Last week, an election rally in Fort Myers turned into a piece of geopolitical vaudeville.
The occupant of the Oval Office claimed that the "beautiful ships" returning from Iran would make a "brief stop" off the coast of Cuba—that the island would "raise its hands"—and that he would then send the Secretary of State to "seal the deal."
It sounds like the script for a low-budget 1950s film, but this is no fiction; it is part of the spectacle surrounding the 2026 election campaign in Florida.
The "envoy," for his part, took to X to call upon those seeking "positive change" to enter into a "discreet partnership with the CIA."
"Discreet"—the word itself is a monument to irony. For a Secretary of State to publicly call for collaboration with an intelligence agency—while asking the recruit to remain discreet—is truly unusual and, frankly, appalling.
This is not the first time the White House has disregarded the history of Cuba.
History, however, has a better memory than campaign speeches; the Cuban people know this Agency all too well.
In 1955, the CIA helped Fulgencio Batista strengthen and establish repressive institutions—such as the BRAC, an office tasked with torturing, "disappearing," and murdering political opponents.
It did not end well; the Revolution swept away both Batista and his repressive apparatus in 1959.
Since then, the effort to recruit traitors has been pursued with remarkable stubbornness—yet Cuban State Security has time and again managed to infiltrate CIA operations.
Most of the plans ended up dismantled before they began. The pattern is old: the agency tries to buy wills, and the Cuban counterintelligence successfully hits them back.
Now they ask the Cubans for "discretion." Perhaps you should ask the CIA itself, because the history of failures is not at all discreet, from the Bay of Pigs and Mongoose, to recruitments that end in public complaints.
At the rally in Florida there was talk of ships and raised hands. The only hands that have been rising for decades clearly say Homeland or Death!, and the enemies know very well what that means.
