CIA director travels to Cuba as fuel reserves hit zero

CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana on Thursday for meetings with senior Cuban security and intelligence officials as blackouts swept the country, protesters took to the streets in the capital and the government acknowledged it was “without any reserves” to fuel power plants.

The surprise appearance of America’s top spymaster, a visit Cuba said the United States requested, came as the Trump administration has ratcheted up pressure on Cuba’s communist government.

President Donald Trump has said that Cuba is “next in line” as soon as he finishes his war with Iran, although the administration has not publicly declared it intends to use military force to achieve regime change in Havana.

Instead, it has adopted a policy of economic strangulation to try to drive the current leadership from power.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the U.S. is seeking a change in Cuba’s economic policies, while acknowledging the goal of a political transition: “I don’t think we’re going to be able to change the trajectory of Cuba as long as these people are in charge of that regime.”

Administration officials have previously outlined a possible resolution similar to that imposed in Venezuela, where the existing government was left in place following the January removal of strongman Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military raid. Unlike Maduro, however, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel is considered a figurehead atop a highly organized Communist Party and military infrastructure in control of every element of national power.

Trump has progressively tightened sanctions against Cuba over and above the economic embargo imposed more than six decades ago, including an executive order declaring a national emergency over the threat he said it posed to U.S. national security, a naval blockade preventing ships carrying oil to the island, and the threat of secondary sanctions on any other country or entity that trades with the Cuban government or designated individuals or companies.

After Cuba announced the Ratcliffe visit, the CIA distributed a statement to the media saying he met with Raúl Rodriguez Castro — the grandson of former president Raúl Castro, head of the Cuban Communist Party - along with Interior Minister Lazaro Alvarez Casas and the head of Cuban intelligence.

Ratcliffe’s mission, the CIA statement said, was to “personally deliver President Trump’s message that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.”

It said the talks included “intelligence cooperation, economic stability and security issues, all against the backdrop that Cuba can no longer be a safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere.”

But other regional experts and analysts saw an even more immediate message in Ratcliffe’s visit.

“The director of the CIA turns up unannounced. One assumes not for a history lesson and a cigar,” said a diplomat familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment on sensitive matters. “There is a general sense here that Díaz-Canel cannot stick around much longer.”

The Cuban statement said the meeting “made it possible to categorically demonstrate that Cuba does not constitute a threat to the national security of the U.S., nor are there legitimate reasons to include it on the list of countries that, allegedly, sponsor terrorism.”

The terrorism designation, first imposed in 1982, was removed by the Obama administration in 2015, reimposed by Trump during his first term and lifted by the Biden administration as it left office, only to be reimposed by Trump in one of the first acts of his second term.

In a social media post as he departed for China on Tuesday, Trump said Cuba “is a failed country and only heading in one direction — down! Cuba is asking for help, and we are going to talk!!!”

Tom Shannon, a former senior State Department official with extensive experience in Latin America, said “the fact that we are conducting talks through our security services highlights that our purpose is not regime change but regime management.”

Ratcliffe’s Cuba visit was the first known trip to the island by a CIA chief since CIA Director John Brennan made a secret trip in 2015, following a historic normalization of U.S.-Cuba ties announced by President Barack Obama and the Havana government. The U.S. government has never publicly acknowledged Brennan’s trip.

Though Rubio, accompanying Trump on his visit to Beijing, said the U.S. can’t see a future for Cuba with the current regime in place, he’s also backed away from soaring rhetoric about human rights and democracy in favor of criticism of Havana’s economic incompetence. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he said.

“We’ll give them a chance, but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he said, speaking in an interview with Fox News.

In a Havana news conference Wednesday, Minister of Energy and Mines Vicente de la O Levy said worsening blackouts stemmed primarily “from the severe energy blockade we are currently experiencing.” The only oil delivered since December — one tanker from Russia allowed through the U.S. blockade in early April — is now gone, he said.

With rising temperatures and the approach of summer, he said, Cuba is “without reserves” and the situation is likely to worsen. Havana residents reportedly took to the streets to bang pots and set fire to mountains of garbage that have not been picked up for lack of fuel.

One answer to Cuba’s economic problems, Rubio said, would be the return of Cuban expatriates to the island as residents, investors or both, particularly the 1.3 million Cuban Americans in the U.S.

“Look, they have significant mineral deposits in Cuba ... and some of the rare earth minerals, some of the best in the world,” he said. “They have, obviously, an incredible opportunity with tourism, with agriculture, very rich farmland. So Cuba should not be a poor country.”

Rubio noted that the U.S. sent $6 million in humanitarian aid to Cuba early this year, on the condition that it be distributed by the Catholic Church. “We’ve offered to distribute $100 million” also via the church, but “the regime has denied it,” he said.

Diaz-Canel said Thursday that “if the U.S. government is really willing to provide aid in the amounts it has announced, and in full conformity with universally recognized practices for humanitarian aid, it will find neither obstacles nor ingratitude from Cuba.”

John Hudson contributed to this report.