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The CIA Targets Cuba… Again

Covert operations add to Trump’s ruthless regime change efforts.

As part of President Trump’s escalating efforts to “take” Cuba, the CIA is significantly expanding its clandestine operations targeting the island nation. In recent days, US officials have leaked word that the CIA is increasing its agents and assets inside Cuba, repositioning satellites to enhance intelligence gathering, as well as adding cyberwarfare and covert influence specialists to the growing number of personnel assigned to implement the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” in the Caribbean.

Indeed, the Agency has established a new, secret “task force” whose covert mission, reportedly, is to sow division and destabilization inside the Cuban government—creating conditions conducive for an internal coup. The secret plan calls for the CIA to elevate pro-American leaders to positions of power. Those “pragmatic”—meaning malleable—Cuban officials would then do Washington’s bidding, resulting in “regime alteration rather than regime change,” as The New York Times clarified the covert efforts designed to replicate the Venezuela model. As part of the administration’s new National Intelligence Priorities Framework, the Times ominously reported, Cuba has been designated a “Priority 1” nation.

“The intentions here are no surprise, since Cuba has long been the target of the CIA’s efforts at espionage, subversion, and destabilization, including terrorism,” Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío, responded in an interview.

To be sure, the Cubans have seen this playbook of dirty tricks before; since the advent of the 1959 revolution, Cuba has survived just about every form of paramilitary, assassination, infiltration, sabotage, and black propaganda operation the CIA has in its clandestine arsenal. But the covert operations will now augment a multifaceted US effort to coerce the Cuban leadership into bending the knee of the revolution to the Colossus of the North. Overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Trump administration’s methodical “maximum pressure” campaign to asphyxiate an entire nation is, by far, the most existential threat Cuba has ever faced.

The CIA’s Covert Wars

The history of CIA covert action against Cuba remains legendary. The Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, Mafia-supported assassination plots—poison pills, poison pens, poisoned cigars, toxic scuba diving suits, exploding seashells—among other clandestine regime change efforts, dominate the Agency’s checkered operational past. As part of this history, the CIA’s new Cuba task force has a number of predecessors—all of them abject failures.

Only a year after Fidel Castro took power, in early 1960 the CIA set up its first Cuba-centric unit inside its Western Hemisphere division known as “Branch 4 Task Force.” During the very first meeting of the Branch 4 task force, according to a secret summary, the head of that division, Col. J.C. King, reported that Fidel Castro had the overwhelming support of the Cuban people. “Unless Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara could be eliminated in one package,” King advised, “this operation can be a long, drawn-out affair and the present government will only be overthrown by the use of force.”

Drawing on that reality, the task force planning for regime change evolved into the Bay of Pigs paramilitary invasion—the most........

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