The CIA Has Stood Up a Classified Cuba Task Force, and the White House Is Shopping for Someone to Run Havana

The CIA has created a classified task force dedicated to Cuba, according to officials briefed on the move who spoke to The New York Times and Politico, formalizing what had been an escalating but improvised pressure campaign against the government in Havana.

The unit draws case officers, analysts, cyber specialists and covert influence operators into a single structure. Its stated purpose, according to the officials, is to expose and exploit fractures inside Cuba's ruling elite and to encourage the emergence of figures more willing to accommodate Washington's demands. It is backed by a broader realignment of American intelligence priorities that has elevated Cuba into the top tier of collection targets, alongside China, Iran and Russia — a category the island had not occupied in decades.

One boundary is explicit. Unlike the agency's Cuba operations of the early 1960s, the officials said, the new task force is not authorized to train armed proxies or conduct lethal missions. Its work is non-kinetic: intelligence collection, cyber operations and influence activity intended to widen existing splits rather than to stage an insurrection. That distinction matters legally as well as historically, because covert action involving lethal force requires a presidential finding and notification to congressional intelligence committees.

Running in parallel, The New York Times reported that the administration is searching for a current or former Cuban official who could take charge of the government in the event of a political rupture on the island. Officials described the profile they are looking for as a pragmatist capable of assuming control and working with Washington — and privately compared it to the Venezuelan template, where Delcy Rodríguez has held power in Caracas since Nicolás Maduro was removed and brought to New York to face charges. Those same officials acknowledged that very few Cuban figures fit the description, and there is no indication Washington has settled on a candidate or that any Cuban official has agreed to play the part.

The task force lands on top of a year of escalating economic pressure. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced successive rounds of sanctions on Cuban entities and individuals, the decades-old embargo has been tightened, and the administration has threatened tariffs on countries that supply the island with oil. The squeeze has coincided with a punishing run of infrastructure failures inside Cuba, including a national grid collapse in early August that cut power to the entire island — the sixth such failure this year.

Cuban officials responded by describing the effort in the language they have used since 1961, calling it a campaign of espionage, subversion and destabilization. Havana has spent much of this year accusing Washington of manufacturing a pretext for confrontation, an argument the grid failures have made both more urgent and harder to separate from its own governance record. Neither the CIA nor the White House commented publicly on the existence of the task force, which was first reported on Aug. 6.