Rubio Asks Cubans to Partner With CIA Havana Mocks
by: Marcus Webb

Rubio Asks Cubans to Partner With the CIA, and Havana Mocks It

The CIA’s newest recruiting pitch came from the secretary of state. Marco Rubio wrote on X on Friday, Oct. 23, “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba – now is the time,” he wrote, urging Cubans tired of “failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few” to seek “a discrete partnership with the CIA.” He wrote “discrete,” which means separate. The Spanish version posted alongside it uses discreta, meaning discreet, and that is how most outlets read it.

The post had been viewed more than 3.7 million times by Saturday, IBTimes UK reported.

The CIA followed with a Spanish-language video on X telling Cubans how to reach it, AFP reported. Anyone who can safely get to an official U.S. facility should go in person. Everyone else should use the contact page on cia.gov over a VPN, in a private browser, from a throwaway email account with no link to their identity, and say what city they are in, what job they hold and what they have access to.

A recruiting drive with a political goal

The agency has asked foreigners to contact it in public before. It began posting Russian-language instructions for contacting it securely in 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, and in May 2023 released a produced video on Telegram and other platforms showing fictional Russian officials deciding to reach out, NBC News reported. A CIA official said then that the agency wanted information on science, military and cyber technology, finance and foreign policy. In October 2024 the CIA added instructions in Mandarin, Farsi and Korean, with a spokesperson saying the Russia effort had been successful and that people in other authoritarian countries should know “we’re open for business,” Reuters reported.

Those campaigns came from the agency and were framed around information. The Russia drive sought people who could tell the CIA “the truth about Russia,” an official told NBC. Rubio’s post came from the State Department’s top official and addresses Cubans who want “to create the change you desire.” The CIA’s follow-up video, as AFP described it, sticks to the older format and asks what a source can tell the agency. AFP described the administration’s aim as forcing an end to Cuba’s communist government, and Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has questioned whether any settlement is possible with its current leaders.

“Like a tube of toothpaste”

Havana answered on X. “Now the United States is resorting to public recruitment for the CIA,” Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío wrote on X, adding that the agency must be desperate to “sell its services like a tube of toothpaste,” AFP reported.

Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez replied to President Donald Trump, who had told a rally in Fort Myers, Florida, earlier that day that warships coming home from the Iran war would pass Cuba. Trump said one would “stop about 50 yards off the coast,” the Cubans would “raise up their hands,” and the U.S. would then send Rubio “in to finish up the deal,” according to AFP and Business Today. Rodríguez wrote that Cuba’s coast has beaches but also “razor-sharp limestone spikes” for anyone arriving with hostile purposes, IBTimes UK reported.

The rally remarks and the post land on top of months of pressure. Since January the U.S. has kept up what AFP calls a de facto energy blockade, threatening sanctions on any country that sends fuel to the island of 9.4 million people. Former president Raúl Castro, 95, was indicted on federal charges in May over the 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue planes, and Florida’s attorney general announced a state murder warrant for him this week. President Miguel Díaz-Canel has called the federal case legally baseless and an attempt to justify military aggression, AFP reported.

The last time the CIA thought it had Cubans on its side

The agency’s record with Cuban recruits is a warning it knows well. In June 1987, Maj. Florentino Aspillaga, the head of Cuban intelligence in Czechoslovakia, drove an embassy car across the border into Austria and presented himself to U.S. diplomats in Vienna. In debriefings he told the CIA that nearly every agent it had recruited in Cuba since the early 1960s had been working for Havana all along, according to Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst who later interviewed him at length, as recounted by Spyscape.

Benjamin Fischer, the CIA’s former chief historian, put the number at about four dozen recruits over four decades who had fed the agency disinformation, in a 2015 journal article reported by The Washington Free Beacon. Later in 1987, Cuban state television aired a documentary presenting 27 of those supposed CIA agents, with their communications and photo equipment, according to the same report.

In the Free Beacon’s account of Fischer’s article, Cuba was the CIA’s first major double-agent failure.

We’ve covered the agency’s earlier efforts against Castro’s government in Bay of Pigs, 1960–1961: The Declassified CIA Record and Operation Mongoose: Kennedy’s Cuba Project, and the shootdown behind the Castro charges in The FAA Log That Complicates Both Sides of the Castro Case. Rubio’s post is on his X account.

Sources

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