Havana, Cuba —
A few days ago, the manager of the building that houses CNN’s Havana office knocked on our door with an urgent message. They wanted to know if we would be reporting to work during an “imminent” U.S. invasion.
Washington’s intense pressure campaign against Cuba was already keenly felt in everyday life. Due to the ongoing US oil blockade, the office experiences power outages several times a day. The deepening economic crisis has created a shortage of fuel for building generators and even toilet paper for toilets. Every day I walk past the giant artificial Christmas tree in the lobby that no one bothers to remove.
But now, the building manager tells me, he has been told “orders from above” to plan the building, which, like all office buildings in the city, is owned by the state, in case of an imperialist attack. Like the American attack. (The Trump administration has not said it is planning military operations in Cuba.)
Cubans have lived with the threat of American military action for so long that it has become a black joke. “Cuando bienen los Americanos when the Americans come” is an expression Cubans use to use their trademark dark humor to talk about how their long-standing problems (of which there are countless) will one day be solved.
Now it looks like the Americans are coming.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Havana this week on a not-so-secret plane marked “United States of America” was deeply shocking to many Cubans and the clearest sign yet that tensions were reaching a breaking point.
If the United States is the Cuban government’s “evil empire,” then Lucifer is the CIA director who concocted a fanciful plot to assassinate Fidel Castro in the 1960s with exploding cigars and poisoned scuba suits.
Cuba is home to several museums dedicated to the CIA’s nefarious actions against the revolution.
Photos released by the CIA show Cuba’s brooding spy chiefs greeting their American counterparts in the Protocol Hall, with blackout curtains on the windows and a long table bizarrely decorated with flower arrangements. The faces of the U.S. intelligence officers, except for Ratcliffe, have been blurred to hide their identities.
“This is the height of historical irony,” said Peter Kornbluh, co-author of “Reverse Route to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” about the sudden appearance of a U.S. spymaster on the communist-held island.
“Mr. Ratcliffe’s mission was to force Cuba to make a ‘do or die’ offer that it ostensibly could not refuse. Political scientists call this ‘obedience diplomacy,'” Kornbluh told CNN.
During the visit, Cuban officials explained why the island poses no threat to the United States and countered the Trump administration’s legal justification for the oil blockade that plunged the island into economic decline, according to a statement from the Cuban government.
These arguments clearly fell on deaf ears. Ratcliffe accused Cuban officials of setting up Russian and Chinese listening posts on the island and interfering with U.S. interests in the region, U.S. officials said.
Given that the United States has adopted a carrot-and-stick approach toward Cuba in recent months, including offers of aid and economic coercion, carrots no longer appear to be on the menu.
Just hours after Mr. Ratcliffe left Havana, news broke that U.S. federal prosecutors were seeking charges against former Cuban President Raul Castro, who has officially retired but is still referred to on the island as the “leader of the revolution” and is widely believed to be carrying out attacks from behind the scenes.
Many Cuban exiles living in Miami will welcome the indictment of Mr. Castro for his alleged role in the 1996 shooting down of two planes belonging to the Cuban-American exile organization Brothers to the Rescue. An indictment would pave the way for Mr. Castro’s possible arrest and trial, similar to that of Cuba’s ally Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in January.
But any action against Mr. Castro, who turned 95 in June and now has difficulty walking without the help of his grandson, a chaperone and bodyguard, would be a final escalation of already smoldering tensions and would likely lead to a break in diplomacy, if not an open confrontation.
In recent weeks, amid rumors of an indictment against Castro, several Cuban officials have told me that such a development would end negotiations and set the stage for military intervention, which would cost lives if necessary.
“We are ready,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel announced on May Day. “I say this with the deep conviction that I share with my family to give our lives for the revolution.”
Cuban state media has published images of civilians undergoing military training as part of Fidel Castro’s “war for all peoples,” in which Cubans armed by the government would wage a guerrilla war of attrition against foreign invaders.
The plan envisions Vietnamese-style guerrilla warfare rather than military-to-military conflict.
In the video released, soldiers can be seen practicing with Soviet weapons that are older than their own. In one clip, they pull an anti-aircraft gun with a cow.
Despite the Cuban military’s lack of modern weaponry, military historian Hal Klepak told CNN that the Cuban military can still put up a tenacious resistance to a U.S. ground attack.
“As we have seen time and time again with natural disasters, they have shown that they are capable of mobilizing people and evacuating people,” Klepak said.
As the situation on the island worsens and power outages continue throughout the day, some Cubans say at least a conflict would end the lingering suffering.
State hospitals are currently without many basic medicines, Cubans complain of food rotting in refrigerators during prolonged power outages and uncollected garbage piling up in nearly every region of the island.
Washington’s oil blockade has depleted the island’s last reserves, the Energy Minister announced this week. New sanctions on companies doing business with Cuba have halted most maritime shipping to Cuba, ensuring food prices and hunger will rise further.
“If half of us die, half of us die,” one woman told me during a protest against power outages in Havana this week. The protesters hit the pots and pans for so long that the iron plates were dented and dented. “But at least the other half can live in peace,” she says.
Ada Ferrer, a Cuban-American historian and author of “Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter,” said a successful U.S. attack to overthrow Cuba’s government could spark a wave of political retaliation.
“If you think back to any time in Cuban history when there was a political upheaval, when an unpopular government was removed or collapsed in some way, it was always followed by violence,” she told CNN.
The island government is advising residents to prepare for possible havoc.
Cuba’s Civil Defense Agency this week distributed a “family guide on how to act in the event of a hypothetical military invasion of Cuba,” recommending, among other things, preparing backpacks with non-perishable items.
Havana’s neighbors denied any plans for war.
“They tell us to prepare as if a hurricane is coming, but we have already spent everything,” he told me.
