On May 14, an Air Force Boeing C-40B Clipper jet with “United States of America” emblazoned on its fuselage touched down at José Martí International Airport in Havana. It carried a high-level delegation of CIA officials, headed by CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe and his team soon sat down with the leadership of Cuba’s intelligence community, as well as Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro—the grandson of Raúl Castro, who has been conducting back-channel talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office since February.

This was hardly a clandestine meeting. The CIA quickly posted photos of the session on X. Both the Cubans and the CIA have issued statements. The discussions, according to the Cuban government, took place “in the context of complex bilateral relations…to contribute to a political dialogue between both nations.” CIA officials stated that Ratcliffe’s mission was “to personally deliver President Donald Trump’s message that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.”

The CIA has a long record of covert regime-change efforts in Cuba: the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, the ZR/RIFLE assassination plots among them. But this overt CIA mission may well become a capstone to that infamous Cold War history. Ratcliffe’s trip marks a turning point in the protracted, punitive US efforts to force the Cuban leadership to capitulate to Washington’s demands for economic and political regime change.

Indeed, the official message Ratcliffe carried to Havana was a “do or die” ultimatum. He reportedly reminded the Cubans of what had happened in Venezuela—US Special Forces quickly killed 32 members of Cuba’s security team and injured dozens more—when President Maduro did not take Trump’s threats seriously. As the CIA director warned the Cubans, the window for diplomatic dialogue will soon close unless they act on US demands for change; and President Trump plans to “enforce his red lines” if negotiations do not produce the results he desires.

“Submission Diplomacy”

The CIA mission to Havana comes only one day after Cuba’s minister of energy, Vicente de la O Levy, publicly conceded that the country has, essentially, run out of gas. “We have absolutely no fuel oil, and absolutely no diesel,” Cuban Minister of Energy Vicente de la O Levy announced on state television last week. “We have no reserves.”

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Denying the Cuban people gas and electricity, along with the basic economic functions they enable, has been the concerted goal of Trump’s policy of extreme energy deprivation. Since US Special Forces attacked Caracas on January 3, the administration has methodically used threats and coercion to shut down Cuban access to alternative sources of petroleum—with the intent of starving the Cuban people, generating popular unrest, and forcing the Cuban leadership to capitulate. “The strategy of previous negotiations with Cuba has been to offer Havana carrots,” American University professor William LeoGrande said in an interview. “Trump’s strategy is to beat the Cubans with a stick until they cry uncle.”

As the oil blockade takes a devastating toll on the Cuban people, the Trump administration has turned up the heat of economic warfare on Cuba, targeting foreign investment on the island. On May 1, Trump signed a new executive order broadening restrictions on commercial interactions with Cuban entities and applying “secondary sanctions” to foreign businesses that engage with “blocked” Cuban agencies and officials. On May 7, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated the Cuban military corporation GAESA, which administers much of the Cuban economy, as a blocked entity along with the Cuban mining company MOA Nickel SA.

MOA was established as part of a joint venture with the Canadian mining giant Sherritt International, one of the largest foreign investors on the island, which for decades has managed Cuba’s nickel and cobalt mining operations. The new secondary sanctions immediately forced Sherritt to announce that it would close its mining operations on the island—and request the Cuban government buy out its stake for $277 million. Two international shipping companies, which have contracts through GAESA to transport goods and supplies from China, Europe, and the Middle East to Cuba, this week also announced they would have to suspend operations because of the new sanctions. Analysts believe that the Spanish hotelier interests on the island, Melia and Iberostar, will soon terminate their operations as well.

For weeks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has demanded that Cuba open its doors to much needed investment from abroad to stimulate economic development. But US policy is now explicitly designed to push major investors off the island and scare others from coming—further depressing the Cuban economy while clearing a path for US corporate interests to dominate Cuba’s economic future once Trump’s “takeover” is complete.

Setting the Stage for a US Attack

To advance that goal, the Trump administration has also stepped up its threat of military intervention against the island. Earlier this month, CNN reported that “US military intelligence-gathering flights are surging off the coast of Cuba,” and that “the US Navy and Air Force have conducted at least 25 such flights using manned aircraft and drones” in recent weeks. During a recent visit to Florida, President Trump mused that he might soon position the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier 100 yards off the coast of Havana. In his gunboat-diplomacy fantasy, the president predicted that the Cuban leadership would be scared into submission and simply surrender: “‘Thank you very much,’ they would say. ‘We give up.’“

There is little doubt that the US military is preparing for some form of aggression, should the president decide that Cuba’s leadership has not sufficiently capitulated to his imperial demands. Just yesterday, sources leaked classified information on Cuba’s limited supply of drones, and how they might be deployed in a conflagration with the United States. The intelligence, Axios reported, “could become a pretext for US military action.” The very end of the article noted the reality: “US officials don’t believe Cuba is an imminent threat, or actively planning to attack American interests.” But the damage has been done. Headlines such as “Intelligence report suggests drone attacks planned by Cuba,” and “Cuba stockpiles drones and creates list of American targets,” are now circulating around the globe.

