Marco Rubio Posts Job Offer for CIA Agents in Cuba. It’s Not What It Seems.

November 2, 2026

By Blake Burdge

At a recent Florida campaign rally, Donald Trump suggested that U.S. warships returning from Iran could stop near Cuba before dropping Secretary of State Marco Rubio off to “finish up the deal.”

Shortly after the event, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to X to publicly urge Cubans on the island to collaborate with the CIA.

“To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time,” Rubio wrote, encouraging Cubans to seek a “discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”

Less than four hours later, the CIA's official X account posted a Spanish-language video guide for Cubans to contact the agency.

The CIA’s history in Cuba is notorious—poisoned cigars, torched sugar cane fields, a botched invasion—but a public recruitment pitch for prospective coup plotters marks a new chapter in its six-decade-long campaign to overthrow the Cuban government.

“An open call for Cubans to join the CIA against their own nation is virtually unprecedented in the annals of CIA recruitment protocols,” said Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project.

Kornbluh has spent decades uncovering declassified records documenting CIA assassination plots, sabotage campaigns and psychological warfare against Cuba.

Kornbluh said the public appeal is unusual, but the strategy behind it is not. The CIA, he said, is returning to familiar tactics: “dividing Cuba's leadership, sowing distrust and recruiting spies.”

What may have changed is Cuba's ability to withstand U.S. pressure. In the 1960s, the island had stronger international support and more resources to defend itself. Today, the Trump administration is targeting what Kornbluh called a “gravely weakened and impoverished Cuba.”

But economic weakness doesn't necessarily make Cuba’s formidable counterintelligence apparatus easier to circumvent.

Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst who also served as the nation's top intelligence officer on Latin America, doubts Rubio’s public appeal will produce any valuable intelligence assets. 

Armstrong pointed to similar U.S. appeals for defections in Iraq and Panama before the U.S. staged military interventions in each country. But he questioned whether high-ranking Cuban officials would risk helping the Trump administration overthrow their own government given Cuban intelligence’s long history of outmaneuvering the CIA.

“Cuban intelligence has eaten our lunch a zillion times,” Armstrong said.

Meanwhile, the CIA faces the risk that anyone responding to its appeal could actually be working for Havana.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

For more than two decades, Cuban intelligence operated a network of double agents who posed as CIA informants, feeding the agency information their handlers wanted it to receive.

In June 1987, Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga defected to the United States. 

During CIA debriefings, he revealed that informants the agency believed it had recruited were actually double agents working for Havana, according to contemporaneous reporting in The Washington Post.

The following month, Cuban state television began airing The CIA War Against Cuba, a documentary series exposing U.S. intelligence operations on the island.

The episodes featured secretly filmed footage of U.S. diplomats allegedly visiting drop sites and interviews with Cuban agents who said they had spent years posing as CIA informants.

“We all infiltrated in such a way that the CIA never realized we were agents of Cuban Security,” one of them, Dulce María Santiesteban, told reporters.

The revelations cast doubt on years of intelligence the CIA had gathered from its supposed collaborators. One U.S. intelligence official acknowledged that the agency had been badly deceived: “We certainly underestimated the Cubans.”

Publicity Is the Point

Even if Rubio’s recruitment appeal fails to produce valuable intelligence, Armstrong said the publicity around the recruitment could serve as a psychological operation in its own right.

One objective could be to provoke Cuban authorities to arrest people who criticize the government, whether or not they have any connection to the CIA.

Such arrests could hand Washington a “propaganda point,” allowing it to accuse Havana of persecuting dissidents, which in turn could be used to justify intensified sanctions and other regime change efforts.

“When you have a failed policy, your policy becomes to provoke the other guy to make bigger mistakes than you make,” Armstrong said.

Rubio's announcement was not the first time the Trump administration had publicized its covert operations against Cuba.

In August, Politico reported that the Trump administration was expanding its intelligence presence on the island. The New York Times revealed the same week that the CIA was allegedly assembling a task force to create rifts within Cuba's leadership.

A senior Trump official told Axios that publicizing the CIA’s plans was about “letting the regime know we're watching.”

In September, CBS News reported on an Army Reserve request for military and medical personnel that anonymous administration officials linked to planning for a potential military action against Cuba.

Regardless of whether the reported operations ever materialize, the leaks and public recruitment appeal could themselves be designed to stoke dissension and encourage officials to break ranks.

“[They] are most likely part of a psychological operations campaign, which is also something that the CIA has used against Cuba in the past,” said William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert and professor of government at American University.

Another possible motive behind the CIA job posting: score political points in Washington and Miami.

Governments sometimes undertake such operations “to make it look like they're doing something” Armstrong said. In this case, he argued, the publicity “makes the administration look like they're serious, they're tough. It shows Cuban Americans that [they’re] really serious about this sort of thing.”

The Pressure Cooker

The CIA’s public recruitment appeal comes amid an unprecedented intensification of the U.S. government’s economic war on Cuba, marked by an oil blockade that has plunged the island into darkness.

“Today, the Trump administration has imposed the most severe economic sanctions against Cuba ever, but that alone has not been enough to overthrow the government, so it comes as no surprise that they are stepping up covert operations at the same time,” said LeoGrande.

Armstrong believes the Trump administration is counting on Cuba's worsening economic conditions, driven by U.S. sanctions, to turn the population against its government and ultimately pressure the military to stage a coup. 

“The policy is a pressure cooker policy to try to get the island to explode,” Armstrong said.

Rather than expecting Cubans to storm government buildings, Washington may be hoping they will turn to the military to demand political change. Soldiers endure many of the same hardships as civilians, said Armstrong, making them a potential source of pressure on the country's leadership.

U.S. attempts to spark an uprising in Cuba are not new.

A 1960 memo by State Department official Lester Mallory recommended denying Cuba money and supplies to provoke “hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Economic warfare was accompanied by CIA operations designed to destabilize the government and encourage rebellion.

“The first major covert operations program against Cuba combined economic sanctions, psychological operations, sabotage, and paramilitary operations culminating in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961,” said LeoGrande.

U.S. regime change planners expected the CIA-trained exile force to spark a popular uprising against Castro. The invasion was a disaster and there was no popular revolt to support it.

Even with the weakened state of the Cuban government today, Armstrong considers the idea of an uprising “fictional.”

LeoGrande is equally skeptical. Despite the Trump administration's increasingly severe sanctions and renewed covert operations, he said Washington is pursuing “a strategy that hasn't worked for 66 years and, despite the enormous hardship it is imposing on the Cuban population, it is not working now.”