Cubans prepare for ‘invasion’ as U.S. escalates tensions with long-suffering island

People wait outside a bank office in Regla, Cuba, Friday, May 8, 2026.

HAVANA, Cuba - A few days ago, the manager of the building where CNN’s Havana bureau is located rapped on our door with an urgent message: She needed to know if we would be coming to work during the “imminent” U.S. invasion.

Washington’s intense pressure campaign on Cuba had already been keenly felt in day-to-day life. Under the ongoing U.S. oil blockade, power flickers off in our offices several times a day. The compounding economic crisis means there’s no fuel for the building generator or even toilet paper for the bathrooms. Every day, I walk past an enormous artificial Christmas tree in the lobby that no one has bothered to take down.

But now the building manager told me she had been tasked with “orders from above” — like all office buildings in the city, it is owned by the state — to come up with a plan for the building in case of imperialist attack. As in an American attack. (The Trump administration has not said that it is planning any military operations in Cuba.)

Cubans have lived with the threat of U.S. military action for so long that it has become a dark joke. “Cuando vienen los americanos” — when the Americans come — is the expression Cubans employ with their trademark black humor to say how a long-running problem — of which there are countless — will one day be resolved.

Now it really does look, one way or another, like the Americans are coming.

The CIA comes to Cuba

CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Havana this week aboard a not-very-clandestine airplane emblazoned with the words “United States of America” was deeply shocking for many Cubans, and the clearest sign yet that tensions are reaching critical mass.

If the U.S. is the Evil Empire for the Cuban government, then the head of the CIA, the agency that in the 1960s concocted fantastical plots to assassinate Fidel Castro with exploding cigars and poisoned scuba suits, is Lucifer himself.

There are whole museums in Cuba dedicated to CIA’s nefarious misdeeds against the revolution.

In photos released by the CIA, Cuba’s dour spy chiefs greet their American counterparts in a protocol house with blackout curtains on the windows and a long table oddly bursting with floral arrangements. Except Ratcliffe, the U.S. intelligence officers have their faces blurred out to obscure their identities.

“It is the height of historical irony,” Peter Kornbluh, a co-author of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana, said of the U.S. spymaster’s sudden appearance on the communist-run island.

“Ratcliffe’s mission was to make Cuba a ‘do or die’ offer it ostensibly can’t refuse. Political scientists call this “submission diplomacy,” Kornbluh told CNN.

Cuban officials said that during the visit, they laid out the case why their island does not pose a threat to the U.S. — countering the Trump administration’s legal justification for oil blockade that has plunged the island into an economic nosedive, per a Cuban government statement.

Those arguments apparently fell on deaf ears. Ratcliffe accused the Cuban officials of hosting Russian and Chinese listening posts on the island and thwarting U.S. interests in the region, according to U.S. officials.

If the U.S. has been employing a carrot-and-stick approach with Cuba in recent months — offers of aid or economic coercion — carrots no longer appear to be on the menu.

Just hours after Ratcliffe left Havana, news leaked that U.S. federal prosecutors were seeking an indictment against former Cuban President Raul Castro, officially retired but still referred to on the island as the “leader of the revolution” and widely believed to be calling the shots from behind the scenes.

Many Cuban exiles in Miami would cheer an indictment of Castro for his alleged role in the 1996 shootdown of two planes belonging to the Cuban-American exile organization Brothers to the Rescue. An indictment would prepare the ground for the possible capture and trial of Castro —as it happened in Venezuela in January with Cuba’s ally Nicolas Maduro.

But any action against Castro, who turns 95 in June and now has trouble walking without the help of attendants and his bodyguard grandson, would be the final escalation of already simmering tensions, likely leading to a break in diplomacy — if not open conflict.

Cubans preparing for battle

Several Cuban officials have told me amid the rumors of a Castro indictment in recent weeks that such a development would end negotiations and set the stage for a military intervention to which they would sacrifice their lives if needed.

“We are ready,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel announced on May Day, “And I say it with a profound conviction that I have shared with my family, to give our lives for the revolution.”

Cuban state-media has published images of civilians receiving military training as part of what Fidel Castro envisioned as the “war of the entire population” in which Cubans armed by the government would fight a guerrilla war of attrition against foreign invaders.

The plan counts on Vietnam-style guerrilla combat rather than a conflict between armies.

Some of the videos released show soldiers carrying out maneuvers with Soviet arms older than they are. In one clip, they’re pulling an anti-aircraft gun with oxen.

Despite the Cuban armed forces’ lack of modern weaponry, military historian Hal Klepak told CNN the island’s military still could put up dogged resistance to a U.S. attack on the ground.

“They have shown, as we’ve seen over and over again in natural disasters, that they are capable of mobilizing the population, they are capable of getting people out,” Klepak said.

A population in agony

As conditions deteriorate on the island and power cuts stretch all day, some Cubans say that at least a conflict would end their prolonged suffering.

State hospitals are now deprived of many basic medicines, Cubans complain of food rotting in their fridges during lengthy blackouts and uncollected trash piles up in nearly every neighborhood of the island.

Washington’s oil blockade has drained the island of its last reserves, the energy minister announced this week. New sanctions against companies doing business with Cuba are halting most maritime shipments to the island, guaranteeing that food prices and hunger will spike even higher.

“If half of us die, half of us die,” one woman told me during a protest over the power cuts in Havana this week where demonstrators beat pots and pans for so long that the steel was caved in with dents. “But at least the other half get to live in peace,” she said.

A successful U.S. attack that topples the Cuban government could unleash a wave of political reprisals, said Ada Ferrer, a Cuban-American historian and author of Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter

“If I think about times in Cuban history when political change has happened, when unpopular governments have been removed or have fallen one way or another, there’s always been violence that followed,” she told CNN.

The island’s government is advising the populace to get ready for potential upheaval.

Cuba’s Civil Defense agency this week circulated “a family guide on how to act during a hypothetical military aggression against Cuba” that recommended, among other steps, preparing a backpack of non-perishable items.

A neighbor of mine in Havana was dismissive of the war planning.

“They tell us to prepare like if it were hurricane that’s coming,” he told me, “But already, we have run out of everything.”