Moreover, this week the Trump administration is planning to use Cuban Independence Day to further set the stage for an attack. Only hours after CIA Director Ratcliffe left Havana, Department of Justice sources let it be known that Raúl Castro will be indicted on May 20 for his role as defense minister in the February 24, 1996, shootdown of two Cessna planes that had, once again, penetrated Cuban airspace.

The destruction of the planes, which took the lives of four young Cuban American pilots, was unwarranted and wrong; the pilots of the Cuban MiGs that fired heat-seeking missiles at the Cessnas followed none of the international protocols for warning, intercepting, and escorting unarmed civilian aircraft. But the declassified historical record (revealed in the book Back Channel to Cuba) shows that the shootdown was not unprovoked. It followed more than a year of overtly provocative penetrations of Cuba’s airspace by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue—led by a Bay of Pigs veteran, Jose Basulto, who tried to assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s—dropping insurrectionist leaflets over the Cuban countryside and Havana. “It was so humiliating,” Fidel Castro would later tell Time magazine. “The US would not have tolerated it if Washington’s airspace had been violated by small airplanes.”

Cuba’s leadership, including Fidel, repeatedly warned Washington that the overflights constituted a threat to its territorial security that no nation could tolerate; they used every channel of communication to press the Clinton administration to halt the flights. Both White House and State Department officials repeatedly pushed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to ground Basulto—orders the FAA resisted for bureaucratic reasons. “State is increasingly concerned about Cuban reactions to these flagrant violations. They are also asking from the FAA what is this agency doing to prevent/deter these actions by Brothers to the Rescue,” a FAA e-mail recorded only a month before the fatal flight. “Worst case scenario is that one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes and the FAA better have all its ducks in a row.”

For the Trump administration, indicting the last surviving leader of the Cuban revolution on trumped-up charges makes perfect political, psychological, and military sense. Pegged to Cuba’s Independence Day, the indictment of Raúl Castro will be a public relations boon as well as a political bone to the hard-line anti-Castro community in Miami that has for years demanded that he be prosecuted for authorizing shooting down those planes. Since the administration used the same blueprint of an indictment to justify its raid on Caracas to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, an indictment of Castro significantly escalates the psychological warfare directed at the Cuban leadership to force their capitulation. And creating the fig leaf of legal proceedings will enable Trump to bypass the War Powers Act, as he did in Venezuela, by claiming to Congress that military operations in Havana are for law enforcement purposes, rather than an act of warfare to overthrow the Cuban government.

To their credit, Democrats in Congress, and a few Republicans, have tried to preempt Trump’s quest to conquer Cuba militarily. A war powers resolution sponsored by Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) “to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against the Republic of Cuba that have not been authorized by Congress,” failed by a vote of 51 to 47 on April 28. In a May 12 letter to Secretary of Defense Hegseth and Secretary of State Rubio, 33 members of Congress called on the administration to “lift the coercive economic measures—including the fuel blockade and related sanctions—that are contributing to the humanitarian crisis in Cuba,” and “abandon reported plans for US military action against Cuba.” According to the signatories, “the United States must not respond to a crisis it is creating with policies that deepen suffering, undermine the rule of law, and repeat the gravest failures of its past.”

But it is clear that Congress has neither the votes nor the power to stop Trump’s regime-change efforts in Cuba.

That leaves the Cuban government to defend itself, even as the country has reached a tipping point of deprivation and frustration. As a sense of imminent attack pervades Cuba, this past weekend authorities began distributing a nine-page civil defense booklet titled “Family Guide for Protection Against Military Aggression: Protect, Resist, Survive, and Overcome” to prepare the citizenry for US military aggression. Among its instructions were how to seek shelter during an aerial attack, first-aid training, and the concept of guerrilla-style resistance if US troops occupy the island. “We are preparing to defend ourselves,” Cuba’s ambassador to Washington, Lianys Torres Rivera, said in an interview with The Hill last week. “We don’t want Cubans dying in Cuba,” she added, nor “any American soldier.”