Plainclothes counterintelligence agents from Cuba’s Interior Ministry knocked on the doors of Communist Party neighborhood delegates living near a military outpost in Havana a few weeks ago, asking for the names of everyone in dozens of nearby homes.
The U.S. government had attacked the capital of Venezuela, capturing President Nicolás Maduro and killing more than 100 people, including 32 Cubans who were guarding Mr. Maduro, so the Cuban agents were clearly making contingency plans for a similar strike on potential targets in Cuba, neighborhood delegates said. One delegate was told evacuation plans were being drawn up.
The idea seemed reasonable enough: Even as normal life continues, anxiety is palpable on the island.
The United States attacked Venezuela, a key Cuban ally. President Trump last week proposed a “friendly takeover.” Now, the United States has launched a major assault on Iran and its supreme leader is dead. Many Cubans are wondering if they are next.
“I am afraid of a military invasion,” one of the neighborhood delegates said, speaking on the condition that her name not be published because she was not authorized to discuss her interactions with the counterintelligence services. “The entire country is afraid.”
Last week, the attempted invasion came from an unexpected source. The Cuban government said 10 Cubans living in the United States tried an armed incursion into the island, but got into a gunfight with border guards that left four of them dead and six wounded.
Cuba, a country suffering from a severe energy shortage largely brought on by Mr. Trump’s blockade of foreign oil shipments that has set off a deepening humanitarian crisis, is caught in a Faustian bargain. Many Cubans are enduring the worst moments of their lives and are eager for an end to the 67-year-old Communist government that jails opponents, suppresses free speech and controls a failed centralized economy.
But an actual military conflict, which could lead to civilian casualties, would be a high price to pay, many Cubans say, and the frightening prospect is a divisive issue in this nation of nine million people and among the millions of exiles, many of whom are eager to see the government toppled.
Since the capture of Mr. Maduro, Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has ordered an increase in military exercises, though most Cuban military equipment is obsolete and hails from the Soviet era, according to Hal Klepak, professor emeritus of history and strategy at the Royal Military College of Canada.
An independent news site, 14ymedio, on Saturday reported seeing military caravans patrolling at night.
Mr. Díaz-Canel called the attack on Iran a violation of the country’s sovereignty and a violation of international law. “The international community must act immediately to stop this aggression and escalation,’’ he wrote.
Peter Kornbluh, a co-author of “Back Channel to Cuba,” a chronicle of secret negotiations between Cuba and Washington, who recently returned from the island, said the killing of Iranian leaders serves as a “dagger to the throat” for the Cuban government, signaling that the Trump administration may pursue forced regime change despite continuing diplomatic negotiations.
Still, Mr. Kornbluh said that Cuban officials he spoke to are sticking to their posture of “nationalist dignity,” saying they remain open to dialogue but refuse to negotiate under the threat of obliteration.
The Trump administration has suggested that its plan is for the Cuban government to collapse under the weight of economic sanctions, not rocket fire. Asked the day after the Venezuela strikes whether he planned action in Cuba, Mr. Trump said: “I think it’s just going to fall. I don’t think we need any action. Looks like it’s going down. It’s going down for the count.”
Some Cubans said they haven’t had the time to think about the possibility of hostilities with a far more powerful nation whose military capability dwarfs Cuba’s. They have been too busy dealing with a laundry list of problems, including extended power outages, a lack of gas and increasing difficulty finding food at local markets.
Others, however, are eager for Mr. Trump to do, once and for all, what 12 U.S. presidents before him failed to accomplish: remove the Communist government in Cuba.
“I think that many, many people are expecting that — that he’ll be the one to force things to change. I’m convinced,” said Rita García Morris, executive director of the Christian Center for Reflection and Dialogue, a religious nonprofit group in Cardenas, 90 miles east of Havana. “What they want is for it to happen right now.”
