The Places Where the Bombs Have Rarely Stopped Falling in Iran

 

While fighting has abated in much of Iran, near-constant U.S. airstrikes in Qeshm island and other southern spots have upended lives and livelihoods.

By Farnaz Fassihi and Shirin Hakim 

 The reporters interviewed two dozen local residents, business owners, tour operators and fishermen in the south of Iran, including in Qeshm island, for this story.

Aug. 10, 2026

The turquoise blue waters, white sandy beaches and dramatic cliffs on the island of Qeshm until recently drew millions of annual visitors and a devoted community of artists, investors and designers who helped turn the island into Iran’s hottest vacation spot.

It is so exquisite that it earned a UNESCO Global GeoPark designation because of its natural wonders, with names that seem out of a fairy tale: the Valley of Stars, the Hara Forest mangroves and the Hawksbill turtles of Shib Deraz.

But the war with the United States and Israel, now stretching into its sixth month, has upended life, leaving the once bustling destination desolate and its population struggling.

Farideh, 25, works in the tourism industry in Qeshm and said in a telephone interview from the island that everyone in the tourism sector had been affected and that the war never abated for the people of the south, unlike elsewhere in Iran, because of near-constant airstrikes. She said they lived in a perpetual state of alert.

“Many people owned boats and transported passengers, ran guesthouses, rented motorbikes to tourists or operated cafes. Almost all the cafes gradually closed, sometimes one or two a day. Some people simply packed up and left the island,” said Farideh, who, like everyone interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition that her last name not be used for fear of retribution.

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A couple posing for wedding photos and videos on a rooftop in May.Credit...Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

Qeshm was one of Iran’s rare economic success stories, fueled by robust domestic investment that led to development and job growth. In 2025, nearly four million visitors traveled to Qeshm, and investment in the island grew by 241 percent compared with the year before, according to government data.

The tourism sector employed about 40 percent of Qeshm’s 150,000 people, and the island’s free-trade zone, allowing for imports and exports at minimal cost and free of tax, made Qeshm a trade hub.

But that has all changed, particularly as the U.S. bombing campaign has become largely focused on the south of Iran, targeting Iranian forces, installations involved in attacking vessels in the nearby Strait of Hormuz, and critical infrastructure used by civilians.

City dwellers who once hopped to the island for weekend and winter getaways have stopped coming, people say. The traditional houses turned into stylish boutique hotels, typically booked weeks ahead, remain empty. Cafes and restaurants along the beach, known for impromptu dance parties to the beat of local drummers, are mostly closed.

The island’s other main economic activity — fishing — has come to a near halt as fishermen fear venturing into the open sea, according to interviews with nearly two dozen residents, business owners and frequent travelers to Qeshm island.

“My life has been completely disrupted,” said Ali, 48, a fisherman on Qeshm reached by phone. “I have spent my entire life fishing. It was my only source of income, but at the moment, I have no income whatsoever.”

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Drifting among idle fishing boats in May off Qeshm. Fishing has slowed drastically in recent months.Credit...Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

He said fellow fishermen from nearby islands and on the coast of the mainland faced a similar predicament. “We have fear, fear, fear,” he said. “Fear of terrible events and fear of war.”

Tayeb Mofidi, a member of Qeshm’s tourism board, told local media recently that the island’s economic distress had rippled widely, from hotel owners facing bankruptcy to the local fishing industry and handicraft market. He said some people had started selling personal belongings to survive.

“The situation is simply devastating,” said Hossein, a 29-year-old teacher from Qeshm. “The regional economy has practically come to a standstill.”

Endless War

For the south of Iran, the violence that first erupted with American and Israeli airstrikes on Feb. 28 never ended, except for two intervals, even as a fragile cease-fire held in other parts of the country. The U.S. military said it had targeted military and surveillance facilities, as well as infrastructure like coastal radar towers, ports and bridges.

But bombs have also landed on tunnels, ports, railways, harbors lined with fishing boats, factories and water desalination plants, according to videos, Iranian state media and officials. The U.S. military said just last month after the cease-fire collapsed that more than 1,000 new targets were hit in the south, with the strategy being to cut off the area from resupplying.

