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CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a rare trip to Havana on Thursday and met with top Cuban officials amid growing US pressure on the island.
Some shit you should know before you dig in: Cuba is in the middle of an energy crisis, with the government announcing this week that it has run out of oil, which is resulting in nationwide blackouts that are lasting up to 20 hours a day. Cuba has leaned heavily on Venezuelan oil for years, but that supply dried up in January when the US removed Nicolás Maduro. Following that, the Trump administration choked off all other foreign oil deliveries to the island. This squeeze is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to seek regime change in Cuba, with reports previously indicating that it was demanding Cuba’s current president and other top leadership leave their positions. Trump has openly floated taking over Cuba and launching military action against the island if Cuban officials fail to “make a deal.”
What’s going on now: The CIA confirmed that Ratcliffe met with Cuban Interior Minister Lázaro Álvarez Casas, the head of Cuba’s intelligence services, and Raúl “Raulito” Rodríguez Castro, the influential grandson and bodyguard of former president Raúl Castro. He carried Trump’s message that the US would expand economic and security cooperation with Cuba only if the government makes major changes to its system. The hardest concrete demand was that Cuba shut down the Russian and Chinese listening posts on the island. A CIA official warned that the window for negotiations will not stay open forever, pointing to Venezuela as proof that Trump should be taken seriously.
Cuban officials, who said the US had requested the meeting, used it to argue that Cuba poses no threat to US national security and does not belong on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. The visit follows a State Department offer this week of $100 million in humanitarian aid routed through the Catholic Church, contingent on Cuba making reforms.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel signaled Cuba would accept the aid but pushed back on the broader US approach. “The damage could be alleviated in a much easier and more expeditious way by lifting or easing the blockade, as it is well known that the humanitarian situation is coldly calculated and induced,” Díaz-Canel wrote on X.
This all comes as federal prosecutors in Miami move toward indicting 94-year-old Raúl Castro over Cuba’s 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue planes.
