Anti-Israel Activists Behind Columbia University Protests Trained in Cuba for Years

by Gelet Martínez Fragela

Some of the anti-Israel protests taking place at U.S. college campuses, including the recent demonstrations at Columbia University, have been supported by organizations that traveled to communist Cuba to receive resistance training, an ADN investigation has uncovered.

ADN’s investigation coincides with a recent Sunday report published by the New York Post that revealed a radical NYC based organization known as The People’s Forum familiarized anti-Israel activists with Black Lives Matter protest techniques just hours before they stormed Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, and that the group was incited by Manolo De Los Santos – a radical activist organizer with deep ties to communist Cuba.

De Los Santos, who has long been the subject of past ADN investigations, has a lengthy, storied history of working with some of Cuba’s top communist party leaders including its president, Miguel Diaz-Canel.

Leaving Cuba after 10 days learning with its people & President Miguel Diaz-Canel.

Young people in the U.S. have great tasks ahead of them. We have a responsibility to defeat, once & for all, this genocidal blockade for the survival of the Cuban people & the future of humanity! pic.twitter.com/XG8ensZtyd

— Manolo De Los Santos (@manolo_realengo) May 3, 2023

This past weekend the former seminarian turned radical leftist activist urged pro-Palestinian Columbia student protestors to “give Joe Biden a hot summer” and criticized Columbia’s “Zionist” administration for wanting to “resemble its masters in Israel.” He praised demonstrators for “deciding that resistance is more important than negotiations” and incited protesters to “make business as usual in this country unsustainable.”

Hours after Monday’s meeting was convened, dozens of protesters broke into and illegally stormed into Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, seizing control of the university building in a standoff with education officials – the culmination of decades of Cuba promoting anti-Israel sentiment within U.S. based radical leftist organizations – and De Los Santos was credited for recreating “the summer of 2020,” a reference to the Black Lives Matter violence that besieged northern U.S. cities after the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd.

The People’s Forum: Sympathies to Communist China, Cuba and Hamas

The People’s Forum is known for having sympathies to the Chinese and Cuban communist parties, and describes itself as “an incubator of movements for the working class and marginalized communities,” and has been a cornerstone of anti-Israel protests since Hamas’ attack on the Jewish state on Oct. 7, 2023.

One day after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel, TPF organized a protest in Times Square where attendees celebrated the terrorist organization and waved signs with anti-Semitic slogans and images.

According to a New Lines investigation conducted by journalist and foreign influence researcher Alexander Reid Ross, TPF’s operations are largely made possible by a $12 million donation from pro-China tech mogul Neville Roy Singham, through the People’s Support Foundation (PSF).

New Lines also reported that Singham is in a relationship with Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans who also serves on PSF’s board, which occupied the Venezuelan embassy in D.C. to protest against opposition leader Juan Guaidó, and organizes pro-Cuban regime initiatives in the U.S.

Manolo De Los Santos: A TPF leader who was “based out of Cuba for many years”

The group’s co-executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, is longtime researcher at the Marxist Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and was “based out of Cuba for many years,” where he “worked toward building international networks of people’s movements and organizations,” according to his biography at the anti-Israel group Black Alliance for Peace.

At least since 2016, De Los Santos has been documented in Cuba with delegations of U.S activists received by the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), whose current director was prosecuted and convicted by the U.S. for espionage as part of the infamous WASP network in the 1990s.

Cuban intelligence Officer (DGI) Juan Reyes-Alonso has said that about 90 percent of ICAP personnel are thought to be DGI-affiliated, according to a 2009 Washington Times column by DIA officer Chris Simmons.

Manolo was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His family moved to the South Bronx, New York when he was five years old. He first visited Cuba in 2006 with the organization, Pastors for Peace. Pastors for Peace is a member of the National Network on Cuba (NNOC) in the United States, a coalition of U.S groups who support the Cuban regime.

He later studied in Cuba at the Matanzas Evangelical Seminary in the area of Marxist-driven liberation theology on the island, an ideology that former Romanian intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa says was created by the KGB “to enroll Latin leaders” in the Soviet Union’s espionage operations.

Inspiring Marxist revolution and race riots in the U.S.A.

While in Cuba De Los Santos also represented the U.S. based radical leftist Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO).

“Founded in 1967 by the Reverend Lucius Walker, Jr. and a number of fellow progressive church leaders and activists, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) is an ecumenical agency whose mission is “to help forward the struggles of oppressed people for justice and self-determination” through its “support of community organizing.”

In 1968, the IFCO helped establish Operation Connection, which dispatched teams of activists into American cities that had been struck by race riots, “to open dialogue and work through alternatives to violent confrontation.”

The IFCO has served as a fiscal sponsor for numerous activist organizations including the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, a group that advocated for the liberation of Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal an activist convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner.

In 2018, after living in Cuba, De los Santos assumed the role of founding director of the NYC based People’s Forum, a group that identifies itself as “serving as a movement incubator for working-class communities to foster unity across historic lines of division both domestically and internationally.”

He has been traveling to Cuba since at least 2009, and has been prominently featured in the Cuban-regime press for almost a decade. 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.

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

De los Santos has also expressed admiration for former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, recalling multiple times when the late leader returned to power after a coup attempt against him in 2002.

“It’s always good to remember how the Venezuelan people defeated a U.S.-backed coup and returned Chavez to power in less than 3 days!” De Los Santos wrote on social media in April.

In July 2022, Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, received De los Santos and executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Vijay Prashad 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, over 300 activists from the United States, who traveled with the People’s Forum to the island, met with Cuban-appointed president Miguel Diaz-Canel, as reported by Cuban-state press (Granma). Palestinian flags were visible in the pictures of the meeting.

“Our commitment upon returning,” De los Santos said during an interview, “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.”

For decades the Cuban regime has been training radical groups in the United States under the auspices of ‘solidarity movements,’ such was the case of the Weather Underground, a militant antiwar organization, in the late 1960’s.

In February 2023, De Los Santos, spoke in Havana during one of the intermissions of the sessions of the First International Meeting of Theoretical Publications of Leftist Parties and Movements that took place in Cuba at the Casa de las Américas.

#Cuba El taller “El Socialismo y la Juventud” inició la segunda jornada del 1er Encuentro Internacional de Publicaciones Teóricas de Partidos y movimientos de Izquierda
Panelistas: Manolo de los Santos y @mpvaldes1
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