Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently urged Cubans in a post on X to form a “discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA."
That same day, the CIA posted a video in Spanish providing step-by-step instructions on how Cubans could contact the agency.
This week, Belly of the Beast journalist Blake Burdge speaks with a former CIA analyst and Cuba experts about Rubio's not-so-discreet recruitment pitch to prospective coup plotters and the decades-old U.S. strategy behind it.
Also:
UN Condemns U.S. Blockade for 34th Year
Idaho Senator Jim Risch Has Huge Power. Who Really Wields It?
Cuba’s Public Transportation Grounds to a Halt
Cuba Wants Mexican Oil Back Amid U.S. Tariff Threat
Rubio Posts CIA Job Listing for Cubans. Here's Why.
By Blake Burdge
At a recent Florida campaign rally, Donald Trump suggested that U.S. warships returning from Iran could stop near Cuba before dropping Secretary of State Marco Rubio off to “finish up the deal.”
Shortly after the event, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to X to publicly urge Cubans on the island to collaborate with the CIA.
“To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time,” Rubio wrote, encouraging Cubans to seek a “discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”
Less than four hours later, the CIA's official X account posted a Spanish-language video guide for Cubans to contact the agency.
The CIA’s history in Cuba is notorious—poisoned cigars, torched sugar cane fields, a botched invasion—but a public recruitment pitch for prospective coup plotters marks a new chapter in its six-decade-long campaign to overthrow the Cuban government.
“An open call for Cubans to join the CIA against their own nation is virtually unprecedented in the annals of CIA recruitment protocols,” said Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project.
Kornbluh has spent decades uncovering declassified records documenting CIA assassination plots, sabotage campaigns and psychological warfare against Cuba.
Kornbluh said the public appeal is unusual, but the strategy behind it is not. The CIA, he said, is returning to familiar tactics: “dividing Cuba's leadership, sowing distrust and recruiting spies.”
What may have changed is Cuba's ability to withstand U.S. pressure. In the 1960s, the island had stronger international support and more resources to defend itself. Today, the Trump administration is targeting what Kornbluh called a “gravely weakened and impoverished Cuba.”
But economic weakness doesn't necessarily make Cuba’s formidable counterintelligence apparatus easier to circumvent.
Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst who also served as the nation's top intelligence officer on Latin America, doubts Rubio’s public appeal will produce any valuable intelligence assets.
Armstrong pointed to similar U.S. appeals for defections in Iraq and Panama before the U.S. staged military interventions in each country. But he questioned whether high-ranking Cuban officials would risk helping the Trump administration overthrow their own government given Cuban intelligence’s long history of outmaneuvering the CIA.
“Cuban intelligence has eaten our lunch a zillion times,” Armstrong said.
Meanwhile, the CIA faces the risk that anyone responding to its appeal could actually be working for Havana.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
For more than two decades, Cuban intelligence operated a network of double agents who posed as CIA informants, feeding the agency information their handlers wanted it to receive.
In June 1987, Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga defected to the United States.
During CIA debriefings, he revealed that informants the agency believed it had recruited were actually double agents working for Havana, according to contemporaneous reporting in The Washington Post.
The following month, Cuban state television began airing The CIA War Against Cuba, a documentary series exposing U.S. intelligence operations on the island.
The episodes featured secretly filmed footage of U.S. diplomats allegedly visiting drop sites and interviews with Cuban agents who said they had spent years posing as CIA informants.
“We all infiltrated in such a way that the CIA never realized we were agents of Cuban Security,” one of them, Dulce María Santiesteban, told reporters.
The revelations cast doubt on years of intelligence the CIA had gathered from its supposed collaborators. One U.S. intelligence official acknowledged that the agency had been badly deceived: “We certainly underestimated the Cubans.”
Publicity Is the Point
Even if Rubio’s recruitment appeal fails to produce valuable intelligence, Armstrong said the publicity around the recruitment could serve as a psychological operation in its own right.
One objective could be to provoke Cuban authorities to arrest people who criticize the government, whether or not they have any connection to the CIA.
Such arrests could hand Washington a “propaganda point,” allowing it to accuse Havana of persecuting dissidents, which in turn could be used to justify intensified sanctions and other regime change efforts.
“When you have a failed policy, your policy becomes to provoke the other guy to make bigger mistakes than you make,” Armstrong said.
Rubio's announcement was not the first time the Trump administration had publicized its covert operations against Cuba.
In August, Politicoreported that the Trump administration was expanding its intelligence presence on the island. The New York Timesrevealed the same week that the CIA was allegedly assembling a task force to create rifts within Cuba's leadership.
