Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones and Cuban military officials have begun internally discussing scenarios for using them to strike the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, American military vessels, and potentially Key West, Florida — 90 miles north of Havana — according to classified U.S. intelligence reported Sunday by Axios.

The disclosure, citing what the outlet described as classified material and a senior U.S. official, marks the most pointed public signal yet that the Trump administration is treating the Cuban regime as a hard-security threat rather than the diplomatic and economic problem it has typically been for previous administrations. The intelligence, Axios noted, “could become a pretext for U.S. military action.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Cuba on Thursday and, according to U.S. officials, bluntly warned Cuban government counterparts against engaging in hostilities. A CIA official quoted in the report said Ratcliffe’s message was that Cuba “cannot be a platform for adversaries in the hemisphere.”

Additional U.S. sanctions are expected to be rolled out this week, and the Department of Justice is preparing to unseal an indictment against former Cuban President Raul Castro for ordering the 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue civilian aircraft over the Florida Straits.

“When we think about those types of technologies being that close, and a range of bad actors from terror groups to drug cartels to Iranians to the Russians, it’s concerning,” the senior U.S. official told Axios.

What has changed the calculus in Washington, according to U.S. officials, is not Cuba’s traditional military, which is widely considered a hollowed-out shell of the force it was in the 1980s. “No one’s worried about fighter jets from Cuba. It’s not even clear they have one that can fly,” the senior U.S. official told Axios. “But it’s worth noting how close they are — 90 miles.”

The new concern is drones — and the people advising the Cubans on how to use them.

U.S. intelligence assesses that Iranian military advisers are currently in Havana, and that Cuban intelligence officials have been actively trying to learn from Tehran’s experience absorbing, and partially countering, the joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign that began in late February. According to intercepts cited in the report, Cuban intelligence officers have been “trying to learn about how Iran has resisted us.”

Within the past month, Cuban officials have also sought additional drones and military equipment from Russia, the senior U.S. official said. Russia and China both operate high-tech signals-intelligence (SIGINT) facilities on the island, long-standing positions that Washington has tolerated uneasily but that are now being viewed in a much harsher light.

“We’ve long been concerned that a foreign adversary using that kind of location that close to our shores is highly problematic,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Miami Republican, during a congressional hearing last Tuesday. In the same exchange, Hegseth also confirmed that Raul Castro had personally ordered the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, foreshadowing the indictment now being prepared.

A second, less visible line of concern runs through Ukraine. U.S. officials estimate that as many as 5,000 Cuban soldiers have fought for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, with the Cuban government collecting roughly $25,000 from Moscow for each soldier deployed. Many of those troops, U.S. officials say, have absorbed firsthand the realities of modern drone warfare — both Ukrainian first-person-view drone tactics and the Iranian Shahed-style standoff weapons Russia has used extensively against Ukrainian cities. Returning Cuban personnel have, according to intelligence intercepts, been briefing Cuban military leadership on what they observed.

“They’re part of the Putin meat grinder. They’re learning about Iranian tactics. It’s something we have to plan for,” the senior official said.

For all of the administration’s rhetoric, U.S. officials cautioned that they do not currently assess Cuba as posing an imminent threat or actively preparing an attack on American interests. The intelligence, as described, reflects internal Cuban military deliberations about how the island might use its drone capability if hostilities erupted, not operational planning for a strike now.

Cuba does not have the ability to close the Straits of Florida in the way Iran has been able to interdict shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, officials said, and the regime is not seen as a conventional military threat on the scale it represented during the 1962 Missile Crisis. The Cuban air force is, by most assessments, barely functional.

What is different is geography combined with technology. A drone with even modest range, launched from Cuban soil, can comfortably reach Key West. From the eastern end of the island, Guantanamo Bay — still home to a U.S. naval base on territory leased from Cuba in perpetuity over Havana’s strenuous objection — is within easy reach of even short-range systems.

The intelligence disclosure comes at a moment when the Castro regime is, by U.S. officials’ own assessment, weaker than at any point since the 1959 revolution. Years of U.S. sanctions, decades of economic mismanagement, the collapse of subsidized oil deliveries from Venezuela, and a hollowing-out of the productive economy have left the island in chronic blackout and its population in flight. Cuba is classified by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism and is described inside the administration as the “head of the snake” of revolutionary Marxism in Latin America.

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