From April 8 — when Tehran and Washington announced a cease-fire and began negotiating over an interim peace deal — until July 30, the United States attacked the south of Iran almost nightly except for from April 8 to May 7 and then again from May 7 to 25, according to a review of statements from U.S. Central Command.

The fighting has followed a predictable pattern: Iran attacks ships trying to bypass its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. bombs targets in the south of Iran, and then Iran retaliates with drones and ballistic missiles against U.S. military bases in the region.

The south of Iran is the heart of the country’s oil and gas industry and home to major ports, refineries, energy and military installations, making it a vital region for the country’s economy and security. But it is also home to millions of civilians who are increasingly bearing the economic and human toll of the war.

The effects have been felt in many southern cities. In Jask, at least 100 fishing boats in the harbor were destroyed, local officials said, affecting the livelihood of more than 3,500 people. In Kenarak, 17 fishermen have been missing since May when their boat disappeared in the Sea of Oman after warning shots from an American helicopter, the state news agency IRNA reported.

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A building and small boats destroyed by airstrikes near a fishing pier on the island’s coast.Credit...Asghar Besharati/Associated Press

In a wildlife preserve north of Bandar Abbas, airstrikes targeting a guard station killed three family members of a park ranger, according to the minister of environment and a video published on BBC Persian showing the destroyed facility.

“Since the attacks began, there has been a constant feeling of uncertainty,” said Reza, 28, a resident in Bandar Abbas, the largest city in southern Iran. “Even when Bandar Abbas itself is not being attacked, people are still worried because no one knows what might happen next.”

Fatemeh, 35, a mother of two small children in the city of Lar, close to Iran’s southern coast, said the repeated airstrikes and gnawing sense of uncertainty were taking a toll on her mental health. She said she has had panic attacks, shortness of breath and a feeling of hopelessness.

“Every time I hear the word ‘war,’ I immediately panic, and it continues for several days,” said Fatemeh. She added, “We have no way out. In front of us is an enemy attacking, and behind us a government that is brutal and making life difficult for people.”

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Walking next to the Strait of Hormuz in Bandar Abbas in May.Credit...Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

For the residents of Qeshm, July 30 marked the moment when the abstract fear evoked by explosions in the distance became a tangible threat of being killed in your sleep.

In the early hours of that day, an enormous explosion rocked the island, rattling walls and windows like an earthquake. When neighbors and rescue workers arrived at the scene of the blast, they found a modest family house of mud bricks reduced to a pile of debris and a family of five trapped under the rubble. The bomb had created a giant crater.

A New York Times visual investigation found that the U.S. had dropped a 2,000-pound bomb, one of the most powerful weapons used in this war, on the house, located in a densely populated residential area in the village of Chah-Tangou. There were no military facilities in its vicinity.

The airstrike killed the father and mother and their 2-year-old son. It injured their two other sons, 8 and 14, according to official reports. The father, Gheysar Jaffari, had worked as a taxi driver. He had been struggling to find work and make ends meet during the war, according to comments by his relatives to Iran’s top newspaper Shargh.

“Under the blazing 125-degree heat, he drove around all day looking for a passenger,” Mr. Jaffari’s cousin told Shargh.

The Highest Price

Amir, 45, a businessman from Tehran, moved to Qeshm about 10 years ago with his family, drawn to the island by its slower pace of life, natural beauty and economic opportunities. He bought a property, renovated it and then began a business of converting homes into trendy hotels. He said there were challenges: a poor road network, inadequate medical care and spotty internet.

But the past year, Amir said, has been the hardest. First, the government shut down the internet to quell protests during a nationwide uprising crushed by brutal force in January, disrupting advertising and booking, which is mainly done through social media. Then came the war in February at the peak of the tourism season, and the financial losses piled up.

Daily power and water cuts, amid extreme heat, and travel difficulties because of damage to infrastructure have added to the misery, Amir said.

“I would like the world to know that ordinary people have never wanted this war and are not on either side of it,” he said. “Yet they are the ones paying the highest price.”

