Report: Pro-Hamas Campus Agitators Trained with Communists in Cuba

Some of the activists in protests backing the goals of the jihadist group Hamas on American college campuses received support and training in Cuba, ADN America reported Tuesday.

ADN America named Manolo De Los Santos, a far-left activist believed to have incited the storming of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall in late April, as having deep ties to the Castro regime and its figurehead president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, with a long track record of political activities in Cuba spanning multiple years.

De Los Santos is the executive director of The People’s Forum, a far-left organization that is highly sympathetic to the Cuban and Chinese Communist Parties and which describes itself as “an incubator of movements for the working class and marginalized communities.”

ADN America noted that its report coincides with a report that the New York Post published on Sunday that said that The People’s Forum has been urging anti-Israel protesters at campuses to “rekindle the bloody Black Lives Matter riots of summer of 2020.”

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The People’s Forum is one of several far-left organizations at the forefront of the wave of anti-Israel protests that erupted following Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel that left more than 1,200 dead and hundreds taken hostage.

ADN America reported that The People’s Forum organized a protest in Times Square, New York, one day after the October 7 attack, where attendees celebrated Hamas’s actions while waving signs that contained antisemitic slogans and imagery.

According to a 2015 interview, De Los Santos was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the South Bronx, New York, with his family when he was five years old. The far-left activist reportedly first visited Cuba in 2006 through Pastors for Peace, an organization that is part of the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a coalition of pro-Castro regime organizations in the United States.

At Cuba’s Matanzas Evangelical Seminary, De Los Santos conducted Marxist-driven liberation theology studies — an ideology that experts describe as a creation of the Russian KGB “to enroll Latin leaders” in the erstwhile Soviet Union’s espionage operations.

“[De Los Santos] has been traveling to Cuba since at least 2009 and has been prominently featured in the Cuban-regime press for almost a decade,” ADN America stated in its report.

“Reports indicate that, back in the U.S., he organized rallies in the U.S. to support the Cuban regime and that he is a staunch admirer of Fidel Castro,” the report continued.

“Fidel, for us, is a great example,” De Los Santos said in 2016. “I wish all leaders were like him and many of them had the dignity and integrity of the Commander.”

Cuba’s figurehead president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, received De Los Santos and other far-left activists in July 2022 with the aim of “elaborating a new consensus, based on theory and according to the different experiences of social movements and countries, on the path of socialism.”

In May 2023, more than 300 activists from the United States traveled to Cuba with The People’s Forum to meet with Díaz-Canel as part of Cuba’s communist “May Day” activities. Palestinian flags can be seen in the photos of the event that the Cuban Communist Party’s official newspaper, Granma, published.

“Our commitment upon returning will not only be to raise our voice but to organize a different political project in the United States, and we will always be by Cuba’s side,” De Los Santos said in an interview at the time.

The far-left People’s Forum received a $12-million donation from pro-China tech mogul Neville Roy Singham through the People’s Support Foundation (PSF). Singham has been a major financial backer of the ongoing anti-Israel protests in the United States.

Founder of CODEPINK, Jodie Evans (L), and founder of ThoughtWorks, Neville Roy Singham (R), attend V20: The Red Party, at Carnegie Hall on February 14, 2018, in New York City. (Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for V-Day)

In addition to De Los Santos, ADN Cuba mentions communist activist Onyesonwu Chatoyer as a member of both the Castro Regime-linked Venceremos Brigade and the All African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

“There has never been a moment where we questioned the necessity of a struggle to smash Zionism,” Chatoyer said in a March interview.

“Our opposition to Zionism is about solidarity with Palestine and all peoples struggling against settler-colonialism and imperialism,” she asserted at another point of the interview.

ADN noted that the Peace Action Network, another far-left organization currently organizing anti-Israel rallies, has taken some of its activists to “solidarity trips” to Cuba in the past.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.