In the shadow of U.S. interventions in Venezuela and Iran, I spoke with Brian Fonseca about the fate of Cuba. Its revolutionaries are dead. Its latest Communist leader is not a Castro. And for an island accustomed to shortages, its people are facing a devastating humanitarian and economic crisis because of President Donald Trump’s sanctions and fuel blockade.
Brian, a fellow at DC-based think tank New America, spoke to me from Miami. He was previously a Senior Research Manager for Socio-Cultural Analysis in the U.S. Southern Command’s Joint Intelligence Operations Center South.
We went beyond Trump’s remark in May to journalists that, “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years, doing something. And, it looks like I’ll be the one that does it.”
Brian said there are four recent developmemnts that signal Trump will move forward: CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s very public visit to Cuba, an intelligence leak to Axios regarding Cuba’s apparent plans “to attack the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military vessels and possibly Key West,” the indictment of Raul Castro along with five other men, and the movement of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier to the region. We broke down each item in the conversation.
He also told me he believes Trump will make a move when the White House feels U.S. officials can no longer engage with the regime. What would that look like? “One could be what I term as a ‘smash and grab,’ similar to what happened to [Nicolas] Maduro, enhanced law enforcement actions supported by the military.”
Or it could come under the guise of a humanitarian intervention in the midst of food, water, and energy shortages — what Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canal called “part of the strategy to justify the false narrative of collapse and thus military intervention.”
Brian pointed out how the last major protests in Cuba happened in July of 2021, when temperatures were peaking and the country was rocked with food and medicine scarcities.
We discussed Cuba’s military, which is nothing like what it used to be in the 1960s and ‘70s, as it supported revolutions in African countries like Congo and Angola. “When Fidel Castro came to power, Raul Castro took the helm of the military and essentially turned the revolutionaries into a professional military corps,” he said, adding that today the military is more of a political pillar.
“The Cuban military is incredibly degraded. They’re operating largely outdated, poorly maintained Soviet-era equipment,” he said. “You’re talking about an incredibly degraded force, roughly 50,000 members of the FAR [Revolutionary Armed Forces], so it would be absolutely no match for the American military, even less so than what Venezuela was.”
But it gets more complicated on the intelligence side. “Cuba has prioritized intelligence and counterintelligence and eternal control over all else,” he told me. “Certainly there has been a degrading of capability — when you’re talking about poor salaries and economic and structural constraints — in terms of the ability to have the kind of intelligence organization that has been lauded as punching above its weight for most of its existence. That said, I still think it has an incredibly sophisticated capacity.”
Internal surveillance, protecting the inner circle, monitoring dissidents in the diaspora, “those are the things that I think that the Cubans have remained somewhat capable in and that they’re leveraging right now to understand exactly what the U.S. is doing.”
We also spoke about how Cuba has used medical doctors to gather intelligence under the guise of humanitarian aid overseas, Russia’s and China’s listening stations on the island, how Moscow might try to interfere in U.S. action, and why the U.S. midterm elections could factor in. I also asked him about lessons from the Bay of Pigs invasion, and whether a U.S. intervention would reshape intelligence dynamics in Latin America. That part of the conversation is available below to paid subscribers, who graciously make my work possible.
