The US government’s latest allegations that Cuba is behind “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history” and that its leaders pose “a unique threat to American homeland security” have come as startling revelations to those living under the six-month-long US oil blockade in Havana, where desperate people search through piles of uncollected rubbish for food, or else swelter at home in 24-hour-plus blackouts.

The unsigned 100-page report, Cuba: Capital of 21st-Century Communism, published by the US state department on Monday, blames Havana for everything from “the George Floyd riots to the rise of antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses”.

The State Department has released a report that labels Cuba as the “ideological capital” of left-wing politics in a document seemingly imitating Cold War politics published amid the Trump administration’s fascistic crackdown on the left.

The 99-page report is entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” It argues that, since the rise of Fidel Castro and left-wing revolutionary thought in the Caribbean country in the 1950s and ‘60s, the country’s brand of left-wing politics “now enjoys something approaching ideological hegemony both within and beyond the West.” Though Cuba itself is a “failed state,” the report says, its political project has still spread to the point of threatening “Western civilization itself.”

Nothing exposes the bankruptcy of America’s approach to Iran more clearly than its return to more war as the answer to its own failures.

Less than a month after stepping back from military escalation in pursuit of an interim understanding with Tehran, the Trump administration has returned to the same maximalist strategy that nearly 40 days of fighting had already shown could deliver neither a favorable outcome for the United States nor regional or global stability. In the latest wave of escalation, three more US service members were killed, bringing the US. military death toll to 17. The United States has widened its strikes to include bridges, electrical infrastructure and, according to Tehran, the unfinished Darkhovin nuclear power site, while Iran has attacked US bases and critical infrastructure across Jordan and the Persian Gulf.

He did it again. There was a world championship trophy, waiting to be held aloft at the same gargantuan stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. There was Gianni Infantino, waiting alongside the US president. And there was that same US president, Donald Trump, fresh off a round of stadium-wide booing and jeering, handing off the trophy with Infantino and then staying stubbornly in the frame as another team enjoyed the pinnacle of their professional careers with an octogenarian standing awkwardly in the shot.