When she first saw the news on Facebook, she thought it had to be one of those hoaxes that circulate on social media. It was too implausible, an absurdity. But shortly afterward the principal of the school where she works forwarded to the teachers’ group chat a message that opened with the classic tone of a war dispatch: Information from the Revolutionary Government. Then she had no doubts. The information was real. The CIA director had just met in Havana with the senior leadership of the Cuban security and intelligence apparatus.
“It was hard for me to accept that it wasn’t a barefaced lie,” says this 30-year-old teacher, who asks to remain anonymous, over the phone. Her surprise is shared by many Cubans, who are watching with astonishment and anxiety the new path opening up for their country. A kind of final flash in the eternal Cold War that looks increasingly irreversible: the energetic stranglehold imposed by Donald Trump since late January has pushed the population to a breaking point, and the political leadership of Castroism into an ongoing negotiation that has now lasted more than two months. A road still riddled with unknowns, anguish, and hope stretching across the island.
The visit of the CIA delegation, led by its director John Ratcliffe, who arrived in Havana on Thursday aboard the military aircraft used for state travel, is the most significant milestone so far in negotiations shrouded in secrecy. Over these two months there have been other meetings, but none with comparable political weight — and above all, symbolic weight.
The American intelligence agency has been the greatest foe of the Castroite project since its inception. In his incendiary and interminable speeches, Fidel Castro used to call the CIA the “executioning arm” of American imperialism, holding it responsible for countless attempted coups, acts of sabotage, and assassination plots against him —including the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the landing of some 1,500 Cuban exiles trained and financed by Washington to bring down the revolution.
Every Cuban has grown up haunted by those ghosts, in a state of permanent alert. The teacher, who works at a school in Havana’s Diez de Octubre neighborhood, recalls that “the government has speculated its whole life” on the threat —real or exaggerated— that “the Americans are coming to wage war.” Universities still offer a compulsory core subject called Preparation for Defense.
“They educate us to be ready,” the teacher continues, “and I think it has sunk in so deep that right now what people dream of is for them to actually come. The hardest thing is the wait for a messiah from outside because we are incapable of saving ourselves.”
As if by premonition, that same Thursday —the day of the CIA visit— an unsettling message with echoes of the past began circulating on Cubans’ phones. A communiqué signed by the Army, though without official confirmation, warning that Cuba stands “on the threshold of Option Zero.” That was one of the scenarios Castroism had outlined in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. Without oil shipments from the USSR, the regime had an extreme survival plan: strict rationing, suspension of public transport, temporary closure of schools and universities.
The asphyxiation was never total, and the regime never had to press that button. But now, three decades later, that Option Zero is a reality. The day before the rumor began circulating on people’s phones, the Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, announced that Cuba had not a single drop of fuel left. “We have absolutely nothing in the way of fuel. We no longer have any reserves.”
Cubans rushed to stock up on supplies in the country’s already depleted stores. “People are out buying canned goods and bread because the blackouts are ruining their food,” says a Havana taxi driver, who also asks not to be named. On top of the constant and ever-longer blackouts, there are serious problems in basic services such as hospitals and transportation. The University of Havana —the oldest in the country and a symbol of Cuban education— stood empty and shuttered in recent days. “The feeling is of a dead place, where the young university spirit died, evaporated, damned if I know,” the taxi driver adds.
The picture is not much better in one of the country’s prized tourist destinations. Lourdes, 63, is a resident of Cárdenas, a small municipality near Varadero, Cuba’s beach resort par excellence. When she spoke by phone, her neighborhood had been without power for more than 40 hours. “Luckily I have a solar panel I bought with money sent from abroad,” she says, referring to the dollars that reach her through unofficial channels —wads of cash stuffed into suitcases— from her family in the United States, one of the few lifelines for many Cubans.
“People survive however they can. There’s no water because it can’t be pumped without electricity. The little food there is spoils. Prices are through the roof, and anything in decent condition is priced in dollars. This is no way to live.” As for the enormous beachfront hotels, she says: “they have electricity there, all right.”
Aid and protests
The pressure has been so intense that the Castroist regime —cornered as never before— has been forced to accept $100 million in aid offered by the U.S. State Department in exchange for “significant reforms to Cuba’s communist system.” The terms of the negotiation, driven by Trump’s transactional logic of offers and punishments, remain unknown. But the regime’s warlike rhetoric has been softening.
