Havana, Cuba —
A few days ago, the manager of the building where CNN’s Havana bureau is located rapped on our door with an urgent message: She needed to know if we would be coming to work during the “imminent” US invasion.
Washington’s intense pressure campaign on Cuba had already been keenly felt in day-to-day life. Under the ongoing US oil blockade, power flickers off in our offices several times a day. The compounding economic crisis means there’s no fuel for the building generator or even toilet paper for the bathrooms. Every day, I walk past an enormous artificial Christmas tree in the lobby that no one has bothered to take down.
But now the building manager told me she had been tasked with “orders from above” — like all office buildings in the city, it is owned by the state — to come up with a plan for the building in case of imperialist attack. As in an American attack. (The Trump administration has not said that it is planning any military operations in Cuba.)
Cubans have lived with the threat of US military action for so long that it has become a dark joke. “Cuando vienen los americanos” — when the Americans come — is the expression Cubans employ with their trademark black humor to say how a long-running problem — of which there are countless — will one day be resolved.
