Peter Kornbluh talks about his recent Nation magazine article, “The CIA Goes to Cuba” and what the Trump regime may be planning after its indictment of Raúl Castro in Florida, possibly kidnapping the aging Cuban leader as they did with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January—or a U.S. military invasion.
Kornbluh is a co-author with William M. LeoGrande of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. Kornbluh is also the author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.
SCOTT HARRIS: Good evening and welcome to Counterpoint. My name is Scott Harris here Monday evenings between 8 and 9:30 p.m., bringing you discussion, analysis, commentary and a lot more on major issues that we confront locally, statewide, nationally and internationally from progressive perspectives that don’t ordinarily get a lot of time or attention in our corporate media. Thank you so much for joining us.
First off, I want to welcome to our program Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. and co-author with William M. LeoGrande of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. Peter’s also author of other books, including The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. Peter, thank you so much for joining us again on our program for many years on the air here together.
PETER KORNBLUH: Oh, Scott, I think we go back over 35 years of interviews on your very protracted radio career and radio station. I’m just happy to be back and talking to the same people of Connecticut.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yes. Thank you so much for joining us. On a very busy evening, I know just moments ago you concluded an online webinar about Cuba. So thank you for making time for us in this really very busy evening. I wonder if you’d just briefly tell our listeners about the important work you and your colleagues do at the National Security Archive based in Washington.
PETER KORNBLUH: The National Security Archive sounds like the library of the Central Intelligence Agency, but it is actually the antithesis of that. The CIA keeps the secrets, but the National Security Archive pushes to get those secrets declassified and into the hands of the type of people who are listening to your radio show tonight. We can’t really have real democracy unless we are an informed citizenry and the only way we’re going to be informed is if we can get our hands on what really goes on behind the scenes that’s recorded in secret U.S. government documentation. And so obviously, governments want to keep those materials’ secrets secret and our organization wants those documents to be in your hands and the hands of the American public so that we can truly know what our government is doing in our name but without our knowledge and push back against such actions.
SCOTT HARRIS: An incredibly important mission that you and the colleagues that you work with at the National Security Archive really have done a great service for our country. So thanks for all that. Now, onto Cuba that you have covered for many, many years. As many of our listeners are aware, on May 20th, the Trump administration indicted retired 94-year-old Cuban leader Raul Castro, the surviving brother of Fidel Castro on charges of murder and conspiracy stemming from the Cuban military shooting down two small planes in 1996 owned by the Cuban anti-government exile group, Brothers to the Rescue, for what Cuba said was violating Cuban airspace. This indictment announced on Cuban Independence Day in Miami came just one week after Donald Trump’s CIA director, John Ratcliffe, traveled to Havana to personally deliver an ultimatum to the Cuban government. Tell us about what we should know regarding this indictment and the CIA director’s visit to Cuba.
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, this was a one-two punch in what is an escalating campaign of economic warfare and now military threats to attack Cuba, decapitate the leadership and basically terminate the Cuban Revolution. The one-two punch was one, CIA Director John Ratcliffe going to Cuba, meeting with Cuban intelligence officials and with the grandson of Raul Castro, who’s known as Raulito, Little Raul. And this mission was an overt mission. I think many of your listeners know that the CIA is known for its many covert operations in Cuba, going all the way back to the days of the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose and ZR/RIFLE, the code name for all the assassination plots against the Castros.
But now the CIA director was on an open trip essentially to basically tell the Cuban leadership, “Look, President Trump wants you to do certain things. If you don’t do them, then we’re coming after you.” And that was basically the bottom line of his message. As he was leaving Cuba, the administration leaked word that in the coming days thereafter they were going to indict Raul Castro and that was the kind of two-punch of this double whammy. On the surface of it might not sound very threatening, but you have to remember that this was the modus operandi that the Trump administration used in Venezuela. They indicted Nicolás Maduro and then they sent a Delta Force team in to seize him, basically kidnap him. That operation took the lives of 32 Cuban security agents who were there to guard Nicolás Maduro from exactly that type of operation. They all lost their lives in this attack. So you can imagine the message that arrives in Havana having already lost 32 personnel in Venezuela.
