Cuba Braces for Possible U.S. Military Action as Tensions Escalate

The building manager in Havana showed up at the CNN office door with an urgent question: would the staff keep working when the Americans invaded? It was not quite a joke, though Cubans have long treated the threat of U.S. military action as a dark one—a someday-problem so distant it became a running gag. "Cuando vienen los americanos," they say, when the Americans come, as if to suggest that one day, somehow, all the island's intractable problems would simply resolve themselves. Now, for the first time in decades, that day seemed to be arriving.

The pressure from Washington had already seeped into the texture of daily life. Under the current U.S. oil embargo, the power cuts off in the office multiple times each day. There is no fuel for the building's generator, no toilet paper in the bathrooms. An enormous artificial Christmas tree sits in the lobby, untouched and undecorated, a monument to the island's exhaustion. But this week, the building administrator received orders from above—all state-owned office buildings in the city had received them—to draft an evacuation plan in case of American attack.

The catalyst was the arrival of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who landed in Havana aboard a plane emblazoned with the words "United States of America," a vessel so undisguised it seemed almost deliberately provocative. For the Cuban government, which views the United States as the embodiment of imperial evil, the CIA represents something worse: the agency that once plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro with exploding cigars and poisoned wetsuits. Entire museums on the island document the agency's historical crimes against the revolution. The meeting itself was surreal—Cuban intelligence chiefs greeting American spies across a long table laden with flower arrangements, the windows covered with opaque curtains, the American agents' faces blurred in the released photographs except for Ratcliffe's.

According to Peter Kornbluh, a scholar of U.S.-Cuba relations, Ratcliffe's mission was to deliver what amounts to a "do or die" ultimatum, what political scientists call submission diplomacy. The Cuban government argued during the visit that the island poses no threat to American interests, a position that contradicts the Trump administration's legal justification for the oil blockade that has pushed the economy toward collapse. The arguments apparently went unheeded. Ratcliffe accused Cuban authorities of hosting Russian and Chinese listening posts on the island and of frustrating American interests in the region.

Hours after Ratcliffe left, word emerged that U.S. federal prosecutors were seeking an indictment against Raúl Castro, the former president who officially retired but remains known on the island as the "leader of the revolution." Castro will turn 95 in June and now struggles to walk without assistance. An indictment would likely concern the 1996 downing of two planes belonging to Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban-American exile organization. Many Miami exiles would celebrate such a move. But Cuban officials made clear that any action against Castro would be the final escalation, the moment that would end all negotiation and prepare the ground for military intervention. "We are ready," President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced on May 1st, "and I say this with deep conviction that I have shared with my family, to give our lives for the revolution."

The state media has published images of civilians receiving military training as part of what Fidel Castro once envisioned as a "war of all the people"—a guerrilla campaign in which armed Cubans would wage a war of attrition against foreign invaders. Some videos show soldiers maneuvering with Soviet weapons older than themselves; in one, they pull an anti-aircraft gun with oxen. Military historian Hal Klepak told CNN that despite the island's outdated arsenal, Cuban forces could still mount stubborn resistance on the ground, having demonstrated the capacity to mobilize the population during natural disasters.

Meanwhile, the population endures a humanitarian catastrophe. State hospitals lack basic medicines. Food rots in refrigerators during extended blackouts. Uncollected garbage accumulates in nearly every neighborhood. The U.S. oil embargo has drained the island's last reserves, the energy minister announced this week. New sanctions against companies doing business with Cuba are blocking most maritime shipments, guaranteeing that food prices and hunger will rise further. At a protest against power cuts in Havana this week, where demonstrators beat pots and pans until the steel dented, a woman told a reporter: "If half of us die, half of us will die. But at least the other half can live in peace." The government has distributed a family defense guide recommending that citizens prepare backpacks with non-perishable items, as if preparing for a hurricane. One neighbor dismissed the effort: "They tell us to prepare like a hurricane is coming, but we already have nothing left."

Historian Ada Ferrer, a Cuban-American scholar, warned that a successful U.S. intervention could trigger waves of political violence. "Every time there has been political change in Cuban history, when unpopular governments were removed or fell one way or another, violence has followed," she said. The island braces not for invasion alone, but for the chaos that might come after.