By Lena Marchetti
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday urged Cubans who want political change on the island to make “discrete” contact with the Central Intelligence Agency, an unusually public appeal that came hours after President Donald Trump told a Florida rally he expects to send Rubio to Havana “to finish up the deal.”
“To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba — now is the time,” Rubio wrote on X. “The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA.”
The CIA then posted a Spanish-language video on X with instructions for people who believe they have information of interest, encouraging them first to visit an official U.S. installation in person if they can travel to one safely, Agence France-Presse reported. For people contacting the agency online through cia.gov, it advised using a secure network such as a VPN, a private browser and a burner email account, and asked senders to include their city, job, level of access and contact information.
Trump: “He’ll figure it out”
Earlier Friday, at a midterm rally in Fort Myers, Trump said U.S. warships returning from the Middle East could pause near Cuba, Fox News reported.
“Actually, what we’re going to do with Cuba is we’re going to come back from Iran. Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We’ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They’ll raise up their hands,” Trump said. “And then we’re going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal. We’ll have Marco. Marco. We don’t even have to stop. We could just put him in there and he’ll figure it out. He’s a great guy.”
Trump did not describe the terms of any agreement or say whether the remarks reflected a military or diplomatic plan, Fox News noted. His framing centered on a negotiated outcome led by his top diplomat.
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a former U.S. senator from Florida, has long argued that Washington should not normalize relations with Havana without political reforms. His post did not identify a specific operation or explain what cooperation would involve. The administration’s case, as Rubio framed it, rests on the record of Cuba’s one-party government: “failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few.”
Havana responds
Cuban officials mocked the appeal.
“Now the United States is resorting to public recruitment for the CIA,” Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío wrote on X. “There must be a great deal of desperation or misery within the agency for it to be forced to sell its services like a tube of toothpaste.”
Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez answered Trump’s remarks about the coastline. “Our coastline is full of beautiful beaches, but there are also razor-sharp limestone spikes, an inhospitable environment for those who make it to our shores with hostile purposes and lust for domination,” he posted, according to AFP.
A year of pressure
The appeal follows months of mounting U.S. pressure. Washington imposed a de facto energy blockade on Cuba in January, threatening sanctions on any country that supplies fuel to the island of 9.4 million people, AFP reported.
This week, Florida’s top prosecutor announced a state arrest warrant for former Cuban President Raúl Castro, 95, on murder charges tied to the 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes flown by Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based group that searched for Cubans fleeing by sea. Castro was indicted on federal charges over the same incident in May. Four men died in the shootdown.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has said the federal indictment has “no legal basis” and was an attempt “to justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba,” according to AFP.
The pressure campaign follows U.S. military action in January that removed Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro, a close Havana ally, after a U.S. indictment, AFP noted.
The New York connection
The Cuba debate has a standing venue in New York. Every year since 1992, Cuba has brought a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan calling for an end to the U.S. embargo, and it has passed by wide margins.
Cuba’s mission to the United Nations, on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, is Havana’s main diplomatic post in New York.
The Buffalo Chronicle has asked the State Department and the White House to describe the goals of the CIA outreach and any negotiations with Havana.
Featured image: The Malecón in Havana. Photo by Ezarate, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Leave a Reply