This is how we did it in Venezuela. We indicted Maduro. We then claimed that this was a law enforcement operation. That’s what we told Congress to get around the War Powers Act and we could very well do this exact same thing in Havana. Come after Raul Castro, who’s now essentially the symbolic historical leader of the Cuban Revolution. Seize him or kill him and basically tell Congress, “This isn’t a war, this is an act of law enforcement.” So the kind of escalation of pressure was very dramatic over these last 10 days or so. And we’ve entered a period of great stress where there is high alert in Cuba that the United States may launch a military attack. I think growing fears throughout the United States—people who care about Cuba and care about peace and justice—that Trump might actually kind of take out his frustrations for not having a solid victory in Iran by swooping in and trying to claim Cuba as a vassal state of the United States of America.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that summary of recent events, Peter. Trump says that after successive U.S. presidents being unsuccessful in overthrowing Cuba’s communist government, that he may be the president to finally succeed. That’s kind of a paraphrase of things he said recently. Peter, tell us about the long history of U.S. attempts to assassinate Cuban leaders and overthrow the government. And I’ll just say that Trump’s comments seem to be part of what we’re seeing here in his second term, that he’s doing something called legacy building, right? He’s putting his face on everything. P.assports, money, the Kennedy Center. On and on it goes. And he’s attempting, I think, with his attack on Iran is to make his mark in history. Well, I don’t know if that’s going to succeed. He may make a mark, but it won’t be for the reasons that Donald Trump thinks it will be.
But yeah, tell us a bit about this history and where you think Trump’s psychology fits in here.
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, he seems painfully aware of the history that goes all the way back to the Eisenhower era just shortly after the Cuban Revolution when President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to conduct regime change operations against the very young Fidel Castro-led revolution. I think Fidel had only been in power six months before the State Department and the CIA started conspiring to overthrow him. By the end of Castro’s first year in power, the CIA was writing memos basically pushing for the assassination, not only of Fidel Castro, but of Raul Castro and Che Guevara at the very same time. And by the spring of 1960, the agency had come up with a whole plan to overthrow the Cuban government and roll back the Cuban Revolution that was authorized by President Eisenhower and that evolved into the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The invasion plan was inherited by John Kennedy only a few weeks after he became president. The attack went forward. It failed miserably, but there’s not really any lessons there for the current situation. The Bay of Pigs operation was carried out kind of at the height of the Cold War under kind of an international legal order that actually Kennedy respected and he was trying to hide the fact that the United States was behind all of this or at least be able to issue what’s called plausible denial. In this day and age, Trump doesn’t give a damn about plausible denial. He wants the entire world to know that he has exercised the immense power of the United States over other countries. And from Kennedy to Trump, you had a number of presidents who undertook operations to undercut the Cuban government, imposed the trade embargo and various types of sanctions against Cuba.
You did have a number of episodes of secret diplomacy to try and normalize relations. It took place actually under Kennedy, under Carter, under Kissinger actually during the Ford administration to a small degree under Clinton and obviously under Obama who actually did normalize relations. It was Trump who abrogated the deal that Barack Obama had spent more than two years secretly negotiating with Raul Castro, which was essentially to normalize relations, normalize economic relations, restore diplomatic relations, open the embassies, reopen the embassies, legalize travel so that you and I can get on an American airlines flight and fly from Miami to Havana without having to jump through hoops and go to Toronto or fly to Cancun and then fly from there, etc.
So Trump abrogated that deal. He decided that to cater to his friends in the Cuban American community in Florida where he lives, he would, as he put it, get a better deal. And that’s what he sees himself as pursuing right now, that better deal, which essentially comes down to Cuban leadership capitulating to his demands that they resign, that they surrender and that they turn their entire economy over not just a foreign interest, but to U.S. economic interests.
