Cuba’s Long Communist Play in America: Manolo De Los Santos, Calla Walsh, and Marxism’s Rise in the USA

Revolutions live on promises which take time to keep, and, if they do arrive, don’t often appear as advertised. Fidel Castro took control of Cuba in 1959 promising that communism would create a “new Cuban man and woman.”

Ninety miles from Cuba, in America, the legacy of Castro’s promises is even more unexpected—and dangerous. Here, institutional operators supported by Cuba have taken the promises of Castro’s revolution to heart.

Two of them, Manolo De Los Santos and Calla Walsh, have broken through the news barrier in the tidal wave of pro-Palestinian protests, moving from minor to major players. Looking into their long backgrounds and breakthrough moves reveals trends that help explain the recent growth of Marxist ideology in America.

First, both players have been seeded by the Cuban communist regime, a quiet but lethal longtime operator inside the United States. Second, both have links to Democratic organs of politics. Third, both have been nurtured by the financial, academic and nonprofit networks funded from Washington, D.C. that we call the Deep State. Finally, De Los Santos’s and Walsh’s movements gain their followings off the deep state’s overreach at home and abroad.

Manolo De Los Santos and Communist Regime of Cuba

Manolo De Los Santos came to radicalism by way of Cuba, and to Cuba by way of IFCO (Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organization) Pastors for Peace: a progressive religious group which, in 2006, took De Los Santos, then a 17 year old Dominican immigrant living in the South Bronx, to Cuba. Nine years later, in 2015, De Los Santos was based in Cuba full time: an IFCO staffer studying liberation theology and testifying about what he said were the harms of American sanctions on the Cuban regime.

(Read more: Outsiders Edge In: Who Really Benefits from the Campus Protests?)

Over the next near-decade, De Los Santos began broadcasting and producing his ideas. He edited “Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro” and wrote the introduction to “On Cuba: 70 Years of Reflection and Struggle,” a volume co-authored by eminent political Leftist Noam Chomsky with a foreword by the leader of Cuba’s Communist regime.  He also co-founded The People’s Forum (TPF) in Manhattan, identified in a past Restoration report as a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.”

The People’s Forum and Cuba

The People’s Forum’s incubation agenda, under De Los Santos’s direction these last six years, runs deep and wide. It raises “urgent donations” for sending bread to Cuba. The People’s Forum hosts a cast of movers with ties to Cuba including IFCO Pastors for Peace and its allies the Venceremos Brigade and Code Pink. It also hosts Vijay Prashad, co-author of Chomsky’s “On Cuba” and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, where De Los Santos is a researcher. Tricontinental  operates off the ideas of Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci: The “intellectuals of working people . . . bridge the gaps between movements and . . . institutions.”

In the everyday, The People’s Forum creates a community of recruits and activists—a world within a world. It sells coffee, sandwiches, and books at its headquarters near Times Square, which it spent $12 million renovating between 2018 and 2021. It also sponsors around 40 events a month. These include Arabic and Portuguese language classes and forums on “Marxism and National Liberation” with special focuses on “China’s Long March” and “The Anti-Patriarchal Front.” They also include film screenings with $8 “solidarity tickets” in “the spirit of… revolutionary culture.” And they include classes taught by People’s Forum’s treasurer Chris Caruso, a major operator at the poverty-focused nonprofit Robin Hood. Robin Hood’s board of directors is chaired by Goldman Sachs’s Dina Powell McCormick, formerly a staffer in the Trump White House and the wife of the Republican Party’s candidate for United States Senate in Pennsylvania.

All of this activity, along with a staff of at least ten, receives funding from several sources. One noteworthy funder, in the amount of $18 million, is Goldman Sachs’ Philanthropy Fund. Another, in the amount of $20.4 million, is the American multimillionaire Neville Roy Singham, the husband of Code Pink’s Jodie Evans. He is also a funder of Tricontinental and a supporter of the Chinese Communist Party whose unusual sympathies have attracted the attention of even The New York Times.