Abbas, 38, a surfer, tour guide and boat operator, said the island, its waters and its beaches were his home, and like many native residents, he could never leave it behind no matter how bad it gets. But he said it pained him to watch the years of work building a thriving economy slip away.

“People are deeply frightened, and feeling everyone else’s fear affects me too,” Abbas said. “It weighs on me.”

“I swear we are exhausted,” he said. “The best thing the government can do is make peace with the world.”

NEW YORK TIMES 

‘We’re Trapped in Hell’: Iranians Say Life Is Put On Hold by Months of War

 

 

 

 By Leily Nikounazar and Erika Solomon

A horribly familiar rhythm of war has returned for Iranians — with bombarded highways and a plunging currency, menacing social media posts by President Trump and fiery rhetoric by Iran’s clerical rulers.

Yet when Behnam, an unemployed musician in Tehran, calls his family or friends to check in, he never starts by talking about the war. “The first question we ask one another is: Have you eaten?”

Like all Iranians interviewed for this article, Behnam, 38, asked that his last name not be used for fear of reprisal from Iran’s government. “It has honestly reached a point where we’re only thinking about survival,” he said.

Gone are the pep talks from relatives about finding a job, he said, as unemployment continues to soar. Many Iranians have shelved plans to repair buildings or rebuild lives battered by the war. Planning for the future seems an absurd luxury when impoverished friends can afford to buy rice only by the cup and when the United States and Iran are trading strikes on military sites, ports and water desalination plants around the region.

For more than a year, Iranians have been trapped in a constant cycle of airstrikes, domestic security crackdowns and economic devastation. A short-lived cease-fire reached last month with the United States brought some respite from falling bombs, though not from the plummeting economy.

The unraveling of the agreement in recent weeks tipped the country back into war. Many Iranians have been left feeling that their lives are on hold or are no longer their own.

“I have no control over my life anymore,” Behnam said. “Our fate is in the hands of those who don’t think about ordinary people.”

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Taxi drivers at a depot in Tehran last week.Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

This cycle of crisis has plagued Iranians since the 12-day U.S.-Israeli war that battered the country in June last year. In its wake, the government placed the country under a monthslong internet blackout, citing national security concerns. That sent the already foundering economy into a nosedive.

Then, a currency crisis in December set off antigovernment protests that grew into a nationwide movement. Those were crushed in January in a crackdown fiercer than any Iran had experienced in decades, leaving thousands dead and the country bitterly divided.

Weeks later, Mr. Trump and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced their war against Iran, describing it as a once-in-a-generation chance to topple the country’s authoritarian rulers. American and Israeli warplanes pummeled Iran, destroying infrastructure and killing the supreme leader and thousands of civilians. But the country’s theocratic rule remained intact, emboldened by its survival.

Asal, a 20-year-old shopkeeper in a town near Tehran, was among the thousands who took part in the protests in January. Breaking into tears as she described the arrest and torture she said she and her friends experienced, Asal said she had once hoped the U.S.-Israeli intervention would help bring down the regime.

“Trump told us he wanted to save us, but that wasn’t true,” she said. “Whatever happens in the future doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

Adding to the malaise, some Iranians said, was witnessing how many times their loved ones tried to overcome economic adversity only to see their small victories crushed by the next crisis.

Farzad, a web designer in Tehran, said that, in the downturn after the 12-day war, a family friend had begun selling homemade pickles and jam over Instagram to supplement her pension, which was no longer enough. Her once-thriving business collapsed during the internet blackout, which the government imposed throughout the January crackdown and the first months of the war.

Some Iranians said in interviews that prices had become so high that they were foregoing medical care, or buying vitamins to replace fruit and vegetables in their diet because they were cheaper.

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A fruit stall in Tehran. Some Iranians said that they had given up fruit and vegetables in favor of vitamins to save money.Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

“Put aside the statistics,” Farzad said. When it comes to measuring the economic crisis, he said, “we know it with our own bodies, with our lived experience.”

Even when the bombings subsided this spring, Iranians faced fresh indignities. Their government continued to pursue its crackdown on the opposition, including a surge of executions of January protesters and confiscations of dissidents’ property. Last month, cyberattacks shut down three of Iran’s main banks, according to the authorities. Millions of Iranians suddenly lost access to the little money they had.