I think Trump is really in some ways attempting to restore the era of empire at the turn of the 20th century where the United States went to war with Spain, kicked Spain out of the Western hemisphere, took over Puerto Rico as a protectorate and took over Cuba, which was attempting to emerge as an independent country from colonial rule only to find that they were going to be under the thumb of neocolonial rule from the United States of America. And there was actually a law in place called the Plat Amendment that the new Cuban state country was forced by U.S. officials to agree to, which basically authorized the United States to intervene in Cuba’s internal affairs whenever, own all of Cuba’s economic utilities, lease the base at Guantanamo Bay in perpetuity, etc, et cetera. And that kind of arrangement lasted for the first third of the 20th century and by the time it was over, the U.S. Mafia had moved in and Cuba was becoming a playground for the rich and famous and this kind of abuse of Cuba as a country dominated by U.S. oil interests, by U.S. sugar interests, by U.S. banana interests, by the Mafia, by a thug named (Fulgencio) Batista who answered to the Mafia, was in the pocket of the Mafia.
This is what led to the nationalism that spurred the Cuban revolution forward. I mean, literally in 1959, Fidel Castro-led a revolution that was the entire country rising up against the Batista regime and Trump is basically trying to roll back to that era of U.S. dominion and he makes zero secrets about it and he sees this as a trophy. He’s going to be able to do what his 13 predecessors were not able to do. They all tried to get rid of the Castros and he, Trump, is going to have that opportunity as he put it, “I think it’s going to fall to me to take Cuba. I’m going to get to take Cuba and you know what? I’m going to be able to do whatever I want with it. ” And he said this in the midst of dialogue that was supposed to be going on with the Cuban leadership to try and resolve this crisis.
And you can imagine if you were the Cuban leadership and the people you’re trying to have a respectful dialogue with are basically saying, “I’m going to take this country that doesn’t even belong to me and I’m going to do whatever the hell I want with it.” That just does not make for a situation for a successful, peaceful solution to this crisis.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, that’s why many people now refer to the U.S. and have for a longer period of time than just under Trump as a gangster state. We’re speaking with Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. I’m Scott Harris. This program is Counterpoint here on listener-sponsored WPKN in Bridgeport.
Peter, I did want to ask you about what we know of CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s trip to Havana regarding the demands that he may have placed on the Cuban government. I’ve heard several things including stopping Cuba from sharing intelligence with Russia and China, that they have listening stations in Cuba, free market reforms, elections freeing political prisoners, allowing Cuban exiles to own businesses on the island, which I think there were some initial reforms already in the works. But tell us what we know about the particulars, if we know anything about CIA Director Ratcliffe’s trip.
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, we don’t have a summary of that meeting that’s written or declassified. Obviously it just took place, but both the CIA and the Cubans both released statements and the CIA not only released a statement that then started leaking about what was said at the meeting and it does seem like it was a very forceful presentation by Ratcliffe who brought other CIA officers with him, including one officer who was apparently very involved in the seizure of Maduro in Venezuela, which is obviously a psychological message being sent to the Cuban leadership to have to sit across the table from somebody who was directly involved in what ended up being the death of 32 Cuban personnel in Caracus.
Ratcliffe basically said, “Look, I’m coming with a message from President Trump. Time is running out for some type of solution to this. You have to address our demands. Among our demands are you kick out the Russians and the Chinese. We do not want hostile interests here in Cuba conducting surveillance and intelligence gathering operations against the United States. Two, we don’t want upheaval on this island. We don’t want repression and we don’t want mass migration. You’re in a very dire economic situation. There’s going to be discontent. We’re warning you. Do not repress that discontent. And three, our glass is running down. President Trump has given you from January until now to basically understand that we want to see changes here and we’re waiting, but we’re not going to wait much longer. You have to take Trump seriously. Please remember what just happened in Venezuela.”
