CIA Director John Ratcliffe met with Cuban officials, including Raul Castro’s grandson, during a high-level visit to the island on Thursday, according to Cuban and American officials.
Ratcliffe met with Raolito Rodriguez Castro, Interior Minister Lazaro Alvarez Casas, and the head of the Cuban intelligence services, and they discussed intelligence cooperation, economic stability, and security issues. A CIA official confirmed these meetings to the Associated Press.
The CIA official said Ratcliffe was there “to personally deliver President Donald Trump’s message that the United States is prepared to engage seriously on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes substantive changes. According to official reports, the meeting served as a platform for Cuba to present evidence that the nation poses no threat to American national security.”
An official statement issued by the Cuban government noted that Thursday’s meeting “was held… against the backdrop of complex bilateral relations.”
While the United States stressed that Cuba could not continue to be a “safe haven for enemies in the Western Hemisphere,” the Cuban delegation insisted that the island did not pose any threat to US security.
Cuban officials also objected to their country’s continued inclusion on the US list of states sponsoring terrorism.
Rodriguez Castro had earlier met secretly with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the sidelines of the Caribbean Community summit in St. Kitts in February. Although he never held any government position, he worked as his grandfather’s bodyguard and later became head of Cuba’s equivalent of the Secret Service.
Thursday’s meeting comes weeks after the Cuban government confirmed that it recently met with US officials on the island, where tensions between the two sides remain high over the US energy blockade of the Caribbean country.
The island’s national power grid suffered a major failure early Thursday, knocking out power to the island’s eastern provinces, with residents in the capital, Havana, facing rolling power outages, authorities said.
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The state-run electricity union said the collapse knocked out power to all eastern provinces from Guantanamo to Ciego de Avila, and that crews were working to restore power, but did not provide an estimate of how long that would take.
The previous day, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel described the energy situation as “tense” after oil supplies delivered by a Russian ship ran out in late March. Cuba produces barely 40% of the fuel it needs to run its economy.
“We have no fuel oil at all, we have no diesel at all,” Vicente de la O Levy, Cuba’s Minister of Energy and Mines, said Wednesday night.
Russia announced plans to send a second fuel ship to Cuba in early April. According to Russian news reports, the oil tanker left the Russian port of Vysotsk on the Baltic Sea in January, but has remained stuck in the same place in the Atlantic Ocean for the past few weeks.
The power outage in Havana, where authorities rationed electricity, extended for 24 consecutive hours on Thursday.
The fuel blockade imposed by the United States on the island has exacerbated its economic problems, with working hours reduced and food spoiling as refrigerators stop working. In some cases, hospitals have canceled surgeries.
Earlier this week, the US State Department confirmed that the United States would provide Cuba with $100 in humanitarian aid and satellite internet support “if the Cuban regime allows it.”
Cuba’s power grid is deteriorating, but the government also blamed US sanctions for the outages after Trump warned in January of tariffs on any country that sells or supplies oil to Cuba. The Trump administration demanded that Cuba release political prisoners and move toward political and economic liberalization in exchange for lifting sanctions.
Although Trump has also threatened to intervene in the country, and Diaz-Canel recently said his country is ready to fight if that happens, a source told the AP earlier this month that military action is not imminent.
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