(DCNF)—Pro-Soviet Union groups active since the Cold War are part of a movement pushing for softer U.S.-Cuba relations.
Activist organizations made headlines on March 21 after delivering humanitarian aid to Cuba to protest President Donald Trump’s sanctions on the regime. At least seven groups involved previously pushed Soviet-friendly agendas or had direct USSR ties, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.
High-profile leftist groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s daughter and staunchly pro-China influencer Hasan Piker joined the Cuba trip, dubbed the Nuestra América Convoy. Beneath the Cuban “solidarity” messaging, however, lies a web of anti-American politics that has persisted despite the USSR’s 1991 demise.
“Cuba is a time capsule for old communists to relive their revolutionary 1960s youth, and a cult destination for younger militants who are either fully indoctrinated or see their support as virtue signaling against the United States,” Cold War scholar J. Michael Waller, a former CIA operative in Latin America, told the DCNF. “To them, Cuba represents the ‘cool’ Communism of the 1960s, despite the connection with the surviving elements of the Soviet active measures machine.”
The convoy’s “strategic partners” included the Soviet-aligned U.S. Peace Council, International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) and National Lawyers Guild (NLG), according to its website.
Activists at the National Network on Cuba (NNOC) also helped plan the convoy. The NNOC is a coalition of member organizations that include the Soviet-sympathetic Communist Party USA (CPUSA), CovertAction Institute and Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
The NNOC has also organized educational trips to Cuba in tandem with the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), founded by Fidel Castro.
CPUSA, U.S. Peace Council, IADC, CovertAction, SWP the NLG and the NNOC did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Leftists’ Cuba caravans came largely in response to Trump throttling Cuba’s international oil trade. The president previously imposed terrorism sanctions on Cuba for harboring criminals and threatened to “take” the island. ICAP President Fernando González Llort told the NNOC that visiting Cuba is “a political and truthful act” against America in a November video speech.
“The work you do from the United States is essential,” said González, a convicted Cuban regime spy who the U.S. released in 2014. “Each approved local resolution, each caravan, each brigade, each communication piece that dismantles the lie, it is a sharp blow against the policy of asphyxiation.”
‘That Old KGB Network’
Castro established ICAP in 1960 to facilitate flashy trips to Cuba as propaganda, according to Cuban state media and the CIA. Castro’s pro-Soviet government received heavy Russian military support.
ICAP also participates in the Soviet-backed World Peace Council. Soviets created the group and its American affiliate, the U.S. Peace Council, to campaign internationally against America, according to the CIA and the U.S. Peace Council’s former director.
The 89-year-old National Lawyers Guild frequently took pro-Russia stances while denying that it was a Soviet front, a profile by Capital Research Center notes. However, the NLG helped create the IADL, an entity that the CIA and International Commission of Jurists exposed as a front group hiring Soviets.
Additionally, CovertAction Magazine worked with Russia to disrupt CIA spying by publishing compromising materials, according to Soviet documents reported by Politico. Moscow also established CPUSA in the 1920s by merging other communist groups, which the party’s website boasts about.
Meanwhile, the Socialist Workers’ Party promoted “unconditional” American support for Soviet Russia despite criticizing dictator Joseph Stalin.
Overlap between pro-Soviet groups was so extensive that one CPUSA member served as the NLG’s executive secretary and the IADL’s representative to the United Nations, records show. Such groups eventually blended into the left’s Cuba movement as partners of the Nuestra América Convoy or the NNOC, founded in 1991 in Washington.
To support Cuba, the Socialist Workers Party has organized protests, outreach and electoral campaigns in America. SWP’s current U.S. director even attended a 1960 Havana event where rebel leader Che Guevara spoke, according to the SWP’s official newspaper.
The U.S. Peace Council partnered with the NLG to raise money for the March Cuba convoy. CPUSA has also sent multiple so-called Cuba delegations since 2017, its website shows.
Soviet-aligned groups endure because America did not take their influence seriously, Waller told the DCNF.
“They have never been held accountable for being willing collaborators with that old KGB network,” he said. “Their non-Communist allies and coalition partners were always fine with those connections and covered up for them. The big foundations and big academia laundered them and employed them. Big media never exposed them. FBI almost never went after them. And so they never had to cover their tracks because there was no need.”
Clinging To A Failed Experiment
Blaming America for Cuban poverty is an attempt to whitewash socialism’s repeated failures, economic and foreign policy experts told the DCNF.
“As we have seen with nearly every Communist regime in history, Cuba is not a viable state without constant outside support and repression of its people,” said George Moraitis, a former Navy officer and GOP House candidate in Florida. “Whether it’s China, Russia, or these far-left activist groups, the regime survives on lifelines from those willing to prop it up coupled with an aggressive police state.”
With Cubans increasingly protesting communism, “The last thing they need is American activists giving cover to the very regime they’re trying to escape,” Moraitis said.
Cuba’s authoritarian policies largely remain, according to Heritage Foundation economist Anthony Kim. “Heavy state intervention has stifled innovation, and the state’s foreign-currency earnings are dependent on a few exports, along with tourism,” he told the DCNF.
“A small number of limited reforms beginning some years ago, for instance, have allowed Cubans to work as ‘self-employed people’ in the private sector, but currently they can work only in narrow categories defined by the state,” Kim said. “The government — which has been spending more than 60% of the island’s economic output — has remained firmly in control of the private sector and the daily economic life of the Cuban people.”
Leftists are promoting yet another failing communist project to Americans, Waller told the DCNF.
“Their current claims have been the same claims for more than half a century,” Waller said. “It’s all tired, stale Soviet active measures themes. They can’t even be creative about it. They’re just performing their swan song after having wasted their lives on a loser cause.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