A senior Trump official told Axios that publicizing the CIA’s plans was about “letting the regime know we're watching.”
In September, CBS News reported on an Army Reserve request for military and medical personnel that anonymous administration officials linked to planning for a potential military action against Cuba.
Regardless of whether the reported operations ever materialize, the leaks and public recruitment appeal could themselves be designed to stoke dissension and encourage officials to break ranks.
“[They] are most likely part of a psychological operations campaign, which is also something that the CIA has used against Cuba in the past,” said William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert and professor of government at American University.
Another possible motive behind the CIA job posting: score political points in Washington and Miami.
Governments sometimes undertake such operations “to make it look like they're doing something” Armstrong said. In this case, he argued, the publicity “makes the administration look like they're serious, they're tough. It shows Cuban Americans that [they’re] really serious about this sort of thing.”
The Pressure Cooker
The CIA’s public recruitment appeal comes amid an unprecedented intensification of the U.S. government’s economic war on Cuba, marked by an oil blockade that has plunged the island into darkness.
“Today, the Trump administration has imposed the most severe economic sanctions against Cuba ever, but that alone has not been enough to overthrow the government, so it comes as no surprise that they are stepping up covert operations at the same time,” said LeoGrande.
Armstrong believes the Trump administration is counting on Cuba's worsening economic conditions, driven by U.S. sanctions, to turn the population against its government and ultimately pressure the military to stage a coup.
“The policy is a pressure cooker policy to try to get the island to explode,” Armstrong said.
Rather than expecting Cubans to storm government buildings, Washington may be hoping they will turn to the military to demand political change. Soldiers endure many of the same hardships as civilians, said Armstrong, making them a potential source of pressure on the country's leadership.
U.S. attempts to spark an uprising in Cuba are not new.
A 1960 memo by State Department official Lester Mallory recommended denying Cuba money and supplies to provoke “hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
Economic warfare was accompanied by CIA operations designed to destabilize the government and encourage rebellion.
“The first major covert operations program against Cuba combined economic sanctions, psychological operations, sabotage, and paramilitary operations culminating in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961,” said LeoGrande.
U.S. regime change planners expected the CIA-trained exile force to spark a popular uprising against Castro. The invasion was a disaster and there was no popular revolt to support it.
Even with the weakened state of the Cuban government today, Armstrong considers the idea of an uprising “fictional.”
LeoGrande is equally skeptical. Despite the Trump administration's increasingly severe sanctions and renewed covert operations, he said Washington is pursuing “a strategy that hasn't worked for 66 years and, despite the enormous hardship it is imposing on the Cuban population, it is not working now.”
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UN Condemns U.S. Blockade for 34th Year
For the 34th time since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly in support of a resolution condemning the U.S. economic blockade on Cuba despite a pressure campaign by the Trump administration.
For decades, the U.S. and Israel have been the only two countries to consistently oppose the annual resolution. In 2024, they stood alone in a 187–2 vote. Last year, following an aggressive diplomatic offensive by Washington, five other countries joined them.
This year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz ramped up the administration’s efforts to peel away support from Cuba.
A leaked State Department cable obtained by The Nation in July exposed U.S. attempts to block a UN debate on the humanitarian impact of sanctions. And in the weeks leading up to the October 28 vote, Rubio urged El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele to align with U.S. priorities at the UN. Meanwhile, Waltz acknowledged lobbying European governments.
Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez accused the Trump administration of threatening tariffs, visa denials and aid cuts to change countries' votes.
Waltz also sought to discredit the resolution itself. At an invitation-only event at UN headquarters the week before the vote, he assembled a panel of Cuban opposition figures and presented a series of rhetorical questions intended to prove that the U.S. blockade doesn’t exist. (See our article in which we put his claims to the test).
During last Tuesday's General Assembly debate, Waltz doubled down on his denial of the blockade and made sweeping, unsubstantiated accusations of corruption against Cuba's leadership.
Rodríguez called him a liar, sparking a heated confrontation on the Assembly floor. Watch the clash HERE.
On Wednesday, the General Assembly voted 130–17 (ten more no votes than last year) to condemn the blockade, with 25 abstentions (13 more than last year).
Waltz welcomed the result, telling reporters he was “satisfied” that more U.S. allies had shifted their votes toward Washington’s position on the blockade.
But the U.S. lobbying effort still failed to erode the broad international consensus against U.S. sanctions and their impact on the Cuban people. Dozens of diplomats from around the world took the General Assembly floor in support of Cuba. Hear what they had to say HERE.
Idaho Senator Jim Risch has been the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for nearly eight years—and now chairs it.