Those are the messages that reportedly were passed directly to Cuban officials at that meeting. It didn’t last that long. Raul Castro’s grandson, who has been acting as an intermediary with Marco Rubio for the last three or four months, was also at that meeting. It’s very interesting that it was a meeting of intelligence officials. It’s clear that the United States sees kind of various circles of power in Cuba. They see Raul Castro’s family as a circle of power. They’re dealing with his representative, his grandson. They see the intelligence agency in Cuba and the intelligence ministry meeting, as it’s called as a focal point of power.
And they see the Cuban military as a focal point of power. And just last Friday, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Donovan went to the Guantanamo base and he met with Cuban generals on what’s called the fence line, the perimeter of the base. And they had a meeting that the Cubans described as productive. I assume it was respectful because military officers tend to speak to each other in a kind of a regulated way, a reserved way.
They’re both on the frontline of fighting. They know their lives are at stake, but basically we assumed the message was a warning: “Do not attack Guantanamo Base if tensions become higher because the cost to you of our retaliation will be quite significant.”
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. These threats and these meetings all point in a very dark direction. Peter, I wondered if you’d talk about the blockade of oil deliveries to Cuba and the humanitarian crisis that this has caused. I believe it was more than a month and a half ago that on Russian oil tanker did make a delivery, but since that time the island has run out of oil and there’s constant blackouts. Hospitals cannot treat patients effectively. Food production is down. There’s all sorts of ripple effects from this. What has the oil blockade done to the people of Cuba?
PETER KORNBLUH: I mean, this is something that as a society we could recognize that the pain that would happen if suddenly the electricity went out and there was no gas. Let’s just say our electricity went out. The first thing I think people think is, “How am I going to charge my phone?” And that’s true. How are you going to charge your phone? And in Cuba, nobody has really any time or electricity to charge their phone. In Cuba, the water is pumped through everybody’s homes, apartments, houses by an electrical pump. The electrical grid in Cuba runs on oil. There has been no oil except one shipment of one Russian tanker in almost five months since Trump cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba following the Jan. 3rd attack on Caracas and the kind of U.S. takeover of the government there. In that time between Jan. 3rd and June 1st, only one oil tanker has made its way to Cuba.
Why? Because Trump threatened every other country with tariffs and other types of U.S. punishments and sanctions if they stepped in to replace the Venezuelan oil that he was cutting off. He has systematically, methodically, diabolically, I would argue, ratcheted up the economic pressure on Cuba, cutting off the oil, watching as the lights shut out one by one across the entire country, as planes that come from distant places like Russia and Canada, Europe can’t land in Cuba any longer because there’s no fuel to refuel and return home. That means no tourists coming to Cuba.
Nobody can drive anywhere. Doctors can’t get to the hospitals. Patients can’t get to the hospitals. Babies can’t be on incubators. There’s no electricity to run them. You just can imagine the suffering and it gets worse. Nobody can refrigerate their food. Nobody can get transportation to go get food or to have food driven, trucked from the countryside to the cities. Nobody can turn on a fan or an air conditioner in their apartment as a very hot summer descends on the Caribbean. So you can imagine how much suffering there is now.
And it goes beyond just cutoff of oil. Just in the last three weeks, the Trump administration led by Marco Rubio has issued new sanctions against countries that deal with Cuba. These are called secondary sanctions because they’re not direct on Cuba. They are on other entities, other businesses and other countries that actually are engaged with Cuba still. And one of the first things that happened is the two main shipping companies that bring commodities from China, from the Middle East, from Europe to Cuba, including food, basically said, “Well, we can’t do that anymore because we’ll be sanctioned by the United States and we won’t be able to conduct business in the United States.”
And obviously our business, our trade with the United States, our income from our business in the United States is far exceeds our income and business in Cuba. So they have ceased to fulfill the contracts that they had to bring goods into Cuba. So you can see where the scarcities come from. Cuba imports 70 percent of its food and if it doesn’t have any ships to bring that food, then people are literally going to starve. And that’s the humanitarian crisis that our government is foisting upon Cuba right now. And then this, Scott, is just the most credible thing.
