CIA Director John Ratcliffe met with Cuban officials including Raul Castro’s grandson during a high-level visit to the island Thursday, Cuban and U.S. officials said.
Ratcliffe met with Raulito Rodriguez Castro, Ministry of Interior Lazaro Alvarez Casas and the head of Cuban intelligence services and discussed intelligence cooperation, economic stability and security issues. A CIA official confirmed the meetings to the AP.
Ratcliffe was there “to personally deliver President Donald Trump’s message that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes. According to official reports, the meeting served as a platform for Cuba to present evidence asserting that the nation poses no threat to U.S. national security,” the CIA official said.
An official statement from Cuba’s government noted that Thursday’s meeting “took place … against a backdrop of complex bilateral relations.”
While the U.S. stressed the Cuba cannot continue to be a “safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere,” the Cuban delegation insisted that the island presents no threat to U.S. security.
Cuban officials also took issue with the nation’s continued inclusion on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Rodríguez Castro previously secretly met with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the sidelines of a Caribbean Community summit in St. Kitts in February. While he’s never occupied a government post, he served as his grandfather’s bodyguard and later as head of Cuba’s equivalent of the Secret Service.
Thursday’s meeting comes weeks after the Cuban government confirmed that it had recently met with U.S. officials on the island as tensions between the two sides remain high over the U.S. energy blockade of the Caribbean country.
The island’s national energy grid suffered a major failure early Thursday that severed power to the island’s eastern provinces, authorities said, as residents in the capital Havana faced ongoing blackouts.
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The state-run Electric Union said the collapse had stripped power from all eastern provinces from Guantánamo to Ciego de Ávila, and that crews were working to restore power, but it did not give an estimate for how long it would take.
The previous day, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel had described the energy situation as “tense” after supplies of oil delivered by a Russian vessel in late March ran out. Cuba produces barely 40% of the fuel it needs to power its economy.
“We have absolutely no fuel oil, absolutely no diesel,” Vicente de la O Levy, Cuba’s minister of energy and mines, said on Wednesday night.
Russia announced plans to send a second fuel ship to Cuba in early April. According to Russian news reports, the oil tanker left the Russian Baltic port of Vysotsk in January, but has been stuck in the same place in the Atlantic Ocean for the last several weeks.
Power outages in Havana, where authorities have been rationing power, stretched to 24 consecutive hours on Thursday.
The U.S. blockade of fuel to the island has heightened its economic woes, with reduced work hours and food spoilage as refrigerators stop working. In some cases, hospitals have canceled surgeries.
Earlier this week, the U.S. State Department reiterated that the U.S. will provide Cuba with $100 in humanitarian assistance and support for satellite internet “if the Cuban regime will permit it.”
Cuba’s power grid is crumbling, but the government also has blamed the outages on U.S. sanctions after Trump in January warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba. The Trump administration has demanded that Cuba release political prisoners and move toward political and economic liberalization in return for a lifting of sanctions.
Though Trump also has threatened to intervene in the country, and Díaz-Canel said recently that his country was prepared to fight if that should happen, a source told the AP earlier this month that military action is not imminent.
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