The CIA has secretly established a task force focused solely on Cuba, the New York Times reported Wednesday, as part of a broader pressure campaign: Washington has elevated Cuba to “Priority 1” in its intelligence priorities, alongside China, Iran and Russia, prompting the NSA and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to redirect satellite assets toward the island. That intelligence now feeds a second track: CIA analysts tracking financial flows and business dealings of Cuba’s ruling elite, with plans to leak findings publicly to damage reputations and widen rifts inside the leadership.
Havana rejected the operation outright. “Cuba has long been the target of the CIA’s espionage, subversion and destabilization,” Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío said in a statement given directly to the Times, arguing Washington had no standing to call Cuba a threat when the island was only exercising its right to self-defense.
US officials describe the mandate as narrower than the CIA’s 1960 Cuba task force, which oversaw the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. This unit isn’t authorized to train armed proxies or run lethal operations. But the same intelligence buildup is also updating US military contingency options for Cuba, and follows a May visit to Havana by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who warned officials that time was running out, an implicit reference to Venezuela’s rapid, US-backed collapse earlier this year.