By the time the banking chaos had been resolved, the country was back at war.

Supporters of Iran’s government argue that the country has no choice but to keep fighting.

“Everything comes at a cost,” said Hossein, who runs an online business from the port city of Bandar Abbas, which has experienced heavy U.S. bombardment in the past week. “Standing up to the United States and preserving our independence is far more valuable than becoming another country in the region that simply says yes to whatever the U.S. wants.”

Much of the renewed fighting has been in the south of Iran. Farideh, 51, has been appalled by the U.S. bombardments that have smashed railroads and brought down bridges in her region, leaving some residents stranded for days.

In the southern province of Hormozgan, airstrikes knocked out power networks and a water desalination facility, according to Hamid Saed Panah, head of the local electricity distribution company, and Ahmad Nafisi, deputy governor of the province. The United States has not commented on those claims.

Some residents of the south said they had been left without running water and suffering hourslong electricity cuts while having to endure temperatures that frequently top 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It has been an extremely bitter, stressful experience, filled with hopelessness about the future,” Farideh said. She struggled to imagine what would become of her children’s education and what career prospects they would be left with. “Unfortunately, we, the people, are paying the price for the mistakes and stubbornness of governments.”

Loyalists to the Islamic republic camp out nightly on the streets of most cities, demanding that the government pursue war instead of peace and fraying the nerves of those Iranians desperate for the crisis to end.

“Things have become so bad that everyone has completely lost it,” said Mohsen, a business owner in the central city of Isfahan. “We’re trapped in hell, and there’s no saving us.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

Final de 'Cem Anos de Solidão' acerta ao reforçar vínculo político com América Latina

 

 

Sylvia Colombo 

 

Poucos romances parecem tão inseparáveis da imaginação de seus leitores quanto "Cem Anos de Solidão". Na segunda metade da série adaptada do livro, que estreia agora na Netflix, os acontecimentos importam menos do que a sensação de que o tempo passou a girar sobre si mesmo e a repetir-se.

Os muitos José Arcadios e Aurelianos não confundem apenas quem lê. Eles existem para lembrar que cada geração acredita inaugurar uma história nova quando, na verdade, revive paixões, erros e desejos herdados das anteriores.

É essa segunda metade do romance, mais filosófica, mais política e também a mais difícil de adaptar, que chegou agora ao streaming, encerrando a produção baseada na obra máxima do Nobel colombiano Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). Após a primeira leva de oito episódios em 2024, mais sete foram liberados. O oitavo e último dessa segunda parte estará disponível em 26 de agosto.

O ator colombiano Claudio Cataño, que interpreta o coronel Aureliano Buendía na adaptação de "Cem Anos de Solidão", produzida pela Netflix - Mauro González/Netflix

Depois da fundação de Macondo, a cidade em que se passa a história, e da ascensão dos Buendía, acompanhamos a lenta decomposição da família, um dos finais mais extraordinários da literatura do século 20.

A responsabilidade de adaptar essa etapa da história também foi sentida pelo elenco. "Nunca me imaginei trabalhando numa série como essa. Me cobrei muito porque essa passagem de geração dos Buendía é muito significativa", diz Moreno Borja, intérprete do mago Melquíades, personagem que acompanha a trajetória da família do início ao fim e funciona como uma espécie de guardião da memória de Macondo.

García Márquez resistiu por muito tempo à ideia de vender os direitos do romance ou de autorizar adaptações para outros formatos. Não por capricho, mas sim pela certeza de que certos livros existem justamente porque cada leitor os imagina de modo diferente. Macondo nunca foi apenas uma cidade. Foi sempre a cidade que cada um construiu dentro da própria cabeça.

A decisão de adaptar o livro para uma série de TV foi tomada pelos filhos do escritor, Gonzalo e Rodrigo, como uma forma de também celebrar o centenário de nascimento de Gabo, que se completa no ano que vem.