The People’s Forum and the Palestinian Protests

It was this expansive network that Manolo De Los Santos drew on when he saw the opportunity: America’s involvement in the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On October 8, the day after Hamas’s attack and before there was an Israeli-counteroffensive to protest against, The People’s Forum organized a rally in Times Square. Two weeks later, De Los Santos was in Havana helping at a pro-Palestinian rally there, and by December and January he was rallying again in New York. At the same time, his co-director of The People’s Forum Claudia De La Cruz, whose Marxist career also began with a trip to Cuba, became a self-described “fixture” at protests for Palestine. In May, The People’s Forum co-organized a conference in Detroit called “The People’s Conference for Palestine” featuring Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. On June 8, The People’s Forum co-sponsored a march to surround the White House in the name of the Palestinian cause.

De Los Santos has not been shy about where the Palestinians fit in his agenda; in fact, his overtness about their function made national news. In December of last year, at a People’s Forum event, he stated that “when the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism in our lifetime.”

Still, this Marxist reality doesn’t receive much media acknowledgment. Liberal establishment papers like The New Yorker featured quotes by De Los Santos without mentioning his background, while The New York Times refers to The People’s Forum as an “event space.” Meantime, center-right papers like The Free Press cover De Los Santos solely through his pro-Palestinian activism. In reality, for De Los Santos, the Palestinian cause is one marker in a multi-pronged attack on America that flows from communist Cuba.

Calla Walsh and the Radicalized Young Progressive

Manolo De Los Santos is not the only true believer with ties to Cuba and to power. Another is Calla Walsh: fifteen years younger than De Los Santos but a force in her own right as a self-described “organizer, student, and propagandist.” Walsh first appeared nationally in The New York Times in May 2021 in an article about an “army” of Massachusetts “young progressives.” That same month she appeared on a podcast produced by Gen Z for Change, the most influential youth group in Washington known, like Walsh, for its climate advocacy and its militant tactics.

Walsh’s transition from a climate activist to an “anti-imperialist” and “communist” seems to have come around the end of 2021 and in 2022. It corresponds with an uptick in her involvement in Cuba. Likely this involvement ran through her home cities of Cambridge and Boston, thanks to their deep ties to the Cuban regime. Walsh has close links to the city’s elite secondary education networks, also closely linked to its universities, one of which employs her father. These universities, in turn, have close links to pro-Cuban progressive academics, politicians and administrator-activists.

Walsh’s Communist Turn

In 2021, according to Canary Mission, which tracks anti-Semitism, Walsh posted a supportive, since-removed tweet about a communist who murdered an American police officer several decades ago and fled to Cuba. That same year she wrote an article for Yahoo! News citing Kendra Lara Hicks: “one of my local Boston DSA City Council candidates” who led a resolution to lift Cuba’s blockade over protests from Cuban Americans.  

By 2022, in another seemingly deleted tweet reported by Canary Mission, she was posting in support of “abolish[ing] the US” because it was “founded on genocide and slavery.” She was also listed as the co-chair of the National Network on Cuba: “a coalition of organizations across the United States” founded in 1991 in Washinton, D.C. “fighting to end” what it calls, inaccurately, “the US war on Cuba.”

That same year, Walsh visited Cuba with help from IFCO Pastors for Peace. She called the trip “an inside look into a true people’s democracy, where workers decide who will govern them, not wealthy oligarchs and corporations.” The next year, 2023, she was escorted out of U.S. Senator Robert Menendez’s offices where, she said, she was trying to discuss U.S Cuban relations.

Walsh Jumps on the Palestinian Cause

As with De Los Santos, the Palestinian cause gave Walsh a firestorm to leap into for the benefit of her beliefs. Walsh’s Palestinian activism made headlines in December 2023, in Teen Vogue, which had run complimentary features on Gen Z for Change. In its piece covering Walsh, Vogue identified her as a “Gaza ceasefire protestor” and a co-founder of Palestine Action U.S. who led protests outside locations of Elbit Systems, a weapons manufacturer tied to Israeli operations in Gaza.

It was during the second of these protests against Elbit, in New Hampshire, that Walsh’s activism jumped the breaker and led to vandalism, which made news across multiple outlets. Mentioning her ensuing arrest, The Jewish News Syndicate noted that she had also supported the “Mapping Project.” The Mapping Project is a Massachusetts venture identifying civil society organizations associated with “Zionism.”  (These included, according to The Times of Israel, “A Jewish arts group. A Jewish high school. A Jewish newspaper. A synagogue network.”)

