Cuba's terror nexus

Cuba's Castro regime did more than reorient the country's entire economic, social, and political systems. It birthed an activist foreign policy that saw the little nation play a large role in the world—the effects of which we are still living with today.

The Castro government uses its spy service -- the Dirección de Inteligencia (DI), formerly the Dirrección General de Inteligencia (DGI) -- to project power far from Cuban shores. Like its Soviet forebears, under whose auspices it was created in 1961, Castro's intelligence services bolstered terrorist groups.

This was part of the dictatorship's decision to tie itself to the so-called "Palestinian cause," that is, the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. Indeed, upon his death in November 2016, Palestinian leaders hailed regime founder Fidel Castro as a "comrade" in the fight against "imperialism, Zionism, racism and capitalism," according to a statement by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S.-designated terror group.

The PFLP had good reason to mourn Castro's death. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union sought to portray Zionism as racist and imperialist in order to curry favor in the so-called Third World. The intelligence agencies of Soviet client states, such as the East German Stasi and the Cuban DGI, actively participated in this effort.

The 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel successfully defended itself against an attack from massing Arab armies, was a watershed moment—and not only in the Middle East. The Jewish state's victory led to the decline of Arab nationalism and the rise of Islamism. It also led to a public change in Cuban foreign policy.