O crítico americano A. O. Scott, do New York Times, chegou a defender que "Cem Anos de Solidão" talvez nunca devesse ser transposto para cinema ou TV. Em vez de enfrentar Macondo, dizia ele, seria mais razoável adaptar o livro "Notícia de um Sequestro" (1996), grande reportagem de García Márquez cuja estrutura jornalística encontraria uma tradução muito mais natural na linguagem audiovisual.

Adaptações anteriores de livros de Gabo não provocaram entusiasmo. Nem "Crônica de uma Morte Anunciada" nem "O Amor nos Tempos do Cólera" conseguiram preservar nas telas aquilo que fazia dos romances experiências literárias únicas. Pareciam confirmar que García Márquez pertencia à família de escritores cuja obra simplesmente resiste à imagem.

Talvez por isso a surpresa agora seja maior. Há muito mérito na adaptação, pois ela se arrisca a bancar enfoques e a dar mais detalhes e cor política aos personagens.

Ou seja, a série acerta mais do que erra justamente porque parece compreender seus próprios limites. Em nenhum momento tentou competir com García Márquez. Procurou construir uma interpretação visual de um romance que continuará pertencendo, antes de tudo, à literatura.

A mudança de tom nas duas partes da série acompanha de perto a arquitetura do romance.

Se a primeira metade de "Cem Anos de Solidão" era quase um gênesis latino-americano, acompanhando a invenção de Macondo, a chegada dos ciganos, do gelo, das guerras civis e das primeiras descobertas, a segunda passa a narrar outra história: a do desgaste do tempo.

Macondo deixa de ser um lugar onde tudo nasce. Passa a ser um lugar onde tudo retorna. O futuro deixa de apontar para a descoberta e passa a repetir, com pequenas variações, aquilo que parecia já ter acontecido.

É nesse momento que entram em cena os gêmeos José Arcadio Segundo e Aureliano Segundo. Laura Mora, que dirige cinco dos sete episódios finais e falou por videoconferência com a Folha, define esta nova etapa como "a mais política" da narrativa. Também a resume numa expressão particularmente feliz: "é o fim da utopia".

A frase ajuda a compreender o movimento do livro.

Os vários José Arcadios e Aurelianos não constituem apenas um recurso narrativo. São a expressão mais visível de um romance em que a história parece condenada a repetir os próprios ciclos. Os Buendía tentam escapar do destino. Quase nunca conseguem. Essa repetição não é apenas familiar, mas também histórica.

Na segunda metade do romance, a história dos Buendía deixa de bastar a si mesma. Macondo passa a condensar boa parte da experiência latino-americana do século 20.

A chegada da ferrovia, celebrada inicialmente como sinal de progresso, abre caminho para uma empresa multinacional que comercializava frutas tropicais, sobretudo bananas. E com ela vem também um novo tipo de poder: o do capital estrangeiro, da exploração econômica e da violência institucional.

Nesse trecho García Márquez recria literariamente um episódio traumático da história colombiana —o massacre dos trabalhadores da United Fruit Company, em 1928— e faz dele um dos momentos mais devastadores da literatura latino-americana.

O massacre marca o momento em que o romance deixa de ser apenas a saga de uma família extraordinária para dialogar diretamente com a história da América Latina. Macondo passa a representar um continente atravessado por interesses estrangeiros, modernizações impostas de cima para baixo e sucessivos ciclos de autoritarismo, desigualdade e apagamento da memória.

A diretora Laura Mora demonstra compreender essa dimensão histórica. Para reconstruir a chegada da empresa bananeira, a produção optou por filmar exatamente na região colombiana em que a United Fruit se instalou, reconstruindo inclusive o bairro destinado aos funcionários americanos.

Não se trata apenas de um detalhe de produção. É uma maneira de lembrar que o romance está profundamente enraizado na história da Colômbia.

Também chama a atenção no projeto o novo lugar ocupado por Úrsula Iguarán. Marleyda Soto, uma das atrizes que interpretam a personagem em diferentes fases da vida, diz que o maior desafio foi construir, em conjunto com as demais intérpretes, uma mulher de traços tão marcantes.

Laura Mora afirma que quis "reconectá-la" ao destino de Macondo. Aos 104 anos, Úrsula deixa de ser apenas a matriarca da família. Torna-se quase a memória viva da cidade, a personagem que assiste, impotente, ao desmoronamento do mundo que ajudou a construir.