But when Belly of the Beast journalist Reed Lindsay, who grew up in Idaho, traveled to Capitol Hill to discuss Cuba policy with his senator, he was referred to Victor Cerviño, a senior staffer from Miami who previously worked for three Florida senators, including Marco Rubio.
"I left with the impression that Cerviño’s allegiance was to Florida, not Idaho, and that Risch had handed Rubio the keys to Cuba policy," Lindsay wrote in an op-ed published last week in Idaho’s Gem State Chronicleand Post Register.
Risch has supported the Trump administration’s escalating sanctions against Cuba despite a long tradition of Idaho leaders—including former Democratic Sen. Frank Church and Republican Gov. Butch Otter—advocating for an end to the embargo to benefit the state’s farmers and businesses.
Cuba’s public bus system has ground to a halt since the Trump administration imposed a de facto blockade on the island in January.
The number of daily bus departures from Havana to other provinces has plummeted from 419 in 2025 to just 11 this year, Cuba’s Transportation Minister Eduardo Rodríguez Dávila told Reuters.
Nationwide, the number of bus routes has dropped from more than 100 to 21. Rodríguez Dávila estimates that total public transportation trips will fall 75% this year compared with 2025, while interurban transportation will decline 90%.
“These are families that can't move around, people who can't visit their sick loved ones, others who can't get to a hospital,” Rodríguez Dávila told Reuters.
Cubans have increasingly turned to carpooling and electric vehicles to get around. But prolonged blackouts have left even electric taxis stranded.
In July, we spoke with taxi drivers in Havana who have found a way around the blackouts by installing solar panels on their electric tricycles, allowing them to charge their batteries without relying on the electrical grid.
Cuba Wants Mexican Oil Back Amid U.S. Tariff Threat
Cuba is seeking to restore oil shipments from Mexico after the Trump administration's threats of punitive tariffs forced one of the island's largest fuel suppliers to suspend deliveries earlier this year.
Cuba's ambassador to Mexico, Eugenio Martínez Enríquez, expressed hope that shipments would resume in an interview with Spanish news agency EFE last week.
Until recently, Mexico was one of Cuba's largest oil suppliers. Mexico exported an average of 12,284 barrels of crude oil daily to Cuba in 2025, compared with 9,528 from Venezuela, according to Financial Times.
Mexico's state-owned oil company Pemex reported supplying an average of 15,000 barrels of crude and 2,200 barrels of petroleum products daily last year, worth nearly $500 million.
Those figures challenge Secretary of State Marco Rubio's explanation of Cuba's fuel crisis. In May, Rubio denied the existence of a U.S. oil blockade, claiming Cuba's shortages were the result of Venezuela no longer providing “free oil.”
But Cuba was also buying substantial quantities of fuel from Mexico under a commercial agreement. Martínez said Cuba regularly paid for those shipments before the contract was suspended.
In February, Drop Site News journalist José Luis Granados Ceja reported that Pemex was willing to continue supplying Cuba, but the Mexican government was seeking a diplomatic solution with Washington before resuming deliveries.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has defended her country's right to supply oil to Cuba and proposed resuming shipments through private companies, following Cuban reforms allowing private businesses to import fuel.
But Mexico has not sent a single oil shipment this year while Cubans endure blackouts lasting more than 20 hours a day.
Neither government has announced an agreement or specified when deliveries might restart.
Boletines en Español | English Newsletters Archives Durante 33 años consecutivos, el gobierno estadounidense ha intentado, sin éxito, convencer a la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas para que vote en contra de una resolución anual que condena el bloqueo económico a Cuba. El año pasado, la administración Trump logró ciertos avances tras una intensa campaña diplomática. Consiguió que cinco países se sumaran a Estados Unidos e Israel para oponerse a la resolución, mientras que doce se...
English Newsletters Archives | Boletines en Español For 33 consecutive years, the U.S. government has tried—and failed—to convince the United Nations General Assembly to vote against an annual resolution condemning the economic blockade on Cuba. Last year, the Trump administration made some headway following an aggressive lobbying effort, convincing five countries to join the U.S. and Israel in opposing the resolution, while 12 abstained and nine didn't vote. The UN voted 165-7 to condemn the...
Boletines en Español | English Newsletters Archives Hoteles cerrados, operaciones mineras paralizadas y vuelos cancelados forman parte del impacto de la creciente presión económica de Estados Unidos sobre Cuba. Ahora, la escalada de esta guerra económica ha cobrado otra víctima: el cierre del único programa estadounidense de estudios en el extranjero con presencia física permanente en la isla. Tras 11 años trayendo a cientos de estudiantes estadounidenses a vivir y estudiar en La Habana, el...