Again, though media outlets critical of Walsh identify her with the Palestinian cause, this does not do justice to her agenda. Palestine Action U.S., the group she leads, became active in 2023 thanks to the generosity of multi-millionaire media heir and Marxist James “Fergie” Chambers. Its newsworthy actions began after October 7. Before this, Walsh mainly focused on climate change and Cuba. Cuban communism seems to have been the matrix through which she began discussing America as an imperialist regime, and Palestinians as its collateral on the ground.

The Forces Behind the Young Communists’ Rise

Growing numbers of operators like De Los Santos and Walsh don’t believe in a single “issue.” They believe in an ideology, the struggle of the dispossessed against the state system. Their seeding ground is the Cuban Communist regime, whose sixty-year power gambit in America involves using our deep state’s missteps as recruiting tools. A look at the histories of the players involved with De Los Santos and Walsh shows how their affinities with Cuban communism sprang out of resistance to American entanglements abroad.

Pastors for Peace brought both young operators to Cuba. It was founded by Lucius Walker, whose “life was transformed” in Nicaragua in the 1980s when he was attacked by militias armed by the American government, leading him to vow to “to fight…American imperialism.” The Venceremos Brigade, which works closely with Pastors for Peace and appears at The People’s Forum, was founded in 1969 by Carl Oglesby of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who began his career protesting the Vietnam War.

Medea Benjamin founded Code Pink around her opposition to the Iraq War: a defense contracting boondoggle made by Washington corporate-political players who thought the Vietnam War could have been won had America continued to wage it. Calla Walsh’s DSA Boston City Councilwoman Kendra Lara Hicks began her career in a nonprofit founded by MIT’s Noam Chomsky, an advocate against American interference overseas since at least the 1960s. Neville Roy Singham is the son of a CUNY professor active in the non-aligned anti-imperialist movement of the Cold War.

The American Networks at Play

De Los Santos, Walsh, and others like them receive support from government-backed corporations like De Los Santos’s funder Goldman Sachs, or families like that of Walsh’s funder Jim “Fergie” Chambers—early beneficiaries of American empire who now use global institutions to expand their control. Marxists do not truly oppose these institutions and operators; they seek to work through them, at least temporarily. They also work through universities—routes by which wealthy Americans and corporations have always exercised their influence.

Closer to the ground, Marxists take advantage of the hollowing-out of cities thanks to players like Goldman Sachs. In New York City, where skyrocketing rents prevent millennials and Generation Z’ers from saving money and where corporate-backed rezoning destroys neighborhoods driving the rising rents, The People’s Forum provides young, distrustful Americans with a sense of community and purpose. This may be one reason why Goldman Sachs is so supportive of The People’s Forum’s work, and why Goldman’s Dina Powell McCormick chairs Robin Hood, “New York City’s largest poverty-fighting organization” staffed by People’s Forum’s Chris Caruso. In a vacuumed-out city where rezoning and rising rents have not just leeched savings but raised homelessness by 175 percent over 20 years, The People’s Forum and Robin Hood perform a socially pacifying function, at least for now.

These facts suggest that identifying and cutting funding from specific Marxist networks is not enough. To neuter the lure of communist promises that power revolution, Americans need to take away their fuel. Fortunately, this need corresponds to the project of the new Republican Party. That project? Shrinking the deep state—the interconnected agencies, universities, corporations, media outlets and nonprofits directly and indirectly funded by Washington, D.C.—which has turned our politics toward corporatist empire and away from constitutional government.

(Read more: The Extensive Terrorist Connections to America’s Pro-Hamas Campus Protests)

Matt Wolfson is a contributor to Restoration News

Get Involved

Join Restoration of America today and receive the latest updates, news, and ways to get involved with our efforts!

By  providing your phone number and checking this box, you are consenting  to receive calls and text messages, including autodialed and automated  calls and texts, to that number from Restoration of America. Message and  data rates may apply. Reply "STOP" to opt-out. Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions apply.