Trata-se de uma escolha que altera discretamente a hierarquia do romance. Em García Márquez, Úrsula permanece o verdadeiro eixo da narrativa: matriarca, consciência moral da família e a única personagem capaz de atravessar quase toda a história de Macondo sem perder a lucidez diante da repetição dos destinos.

À medida que Macondo envelhece, o verdadeiro protagonista da narrativa deixa de ser qualquer personagem. Passa a ser o próprio tempo. E poucos romances fizeram do tempo um personagem com tanta força quanto "Cem Anos de Solidão".

Talvez seja esse o maior desafio da adaptação: deixar de lado o realismo mágico —convertido, ao longo das décadas, quase numa caricatura pelas inúmeras imitações que inspirou— e transmitir essa estranha sensação de que tudo já aconteceu antes e, ainda assim, continua acontecendo diante de nossos olhos.

Nesse sentido, a série demonstra compreender algo essencial: Macondo nunca foi apenas um lugar fantástico. É também uma interpretação da Colômbia e da América Latina, além de uma reflexão sobre a incapacidade humana de escapar ao tempo histórico que lhe coube viver.

A boa notícia é que a série não compete com o livro. Cada qual segue as regras de seu gênero. Se conseguir levar uma nova geração de leitores ao romance, terá realizado algo que poucas adaptações conseguem, devolver-nos ao texto que lhes deu origem.

• FOLHA

 

 

Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse

 

 

Ezra Klein

 I’ll admit I’m a little late weighing in on “The Odyssey.” Chalk it up to having young kids. I don’t make it to the movies much. But what a trick its director, Christopher Nolan, has pulled off. Elon Musk did not understand what this movie was. But this movie understands what Musk is. It understands who we are becoming and who we have become, and it points a way out.

Tricks are central to “The Odyssey.” In myth, Odysseus is a trickster. He is described, in the first line of the story, as the man of many ways or of many wiles or of many turns. He is, depending on the translator, an ingenious man, a cunning man, a complicated man. He is a man of appetites and contradictions, a man who wants nothing more than to go home but keeps choosing to stay abroad, a man who yearns for his wife but cannot stop bedding goddesses. Odysseus is never one thing; he is always many things.

Matt Damon is no trickster. I thought he was going to be the problem with Nolan’s “Odyssey.” Amid the right-wing outcry over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, it was Damon’s casting as Odysseus that I couldn’t reconcile with “The Odyssey.” Damon often seems to me like a man of a single way, a man who wakes up early and keeps to a clean diet and rarely has more than one glass of wine before bed. That’s not Odysseus.

But Nolan wasn’t looking for a trickster. His Odysseus is something else. That, you can say, was Nolan’s first trick.

I want to stop here and say a bit about tricksters, because I have spent the past few years quietly obsessed with the archetype. The trickster is Loki in Norse mythology, Eshu in Yoruban stories, Coyote or Raven in Native American tales, Maui in Polynesia and Hermes and Odysseus among the ancient Greeks.

The function of the trickster, writes Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book “Trickster Makes This World,” is “to uncover and disrupt the very things that a culture depends on.” The trickster dances across customs and taboos, says what may not be said, does what should not be done. The trickster injects disorder into order, renders visible what is ordinarily hidden. The trickster causes the damage that makes growth possible. But a happy ending is never guaranteed. The trickster can be regenerative or ruinous. Coyote brings fire; Raven brings the sun; Loki brings Ragnarok.

Hyde’s argument is that tricksters are both necessary and dangerous. They represent a tension every society must grapple with. A culture that cannot meet disruption with creativity cannot survive change. A culture that cannot protect its core values will be consumed by corruption. Too much order leads to paralysis; too much chaos invites collapse.

We are living in an age of chaos. We have been living in an age of tricksters. Musk, President Trump, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes — the grammar of the modern right is tricksy. What is serious, and what is not? What is a provocation, and what is a promise? Why did they say that, and how did they get away with it? I am not saying these men are only tricksters. They are not the culture makers Hyde prefers to focus on. But I am saying that the dominant personalities of the age have gathered power by bulldozing customs and taboos, by saying what may not be said, by doing what should not be done.

