A few days ago, the manager of the building where CNN’s Havana bureau is located rapped on our door with an urgent message: She needed to know if we would be coming to work during the “imminent” US invasion.
Washington’s intense pressure campaign on Cuba had already been keenly felt in day-to-day life. Under the ongoing US oil blockade, power flickers off in our offices several times a day. The compounding economic crisis means there’s no fuel for the building generator or even toilet paper for the bathrooms. Every day, I walk past an enormous artificial Christmas tree in the lobby that no one has bothered to take down.
But now the building manager told me she had been tasked with “orders from above” — like all office buildings in the city, it is owned by the state — to come up with a plan for the building in case of imperialist attack. As in an American attack. (The Trump administration has not said that it is planning any military operations in Cuba.)
Cubans have lived with the threat of US military action for so long that it has become a dark joke. “Cuando vienen los americanos” — when the Americans come — is the expression Cubans employ with their trademark black humor to say how a long-running problem — of which there are countless — will one day be resolved.
Now it really does look, one way or another, like the Americans are coming.
The CIA comes to Cuba
CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Havana this week aboard a not-very-clandestine airplane emblazoned with the words “United States of America” was deeply shocking for many Cubans, and the clearest sign yet that tensions are reaching critical mass.
If the US is the Evil Empire for the Cuban government, then the head of the CIA, the agency that in the 1960s concocted fantastical plots to assassinate Fidel Castro with exploding cigars and poisoned scuba suits, is Lucifer himself.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe attends a meeting with Cuban officials at a location given as Havana, Cuba, in this image released by the CIA May 14. CIA via X/Handout/Reuters
There are whole museums in Cuba dedicated to CIA’s nefarious misdeeds against the revolution.
In photos released by the CIA, Cuba’s dour spy chiefs greet their American counterparts in a protocol house with blackout curtains on the windows and a long table oddly bursting with floral arrangements. Except Ratcliffe, the US intelligence officers have their faces blurred out to obscure their identities.
“It is the height of historical irony,” Peter Kornbluh, a co-author of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana, said of the US spymaster’s sudden appearance on the communist-run island.
“Ratcliffe’s mission was to make Cuba a ‘do or die’ offer it ostensibly can’t refuse. Political scientists call this “submission diplomacy,” Kornbluh told CNN.
Cuban officials said that during the visit, they laid out the case why their island does not pose a threat to the US — countering the Trump administration’s legal justification for oil blockade that has plunged the island into an economic nosedive, per a Cuban government statement.
Those arguments apparently fell on deaf ears. Ratcliffe accused the Cuban officials of hosting Russian and Chinese listening posts on the island and thwarting US interests in the region, according to US officials.
If the US has been employing a carrot-and-stick approach with Cuba in recent months — offers of aid or economic coercion — carrots no longer appear to be on the menu.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe boards a US government plane at Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, Cuba, on Thursday, May 14, after meeting with his Cuban counterpart. Norlys Perez/Reuters
Just hours after Ratcliffe left Havana, news leaked that US federal prosecutors were seeking an indictment against former Cuban President Raul Castro, officially retired but still referred to on the island as the “leader of the revolution” and widely believed to be calling the shots from behind the scenes.
Many Cuban exiles in Miami would cheer an indictment of Castro for his alleged role in the 1996 shootdown of two planes belonging to the Cuban-American exile organization Brothers to the Rescue. An indictment would prepare the ground for the possible capture and trial of Castro —as it happened in Venezuela in January with Cuba’s ally Nicolas Maduro.
But any action against Castro, who turns 95 in June and now has trouble walking without the help of attendants and his bodyguard grandson, would be the final escalation of already simmering tensions, likely leading to a break in diplomacy — if not open conflict.