On the CIA meeting, the Cuban Communist Party framed it as “part of efforts to address the current situation.” Faced with an increasingly desperate state of affairs, the population has staged tentative protests, well aware of the harshness of the repression. Amid the collapse, the regime’s repressive apparatus is one of the few things still standing.
“Here people took to the streets,” says the Varadero resident. “But then those guys showed up” — referring to the black berets, the Interior Ministry’s special unit tasked with suppressing protest. “If you go out to protest, they disappear you. And the whole street is full of snitches.”
The Havana taxi driver adds that it has become common to hear “shouts in the street, from the bricklayer and the doctor and the boatman alike: ‘Let this whole damn thing collapse already!’ ‘I’m sick of all this shit!’ And the bolder ones: ‘Down with the government!’” Accounts gathered in the capital speak of streets blocked at night by burning garbage bins, gas stations attacked with stones, people in the streets banging pots and pans.
Abel, 45, is another taxi driver, from Guanajay, a municipality in the rural province of Artemisa just outside the capital, where he was working until January. With no gasoline and no work, he returned to his hometown, where he says “there is surveillance on social media.” “If they catch you saying anything against them, they disappear you. The people no longer want communism. We have watched a lie that lasted more than 60 years fall apart before our eyes. I don’t know what to think about the Americans, but I hope our lives get better,” he concludes.
The organization Prisoners Defenders has registered a total of 1,260 political prisoners in Cuba through April, ten more than the previous month. It warns of an “unstoppable intensification” of repression, with “arbitrary detentions, temporary disappearances, threats, smear campaigns, and the criminalization of any form of critical expression.”
D-Day?
One date comes up repeatedly in the accounts gathered for this report: May 20th, Independence Day, which commemorates the end of American military occupation. On that symbolic date, according to several U.S. outlets citing high-level sources, the U.S. Department of Justice is set to file criminal charges against former Cuban president Raúl Castro —one of the last guerrilla fighters to come down from the mountains, and the historic leader of the Revolutionary Army.
From Bayamo, a city in the south of the island, Maydelis Solano says “there is a lot of expectation.” “People think the 20th is coming, that there’s going to be a change. People want the Castros to go. All of them gone, because otherwise things won’t get better,” she says. According to Lourdes, the Varadero resident, “people are talking about nothing else. They say the bomb is going to drop on the 20th. I don’t know, but there is already so much misery that people don’t care whether they kill or get killed.”
If Castro is indeed indicted, it would in some ways replicate the pattern Trump followed in Venezuela: first the prosecutors put the target in the crosshairs, then the military carries out the capture —as happened with the surgical abduction of Nicolás Maduro earlier this year.
For historian and political scientist Armando Chaguaceda, however, “the Cuban power structure is more homogeneous and compact.” “It is not a collection of clans like Venezuela. That is why some readings suggest it could resist American pressure more effectively —but at the same time, a collapse of the structure could be triggered precisely because it is so centralized.”
The Castros have steered the country with an iron fist for more than 60 years, opening up only to minor adjustments at the most difficult moments to ensure their survival —without ever relinquishing power. So it was with the 2018 succession to Miguel Díaz-Canel, the first president without the guerrilla lineage. A chapter that, in any case, unfolded under the design and supervision of the Castro dynasty.
Sons, sons-in-law, and grandchildren of the family still hold key positions in the regime’s apparatus, as evidenced by the presence of Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro at Thursday’s negotiating table with the CIA. Known as El Cangrejo —The Crab— Raúl Castro’s grandson and bodyguard has been a constant presence at nearly every key moment of the Havana-Washington negotiations throughout this year.
The Venezuelan example does not inspire much enthusiasm on the island. “I have Venezuelan acquaintances who threw a party after what happened with Maduro, and now they are disappointed. I don’t think the Americans are saviors. That’s a mistake,” says Talía, 38, a small business owner in Havana’s Miramar neighborhood. She has fared reasonably well thanks to the regime’s cautious economic reforms, which have opened the door slightly to the market. Her children live in Italy, and her read of the situation is bleak.
“Cuban kills Cuban. I think we have done more damage to each other than the blockade ever did. Those on the inside and those on the outside. The people banging pots also steal from the ration stores the next day,” she says. She uses desolation and disenchantment to describe the mood on the island: “We are all in a kind of collective depression. The joy of the Cuban people is gone.”
