John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, traveled to Cuba on Thursday, a day after Havana admitted that its fuel oil supplies have been exhausted for consumers and businesses.
Mr. Ratcliffe made the visit to deliver a warning to the government that it had to make economic changes and stop allowing Russia and China to operate intelligence posts in Cuba, U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Mr. Ratcliffe is the highest-ranking Trump administration official to visit Cuba. His trip is part of a multifaceted campaign to escalate pressure against the Communist government and fulfill President Trump’s demand for regime change.
In a statement, the C.I.A. said that Mr. Ratcliffe had traveled to Havana to personally deliver President Trump’s message “that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.”
The C.I.A. said Mr. Ratcliffe had met with Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro, known as “Raulito” or “El Cangrejo” (the Crab), the influential grandson of former president Raúl Castro. Mr. Ratcliffe also met with Lázaro Álvarez Casas, the minister of the interior, as well as the head of Cuba’s intelligence services, a C.I.A. official said. At the same time, federal prosecutors in Miami were working toward securing an indictment of the elder Mr. Castro, who remains a force in the country’s politics, according to several people familiar with the matter. The scope of the indictment and the number of defendants is being debated, but it could include drug trafficking charges and accusations connected to Cuba’s downing in 1996 of planes run by the humanitarian aid group Brothers to the Rescue, two of the people said.
Mr. Ratcliffe arrived in Cuba the day after Vicente de la O Levy, the minister of energy and mines, announced that oil supplies for domestic use and power plants had been exhausted. “We have absolutely no fuel oil, absolutely no diesel,” he said. “In Havana, the blackouts today exceed 20 or 22 hours.” The lack of oil has forced people to rely on charcoal or even wood to cook, and some people have taken to the streets, banging on pots and pans to express their frustration. The Cuban government has been grappling with a severe energy crisis for more than two years because of crumbling infrastructure and a dwindling oil supply from Venezuela, its longtime benefactor. Venezuelan fuel stopped flowing to Cuba entirely in January, after the United States seized Venezuela’s leader and took control of its oil industry. Later, the Trump administration imposed an effective blockade barring all foreign oil from reaching Cuba, which had also received shipments from Mexico. A delivery of an estimated 730,000 barrels of oil from Russia last month permitted by the Trump administration provided a brief reprieve.
The administration also has been working on the Castro indictment for months. The effort is being led by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, a Trump ally who serves as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
The Cuban government said the United States had requested Thursday’s meeting. Cuban officials stressed that their country did not constitute a threat to U.S. national security and should not be included on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, Cuba’s state-controlled newspaper, Granma, reported.
“Once again it was made clear that the island does not harbor, support, finance or permit terrorist or extremist organizations; nor are there any foreign military or intelligence bases on its territory, and it has never supported any hostile activity against the U.S. nor will it allow any action to be taken from Cuba against another nation,” the Cuban government said.
The Trump administration has not explicitly said what political or economic changes it wants to see in Cuba, but the broad goal is apparently to end the Communist Party’s lock on political and economic control. A C.I.A. official did not outline the economic steps the United States is seeking.
The visit was particularly remarkable because of the longstanding animosity between Cuba and the C.I.A. In 1961, the C.I.A. organized the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and in subsequent years was known to have made several attempts to kill Fidel Castro.
“A visit by the C.I.A. director is astounding in the present setting of the Trump administration’s regime-change efforts,” said Peter Kornbluh, who co-wrote a book on the history of secret talks between the two nations. “At the same time, the gravitas of such a high-level delegation signals that a dialogue between Washington and Havana is continuing and could still yield nonviolent results.”
He noted that the visit was not unprecedented: John Brennan, who ran the C.I.A. during the Obama administration, visited Cuba during secret talks to restore diplomatic relations.
William LeoGrande, who wrote the book with Mr. Kornbluh, said that Mr. Ratcliffe’s visit was “extraordinary given the unprecedented level of hostility the Trump administration has demonstrated toward Cuba.”
“The strategy of previous negotiations with Cuba have has been to offer Havana carrots,” Mr. LeoGrande said. “Trump’s strategy is to beat the Cubans with a stick until they cry uncle.”
Mr. Trump has flexed American power to cut off foreign oil shipments to Cuba, whose ramshackle economy has been thrown into crisis. The United States has also increased military and intelligence reconnaissance flights around the island as part of what is expected to be a larger U.S. military buildup.
American officials, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have had private talks with Cuban leaders in the hope that economic desperation will force them to make concessions they have long resisted.
In late April, a delegation of State Department officials visited Havana to press Cuban leaders, including Mr. Rodríguez Castro, on a potential diplomatic deal.
In public remarks, Mr. Rubio has suggested that the United States might settle for broad economic reforms to Cuba’s socialist system rather than dramatic changes to its political structure.
But in an interview on Wednesday with Fox News, Mr. Rubio said he doubted it was possible “to change the trajectory of Cuba as long as these people are in charge in that regime.”
During his visit, Mr. Ratcliffe’s most concrete demand was for Cuba to close the intelligence listening posts that Russia and China operate there, and that Mr. Trump has singled out. According to a C.I.A. official, Mr. Ratcliffe also held out Venezuela as an example of a collaborative relationship with the United States.
In the executive order on Cuba that Mr. Trump issued in January, he criticized the Cuban government for hosting “Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility, which tried to steal sensitive national security information from the United States.” The executive order was less direct on China.
Russia opened the intelligence post during the Cold War, but temporarily shut it a quarter century ago, only to reopen it in 2014. The Russian post is in Lourdes, and the Chinese station is in Bejucal.
While Russia, China and Cuba have denied they operate intelligence posts on Cuba, current and former American officials say the facilities exist and allow for the interception of some U.S. communications.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba did not comment on Mr. Ratcliffe’s visit, but publicly accepted an offer of humanitarian aid in a social media post on Thursday.
A day earlier, he acknowledged that the energy situation was “particularly tense.”
“This dramatic worsening has a single cause: the genocidal energy blockade to which the United States subjects our country,” he said on X.
The blackouts have forced Cubans to wake up at odd hours when the power is briefly on to make coffee, charge telephones and cook the next day’s meals. If the electricity goes out in the midst of cooking, they must turn to charcoal.
Eliannis Urgellés López, 40, of Guantánamo, also in eastern Cuba, uses an electric stove to cook but has a ready supply of charcoal for when the power goes out.
Ever since oil deliveries from Venezuela ended, she said, a good chunk of her government salary goes to buying charcoal.
“Venezuela was the lifeline for everything,” she said.
Hermes Marian, 53, who drives refinery employees to work each day in Santiago de Cuba, a city in the eastern part of the island, said the United States’ oil blockade was unjust.
“It can’t be right — it’s not right,” Mr. Marian said. “Here, it’s the people who are suffering.”
Reporting was contributed by Ed Augustin from Cuba, and Alan Feuer, Glenn Thrush and Tyler Pager.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
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