remarks to reporters, Rubio said the administration’s comments were tied to documents the president had released from the intelligence community, and added that the United States “doesn’t want to be a communist country” and was “certainly not going to allow communist efforts to undermine American society and drive wedges into our country.”
Rubio also pointed to Cuba’s government as a major driver of what he described as ideological and intelligence operations in the Western Hemisphere, an argument the State Department has amplified in a recent report accusing Havana of a long-running espionage and influence campaign.
Separately, Rubio has been promoting an international initiative focused on what the Trump administration calls transnational far-left political violence. According to reporting by The Associated Press and The Washington Post, Rubio convened officials from more than 60 countries at the State Department for discussions on “left-wing” political terrorism, and the administration has pursued tools such as financial sanctions and terrorism designations targeting certain anti-fascist groups in Europe.
In that forum, Rubio invoked past militant movements including the Tupamaros, the Montoneros, Peru’s Shining Path, Italy’s Red Brigades, Germany’s Red Army Faction, and the Weather Underground in the United States.
Some statistical claims about sharp recent increases in far-left violence in specific European countries could not be verified in the provided source material. A publicly available analysis by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) has reported that radical-group violence in Europe has been broadly stable since 2020 and that far-right groups account for the majority of such violence overall, while noting that in Greece a large share of radical-group violence involves far-left and anarchist actors.
The administration has said it intends to pair domestic vigilance against foreign influence efforts with expanded coordination abroad against extremist networks, including by targeting financing and cross-border organizing.
