AMY GOODMAN: As the Trump administration threatens to intensify its “global campaign to crush radical left terrorism,” quote-unquote, we look at a new 100-page report issued by the State Department last week accusing the Cuban government of waging a “sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” unquote. The report claims Cuba has backed a number of groups in the United States, including the National Lawyers Guild, CodePink, Pastors for Peace and the National Network on Cuba. In March, CodePink and other organizations led a land, sea and air humanitarian solidarity mission to Cuba called the Nuestra América Convoy, Our America Convoy. Afterwards, the Treasury Department launched an investigation into CodePink.

Meanwhile, the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed three left-leaning nonprofit organizations, including BreakThrough News, demanding the independent online news outlet hand over internal communications and financial records. The subpoena also targeted the New York-based political education group People’s Forum and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

BreakThrough News says it’s being targeted over its coverage of U.S. mass deportations, ICE abuses, Cuba, Palestine solidarity and U.S. foreign policy. BreakThrough News has launched a fundraiser to pay for legal expenses. In a statement, the outlet said, quote, “For years, Republican lawmakers have painted a target on our backs, falsely claiming that our political views and reporting are part of some foreign plot,” unquote.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Washington, D.C., Medea Benjamin is co-founder of CodePink. She returned to Cuba in April and is the author of several books on Cuba, including No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba Today. And in Beirut, Lebanon, we’re joined by Rania Khalek, journalist at BreakThrough News, where she hosts programs Dispatches and BT Live. Her recent Substack post is headlined “Congress Just Subpoena Our Newsroom for Doing Journalism.”

Medea Benjamin, let’s begin with you. You read the entire State Department report on Cuba. If you can start off by laying out what’s in it, but also begin, for context for a global audience, by talking about the congressional hearings that CodePink has interrupted, the antiwar group, to get a sense of the politics of CodePink and why it might be targeted?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, just in this last month, we’ve had an opportunity to speak out at some of the very important congressional hearings: when Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was making his case for the U.S. to pay billions of dollars for this unprovoked, reckless war in Iran; Marco Rubio, when he talked about the State Department’s policies that have wreaked such havoc around the world, and forget that he’s supposed to be a diplomat. One of the recent ones was Mike Waltz, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, who declared at the United Nations that there was no U.S. blockade on Cuba, and was there telling the members of Congress how well the U.S. war in Iran was going. So, these are some of the recent hearings.

And yes, it gives a sense of our politics, which is we’re a peace organization. We don’t want to see the U.S. waging war around the world. We don’t want to see the U.S. supporting Israel. We want to live in cooperation. We want our diplomats to be diplomats.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the report and also what has happened to CodePink. Has CodePink been subpoenaed? Have you personally been subpoenaed?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: I personally have not. CodePink is being investigated by the Treasury Department as a result of this March trip that you mentioned, the Nuestra América Convoy, where we took humanitarian aid for the children’s hospitals to try to help Cuba with the rising infant mortality rates as a result of this brutal blockade. And they are asking us for all kinds of ridiculous information about everything we brought to Cuba, who we gave it to, the receipts.

And this is, of course, in the context of the attacks on U.S. organizations and the U.S. State Department report that you mentioned, Amy, that is just an incredible piece of garbage, a hundred pages, trying to link U.S. movements, whether in the ’60s and ’70s or today, movements for Black Lives Matter, against ICE, the movements in student universities, linking all of these to Cuba, connecting it to Cuba, the connections to Russia, to China, to Iran, to paint this picture of a tiny island nation that is trying to overthrow the United States. In fact, it says it wants to conquer the U.S., it wants to erase the U.S. from the Earth. Absolutely absurd.

And, of course, every accusation is a confession, because it’s the United States that has tried to overthrow the Cuban government from 1960, as we saw in the 1960 memo that says U.S. should use hunger and desperation to overthrow the Cuban government. It accuses Cuba of trying to interfere all over Latin America, when this has been the modus operandi of the United States to try to shape Latin America in its own interests. And it talks about Cuban interference in U.S. internal affairs. We say let’s look at Israel, that has had more of an impact on U.S. policy than Cuba could ever dream of.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about the condition of Cuba today? I mean, as Marco Rubio, who himself is Cuban American, talks about, as you said, Cuba trying to overthrow the United States, I think the United States, the Trump administration, has been very clear about trying to overthrow Cuba. Right now blackout after blackout, its economy asunder, the sanctions against Cuba strangling it. If you can talk about the conditions on the ground for this report to be coming out now?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: It is just criminal, what the United States is doing to Cuba. It’s had these sanctions for a long time, but they have increased to a new degree that we have never seen before, with an oil blockade that, since January, President Trump said not a drop of oil will get into Cuba. There was one Russian tanker, and that’s it.

Imagine a country that is trying to survive without oil. It means there’s not electricity. It means that the roads are empty because there’s no public transportation. It means that people’s food rots in the refrigerator. And it also means that more babies are dying in the hospitals. More women are giving birth to low-weight babies. It means that people don’t have access to cancer medicines and other medicines they need. This is the most cruel policy.

And let’s remember that Cuba at one time was a country that did manage to have infant mortality rates and life expectancy that rivaled the United States, and also a country that spread its message of trying to save lives all around the world with these medical missions that have saved millions of lives in some of the poorest countries in the world, that have organized and built hospitals around the world, that have trained medical doctors. In fact, in the midst of this crisis, they just graduated 1,600 doctors from 71 countries, including Palestine, in Cuba. So, the fact that Cuba has been able to survive is quite remarkable, but the situation is catastrophic.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, the State Department hosted an international summit, where White House adviser Stephen Miller described the left as “enemies of civilization.” This is part of Stephen Miller’s speech.

STEPHEN MILLER: Here in the United States, we have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government. President Trump issued a directive — in our parlance, it’s called a national security presidential memorandum, or NSPM — NSPM-7, to be exact — that directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country. It’s very important to understand that left-wing political terrorism seeks as its ultimate end the overthrow of our system and form of government.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Medea Benjamin, that’s Stephen Miller. If you can respond to what he’s saying?

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, what I think is that we are seeing the results of his twisted mind in the attacks on so many of our organizations in the U.S. And it’s a time for us to come together. We encourage people to go to the CodePink website. There is a note now that you can sign to send a message to Marco Rubio about what do you think of his garbage Cuba report and attacks on U.S. groups. We can’t be intimidated. This is really a moment in history that is so dangerous for us in the United States and for the world. Let’s come together and fight harder.