Now that we’re pushing Cuba into kind of a failed state status, you have U.S. officials like Marco Rubio saying, “Well, a failed state in Cuba will be a security threat to the United States because there’ll be mass migration and there’ll be social upheaval and there’ll be impact on other Caribbean countries and that’s going to impact the security of the United States.” So here we are twisting the screws of economic warfare on Cuba, pushing it over the cliff to be a failed state and then claiming that if it is a failed state, that’s a security threat that the United States will not tolerate and will have to take action against. It’s just a circular hypocritical anti-humanitarian argument and policy that the U.S. government is punishing Cuba with right now.
SCOTT HARRIS: Very bleak picture you paint of the situation and what might happen next. Only have a minute or two left and I got to let you go. Peter, I wanted to get your speculation on what might be in the works for Cuba vis-a-vis the Trump regime and what they may be planning. I guess first of all, how do you think the Cuban military will respond if the U.S. does conduct some operations inside Cuba? And how about this is a longer conversation, but just the headlines here, what do you think the response of the Cuban population would be after this horrible oil embargo creating a hellish life day to day as well as that’s on top of a 66-year- economic embargo that’s been in place?
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, the Cuban population is suffering and they are trying to get through every hour and every day with just enough food on the table and some degree of escaping the heat. And so the Cuban population are consumed with daily survival. They’re not really focusing on the idea of nationalism and then defending their country. And so there will be many Cubans who want change one way or the other at this point because the situation is so onerous and insufferable for them. The Cuban military is going to have a very difficult time. The Cuban military is antiquated, does not have the resources. They don’t have access to oil either. The United States special operations teams, Delta Forces, etc., are extremely formidable as they showed in Caracas where not a single U..S soldier was injured in that attack, which was very quick. The United States can conduct surgical strikes and swift incursions in Cuba, in and out.
They don’t have to have boots on the ground to do considerable damage to the island, to the government, to the infrastructure, to the security divisions of the Cuban government, which will obviously be targeted first. But the real question is what happens then? Does that necessarily lead to regime change? Even going in and kidnapping Raul Castro who was about to turn 95 years old, that would not change anything in the Cuban leadership, to tell you the truth. He’s not president, he’s a figurehead leader, he’s a historical leader, but he is not really involved in the day-to-day governing of Cuba right now. And if we destroy Cuba, then basically it’s going to be up to the U.S. taxpayer to pick up all those pieces. We’re going to have to pay for it to be reconstructed.
The alternative is that President Trump can come to a negotiated solution with the Cuban leadership, claim victory, maybe get his name slapped on a hotel in Varadero Beach and then just tell the American public, “Look, I did what my predecessors couldn’t do. I pushed the Cubans and they opened up and now it’s the end of communism, etc. etc.” I mean, all that blarney and bluster would be fine if there’s a peaceful solution which makes far more sense for immediate short-term, medium-term and long-term U.S. interests in Cuba and the Caribbean.
SCOTT HARRIS: Peter, thank you so much for spending time with us, really getting into some important detail of this very bleak and threatening situation for the people of Cuba and certainly a real stain on our country and what’s going on there now and what’s going on for decades. Peter, leave our listeners, if you would, with the web address for the National Security Archive.
PETER KORNBLUH: The web address is nsarchive.org. Archive singular. We’ve done some postings. We did a posting on the whole issue of the Raul Castro indictment and we have a lot of documents on Cuba on our website. I am happy to talk to you, Scott, again after all these years and I can predict that the Cuba story’s not over and that we’ll be talking again.
SCOTT HARRIS: Indeed. Thanks for all you do, Peter, and making time for us tonight. Appreciate it.
PETER KORNBLUH: All right. Take care and best wishes to everybody.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thanks, Peter. Goodnight.
PETER KORNBLUH: Goodnight.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. This is Counterpoint here on listener-sponsored WPKN in Bridgeport. My name is Scott Harris. Do stay tuned. Lots more coming up.
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