On Friday, October 23, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio used his official account on X to post what amounts to a classified ad for spies. “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba,” he wrote, “now is the time. 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 [sic] partnership with the CIA.”
Within hours the Central Intelligence Agency posted a Spanish-language video and a seven-step guide. Prospective informants are told to use a device “not linked to your identity,” browse in incognito mode, open a disposable email account and connect through a VPN not located in “Cuba, Russia, Iran, China.” They are asked for their city, their job and their “level of access” to information.
On Saturday, Southern Command, the Pentagon’s branch for Latin America, reposted the appeal with a statement from its commander, General Francis Donovan: “No more broken promises, rampant corruption, or tolerating an elite class that lives in luxury while citizens are ignored. Now is the time.”
The campaign came hours after Trump told a midterm rally in Fort Myers, Florida, that he would send Rubio to “close the deal” with Havana, joking about parking warships just off the Cuban coast.
The method has been tested before. On February 12, the CIA released a Mandarin-language video inviting Chinese officers to betray their command amid Beijing’s military purge. In Venezuela, the agency placed a team inside the country in August 2025. According to the New York Times, a CIA source inside the government tracked Nicolás Maduro’s movements in the days and moments before US commandos abducted him on January 3.
The legal pretext has been prepared for such an operation in Cuba. In May, the Justice Department indicted former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, now 95, as it had indicted Maduro before seizing him. On October 19, Florida added a state arrest warrant, announced on the first day of early voting in Miami-Dade.
The CIA set up a Cuba task force of case officers, cyber-operators and covert influence specialists, whose intelligence, the New York Times reported in August, “will help the U.S. military update its options for potential military action against Cuba.”
The ad looks like an absurd way to recruit “discreet” spies. For 66 years, Washington has covertly recruited, paid and armed agents to return Cuba to its pre-1959 status as a semi-colony. Now the secretary of state and a four-star general pursue the same objective using social media, denouncing “an elite class that lives in luxury while citizens are ignored” as they serve Trump and his cabinet of billionaires.
Washington is largely responsible for the conditions the ad invokes. Since Trump’s January order threatening tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba, infant mortality on the island has doubled, according to the United Nations, and the national grid has collapsed at least six times. In August, UN human rights rapporteurs warned of a “silent Gaza,” a population destroyed not by bombs but by the deliberate deprivation of fuel, food and medicine.
Cubans who escape the siege are treated no better. Last Thursday, 85 Cubans, many seized in ICE raids at their jobs across the US, were flown vindictively in shackles from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Bangui, in the Central African Republic. They were told only that they were going to Africa.
Washington knows whom it is addressing: the most venal and despicable elements, those ready to sell themselves to the power carrying out a genocide against the Cuban people.
Following its release of a report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” the same State Department spent the summer telling Americans that protests against ICE raids and the Gaza genocide are the work of Cuban agents to lay the groundwork to criminalize opposition at home.
The report charged that Havana ran an espionage empire inside the US government and served as “a kind of concierge service” for America’s enemies. It traced the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the George Floyd and anti-ICE demonstrations to Cuba “in some way, shape, or form.” Rubio told Fox News that Cuba is “a true superpower” of espionage and that in the protests “there’s nothing organic about it.”
The record shows who infiltrated whom. The last CIA Cuba task force, formed in 1960, produced the Bay of Pigs. As usual, the CIA treats its assets as disposable. The CIA left the 1,400 exiles it landed at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 on the beach without air cover; more than 1,100 were captured and later ransomed for baby food and medicine.
In 1960, CIA-trained exiles also bombed the freighter La Coubre in Havana harbor, killing over 100, and in 1976 blew up Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 aboard. Researchers put the toll of US-directed and US-linked terrorism against Cuba since 1959 at more than 3,000 dead. Luis Posada Carriles, organizer of the Cubana bombing, died a free man in Florida in 2018.
Recolonizing Cuba: the same chains abroad and at home
The ad and the State Department report are two halves of one policy. The most powerful imperialist state in history, with an economy some 300 times larger than Cuba’s and a military budget roughly 5,000 times greater, is using that power to starve an island of fewer than 10 million people into submission. It pays for this with the taxes of American workers. Having cut off the fuel, the food and the medicine, it now advertises for stooges to help finish the job.
Then it blames that same impoverished island for the opposition growing inside the United States, so that American workers and youth can be prosecuted as agents of a foreign enemy. In Latin America, “Cuban subversion” was the pretext for military dictatorships that murdered tens of thousands of workers, students and peasants through the 1980s.
Lenin explained the economics of this relationship more than a century ago. Capitalism, he wrote in Imperialism, “has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries.”
The super-profits drawn from the oppressed countries, he added, made it possible to further place chains on workers at home, including by “bribing the labor leaders and the upper stratum of the labor aristocracy.” The bribe never went to the working class as a whole, but to the union bureaucracy, which polices American workers on behalf of the corporations.
Venezuela shows where the plunder goes. Eight months after US commandos seized Nicolás Maduro, Harold Hamm, the billionaire who organized the oil industry’s financing of Trump’s campaign, signed for an Orinoco block holding an estimated 30 billion barrels. Not one barrel of it will lower the price of gasoline in Ohio or lift a wage in Texas. Instead, it enlarges the fortunes and the power of the same financial oligarchy that controls the US government and slashes healthcare, wages and pensions. It strengthens the main enemy, the one at home.
That oligarchy has also turned the police apparatus built against Cuba on American workers. In the 1960s the FBI filled the Fair Play for Cuba Committee with informants and used it to watch and disrupt opponents of the war on Cuba and to plant agents in the Socialist Workers Party and other left organizations.
On July 16, Rubio told representatives of 66 governments that “anti-capitalists, or anti-imperialists, Communists, or anarchists, or Marxists” share a single character, and that “it is time to crush this evil forever.” The state that ships Cubans in shackles to Central Africa and recruits informants in Havana is the same state that raids American workplaces and has subpoenaed New York organizations that protest against the Gaza genocide, on the pretext of “foreign influence.”
The regime in Havana cannot defend the Cuban people. It mocks the CIA’s ad while negotiating its surrender with the CIA’s director, and it offers the island to American investors rather than appeal to American workers, whom it fears more than Washington. The World Socialist Web Site gives it no political support.
The power to stop this operation lies with the working class. The blockade, the war preparations and the plunder all depend on the labor of dockworkers, oil workers, truckers, engineers and soldiers. When that labor is withdrawn on an international scale, no state, however heavily armed, can carry them out. Uniting workers in the United States, Cuba and across the Americas in that struggle requires a socialist leadership: the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.