"When the Americans Come" No Longer Sounds Like a Joke

A few days ago, the manager of the building that houses CNN's Havana bureau knocked on our door with an urgent request: she wanted us to tell her whether we would be coming to work during the upcoming American invasion.

Washington's intense campaign of pressure on Cuba is being felt strongly in everyday life. Due to the ongoing US oil embargo, the power in our offices goes out several times a day. The deepening economic crisis means there is no fuel for the generator in the building, and not even toilet paper in the bathrooms. Every day I pass by the huge artificial Christmas tree in the lobby, which no one has even tried to remove.

However, now the building manager told me that, by “orders from above” - like all office buildings in the city, this one is state-owned - she was tasked with making a plan for the building in the event of an imperialist attack. In other words, an American attack.

Cubans have lived under the threat of American military action for so long that it has become a joke. “Cuando vienen los Americanos” - when the Americans come - is an expression that Cubans, with their signature dark humor, use to say that some long-standing problem - of which there are countless - will one day be solved.

Now it seems that, one way or another, the Americans are indeed coming.

The CIA is coming to Cuba.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe's visit to Havana this week, on a not-so-secret plane emblazoned with the letters "United States of America," deeply shocked many Cubans and is the clearest sign yet that tensions are approaching a critical point.

If the US is the Evil Empire for the Cuban government, then the head of the CIA, the agency that in the 1960s concocted fantastic plots to assassinate Fidel Castro with exploding cigars and poisoned diving suits, is Lucifer himself.

There are entire museums in Cuba dedicated to the CIA's sinister misdeeds against the revolution.

In photos released by the CIA, somber Cuban intelligence chiefs greet their American counterparts in a formal villa, with curtains drawn across the windows and a long table strangely laden with flower arrangements. Except for Ratcliffe, the American intelligence officers' faces are blurred to conceal their identities.

"It's the height of historical irony," said Peter Kornblu, co-author of "Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana," commenting on the sudden appearance of the head of US intelligence on the communist-ruled island.

"Ratcliffe's mission was to make Cuba a 'take it or lose' offer that it supposedly couldn't refuse. Political scientists call it 'subjugation diplomacy,'" Kornblu told CNN.

Cuban officials said they presented arguments during the visit why their island does not pose a threat to the United States - challenging the Trump administration's legal reasoning for the oil blockade that has plunged the island into economic collapse, according to a statement from the Cuban government.

Those arguments, apparently, did not resonate. Ratcliffe accused Cuban officials of allowing Russian and Chinese listening stations to operate on the island and of undermining American interests in the region, according to American officials.

If the US has been applying a carrot-and-stick approach to Cuba in recent months - offering aid or resorting to economic coercion - it seems that the carrot is no longer on offer.

Just hours after Ratcliffe left Havana, news leaked that US federal prosecutors were seeking to indict former Cuban President Raul Castro, who is officially retired but is still called the "leader of the revolution" on the island and is believed to be pulling the strings from the shadows.

Many Cuban exiles in Miami would welcome an indictment against Castro for his alleged role in the downing of two planes belonging to the Cuban-American exile organization Brothers for Salvation in 1996. The indictment would set the stage for Castro's possible arrest and trial - as happened in Venezuela in January with Cuban ally Nicolas Maduro.

But any move against Castro, who turns 95 in June and now walks with difficulty without the help of attendants and a grandson-in-law bodyguard, would represent the final escalation of already simmering tensions, likely leading to a break in diplomatic relations - if not open conflict.

Cubans prepare for battle

Several Cuban officials told me, amid rumors in recent weeks of a possible indictment of Castro, that such a development would end the negotiations and pave the way for military intervention, which they would oppose at the cost of their lives if necessary.

“We are ready,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on May Day. “And I say this with a deep conviction that I share with my family - to give our lives for the revolution.”

Cuban state media has released footage of civilians undergoing military training as part of what Fidel Castro envisioned as a “war of the whole people,” in which Cubans, armed by the state, would wage a guerrilla war of attrition against foreign invaders.

The plan relies on Vietnam-style guerrilla warfare, rather than a clash of regular armies.

Some of the footage released shows soldiers performing maneuvers with Soviet weapons older than themselves. In one clip, an anti-aircraft gun is being pulled by oxen.

Despite the Cuban armed forces lacking modern weaponry, military historian Hal Klepak told CNN that the island's military could still offer stubborn resistance to a US ground attack.

"They have shown, as we have seen time and again during natural disasters, that they are capable of mobilizing the population, that they are capable of getting people out," Klepak said.

Population in agony

As conditions on the island worsen and power outages last all day, some Cubans say at least a conflict would end their long-standing suffering.

State hospitals are now deprived of many essential medicines, Cubans complain that their food spoils in refrigerators during long power outages, and garbage piles up in almost every neighborhood on the island.

The US oil blockade has depleted the island's last reserves, the energy minister said this week. New sanctions against companies doing business with Cuba are halting most maritime shipments to the island, all but guaranteeing that food prices and hunger will rise further.

“If half of us die, let them die,” one woman told me during a protest over power outages in Havana this week, where demonstrators banged pots and pans for so long that the steel dented. “But at least let the other half live in peace,” she said.

A successful US attack that would overthrow the Cuban government could trigger a wave of political retaliation, said Ada Ferrer, a Cuban-American historian.

"When I think about the moments in Cuban history when there were political changes, when unpopular governments were removed or fell in one way or another, violence always followed," she told CNN.

The island's government advises residents to prepare for possible earthquakes.

Cuba's civil protection agency this week distributed a "family guide on how to act during a hypothetical military aggression against Cuba," which recommends, among other things, preparing a backpack with non-perishable food.

My neighbor in Havana looked at these recommendations with suspicion.

"They're telling us to prepare like a hurricane is coming," he told me. "But we've already run out of everything."

The text is taken from CNN.

Translation: NB