A node of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence apparatus is shuttling American communist activists to Cuba, The Daily Wire can report.
From August 1-15, The People’s Forum, a Neville Roy Singham and CCP-linked organization, helped at least 80 activists bring material aid to Cuba, potentially circumventing a strict U.S. embargo.
Singham is a wealthy American-born Marxist activist who resides in Shanghai, China. He has poured tens of millions of dollars into radical causes in the United States in recent years, and is accused of working closely with the Chinese Communist government.
The People’s Forum, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, helped use tax-deductible charitable donations to fund the Venceremos Brigade. The Venceremos Brigade facilitated the “Centenary of Fidel Brigade,” a celebration of Fidel Castro’s 100th birthday that brought “material aid for our Cuban hosts,” according to the Venceremos Brigade’s website.
The Daily Wire previously reported on a few notable people who attended the Castro celebrations in Cuba in connection with this network. Today, The Daily Wire can add more to that list, according to a source familiar with the trip’s attendees. One is Gloria La Riva, who co-founded the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the U.S. and ran for president with Leonard Peltier, a revolutionary American Indian Movement militant who had been in federal prison since the 1970s for the murder of two FBI agents.
Venceremos encouraged “African/Black folks, Indigenous folks, Palestinian folks, and people of color, Families with children, Queer and Trans comrades, workers, artists, students, and organizers of all kinds” to apply for the celebrations in Cuba, and Nadiyah Salawdeh met the call.
Salawdeh, who is the co-chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network-Minnesota, was arrested in connection with an anti-ICE demonstration in Minnesota, trespassing during a sit-in inside leftist mayor Jacob Frey’s office. At the Twin Cities Taking Back Pride press conference on June 10, 2026, she said that “Pride” meant “a time to honor those before us that have risked their lives and come face to face with state violence in the name of Queer Liberation … From the bricks thrown at Stonewall to the rocks thrown in Palestine, our fight is one fight against capitalist, imperial violence.”
Other attendees included Robert Rosa of the notoriously radical American Indian Movement. Rosa, who participated in the previous Venceremos Brigade “African, Indigenous, Palestinian Brigade,” has issued a letter appearing to threaten violence over the continued presence of Christopher Columbus statues.
Mustafa Sullivan, director of national programs at Gender and Sexualities Alliance Network, attended the Castro celebrations along with Venceremos organizer Nesbit D. V. Crutchfield, who spent more than a year in jail after his arrest on charges of resisting arrest and intent to injure and maim, and John Hyunwook Joo, a longtime leftist activist.
The trip appears to have been jointly run by Venceremos and the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP). The State Department sanctioned ICAP in June, citing its support for “Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence activities.” On August 3, ICAP president Fernando González Llort, a convicted Cuban spy who served 15 years in U.S. prison, personally welcomed the Venceremos Brigade to the island. Weeks later, the State Department sanctioned González himself.
Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, placed The People’s Forum in his crosshairs for over a year due to its ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
The Ways and Means Committee’s investigations into the network have thus far missed the Cuban element of the People’s Forum’s work, including its ties to The National Network on Cuba, a sprawling organization which counts the Democratic Socialists of America as one of its member groups.
The National Network on Cuba, which helped the Venceremos Brigade arrange the trip, expressly advertises its goal to “build public pressure and influence U.S. public opinion in order to bring about an end to the criminal U.S. blockade of Cuba, including working against the U.S. prohibition of the sale of food and medicines to the people of Cuba, ending the travel restrictions, and promoting cultural and educational exchanges.”
According to a report from the State Department, the National Network on Cuba has developed a plan to “[t]o support the organization of coordinated nationwide actions within 24 hours of indications of a U.S. military attack on Cuba while simultaneously building long-term capacity for a massive anti-war movement. The goal is to make it politically and materially costly for the U.S. government to wage war on Cuba.”
The National Network on Cuba plan includes a toolkit on “power mapping,” an exercise whereby individuals flag and map relationships between particular infrastructure and their political and military purposes for the sake of planning disruptions.
Their toolkit even links to the Black Alliance for Peace map, which maps critical US military infrastructure throughout North and South America. “The map is also designed as a tool for anti-base/site organizing and other forms of resistance against the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination in Our Americas by reinforcing hemispheric coordination to support local organizing efforts in solidarity with our joint struggle: ‘Together with the global majority, we are engaged in a struggle for self-determination and sovereignty against a common enemy. We have a common struggle of liberation against empire.’ (Nuestra América and the Black Radical Peace Tradition, March 2025)”
.png)
.png)