Ms. García said she hoped for a negotiated solution that keeps in mind the suffering in Cuba, where hospitals are canceling surgeries, food is rotting in ports because there is no gas to transport it and airlines have suspended flights because there is so little jet fuel.
“As a Christian woman, I can’t support that,” she said of what Cubans are experiencing.
Even in a country where long lines at supermarkets and crushing poverty are commonplace, the current energy crisis has caused a free fall and pushed the government into what experts say is an existential corner.
After attacking Venezuela on Jan. 3 and taking over its oil industry, the Trump administration prevented Venezuela from sending oil to Cuba. Cuba’s government had long depended on Venezuela for about a third of the 100,000 barrels of it needs each day to run factories, public transportation and keep the lights on.
A few weeks later, in a sharply-worded executive order, Mr. Trump threatened tariffs on any nation that provided oil to Cuba, which largely affected Mexico.
Mr. Trump’s order framed the issue as a national emergency because “Cuba has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States.”
Mr. Trump, without providing any evidence, said the Cuban government aligns itself with — and provides support for — numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and “malign actors adverse to the United States,” including Russia, China, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Hamas and Hezbollah serve as Iranian proxy terror groups. Cuba, like Iran, is on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, a measure that has further hampered its economy and helped decimate its tourism industry.
Cuba has denied Mr. Trump’s accusations and denounced the oil blockade as a cruel punishment against the Cuban people. For years, the Cuban government has emphasized that its economic problems are a direct result of the trade embargo Washington imposed on Cuba in 1960.
Amid reports that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been meeting with a grandson of former President Raúl Castro, who still wields significant power, Cuban government officials have said the they are open to discussions — provided that Cuba’s sovereignty is respected.
Lillian Guerra, a Cuban American historian at the University of Florida, said that Cuban officials are most likely nervous, “and should be.”
But she said that if Mr. Trump “decapitates” the Cuban government by killing Mr. Díaz-Canel or targeting Raúl Castro, it would leave a situation similar to Iran, where the powerful Revolutionary Guard remains.
The Cuban military and the Interior Ministry are powerful entities in Cuba, and the military controls the country’s economy.
Since the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ms. Guerra said she has received several worried text messages from friends in Cuba wondering what would happen to their country.
“On the island, people do not want war,” Ms. Guerra said. Years of economic strain have worn Cubans down, she said, and the internet opened their minds to fight back against decades of indoctrination.
More than two million people have left Cuba in the past five years and the rest are simply exhausted.
“The phrase I hear the most from people is ‘I don’t want to hear any more about that country,’” she said.
But Giovanny Fardales, a 53-year-old translator in Cuba, said he thinks there is more support for a military strike than people realize. He said he had spoken to everyone he knows, from the guys drinking cheap alcohol on street corners to people renting out their mansions to high-paying foreign visitors.
“Everyone says the same thing: ‘The Americans need to come, so this can end,’” he wrote in a text message, in all caps.
Alina López, a historian in Matanzas who has written critically about the government, recounted that when she was in college in the 1980s, she was required to spend two weeks setting up bunkers along a 30-mile stretch of northern coastal highway east of Havana.
“We’ve spent our lives doing defense exercises in contexts where the enemy was supposed to be coming,” she said. “People are more afraid of the war we’re fighting for survival and the precariousness of the situation than of something that might come from outside.”
At the military installation that had been visited by intelligence agents, houses with dilapidated concrete show years of wear and garbage was piled up by banana trees. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” said Dayanis García Fonseca, 43, a former high school IT teacher who now sells beer and snacks at a kiosk nearby. “The only concern is the same old thing: if they’re going to cut off the electricity, that there’s no gas, that food is expensive, that your salary isn’t enough — this is what worries Cubans.”
She said the military installation appeared to be nothing but a harmless storage depot. Asked what the military stored there — bombs? airplanes? She laughed and said, “The only thing they have there is hunger.”
Frances Robles is a Times reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. She has reported on the region for more than 25 years.
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