Hyde said that Americans love a trickster “because he embodies things that are actually true about America but cannot be openly declared.” That might have been true in 1998, when Hyde published his book. And I can see the argument that American institutions and mores ossified in the years since — that our society had become too rulebound and bureaucratized, that too much had become unsayable, that there was too little openness to transgression and invention.

But today there is little that may no longer be said. The ideas and morals upon which the best of our culture was built have been disrupted and desecrated. The question now is whether that disruption can be met with creativity and renewal.

This is the central question of Nolan’s “Odyssey.” This “Odyssey” ostensibly hinges on Zeus’ law: Treat the beggar and the stranger as you would want to be treated. But as a horde of classicists have pointed out, that is not the law of Zeus, which is narrower: It demands hospitality toward the guest or the stranger, recognizing that anyone could be a god in disguise. It is not an ethic of compassion or even reciprocity.

And here we find Nolan’s central trick: Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into “The Odyssey.” Zeus’ law, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” echoes Leviticus 19:34: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” It echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says, “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.”

Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us live up to it. But the problem with adherents of the modern right is not just that they don’t live up to it; the issue is that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among us as well as we treat our native-born is derided as suicidal empathy. The Trump administration glorifies cruelty toward the immigrant, the stranger, the weak and the poor. It takes money from Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich. It threatens the destruction of whole civilizations.

The modern right is built on the logic of tribute and dominance. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

But weren’t those iron laws replaced by the Golden Rule? When Odysseus concocts the trick of the Trojan horse, taking advantage of Troy’s veneration of the same gods he worships to sack the city and make its streets run red with blood, is he a hero or a villain? Is it a trick or a crime? To Homer, he was a hero. To Nolan, he is a soul in need of redemption. Between Homer’s time and ours came a revolution in civilizational values, an upending of what civilization even means. Which side of that divide are we on?

The modern right believes that Western civilization has lost the appetite for strength and dominance and hierarchy that built it. There is a reason a theorist like Bronze Age Pervert has become required reading for young Trumpists. There is a reason right-wing intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton have mused about the need for an American Caesar. There is a reason the Trump administration is obsessed with Roman-style architecture. It is not an accident that they keep circling this era, both intellectually and aesthetically.

A recent exchange Musk had on X reveals how far this thinking has gone. A user told Musk it was time to “wise up” and abandon classical liberalism, because “universal suffrage leads to universal suffering.” His reply: “I have wised up.”

Helen of Troy, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” is just an excuse for a war launched to dominate routes of trade. It’s a telling choice during an administration that is crashing into the global order in pursuit of more dominance over trade flows.

In the cry of protest by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, against this regime, he also reached back to Greece to describe what he saw happening: “The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.”

When Nolan’s Odysseus recalls the sacking of Troy, he blanches at the memory of 10 years of rage pouring into a city in a single night. It was hard for me not to think, then, of the pent-up rage that Hamas poured into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and that Israel has poured into Gaza a hundredfold in the years since. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, now describes Israel’s future as “Athens and super-Sparta.”

Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli-born historian who wrote “Sapiens,” sees the diminishment this foretells clearly. “A lot of the thinking, and also the practice, about what it means to have freedom of thought, what it means to be a powerless minority, was done by Jewish thinkers,” he told me. He added:

For 2,000 years, Jews all over the world saw studying and learning as the highest spiritual activity. After 2,000 years, you ask them: What have you learned? You have studied for 2,000 years. What have you learned?

And then people like Netanyahu tell you: Oh, we have learned that you need to be a Roman, that you need to be strong, that you need to build legions, that you need to destroy cities. This is the only thing that matters in life.

It’s a legitimate value system. Rome had its usefulness. But if after 2,000 years, the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point? Why did you waste 2,000 years, then? You could have just become Roman back then.

This is Nolan’s finest trick: to make one of our oldest moral rules sound new again. To turn the best of Judeo-Christianity into the law of Zeus, so we can see why it might matter and what it might still have to say to us.

What Odysseus sees, eventually, is that his violations of the moral order have brought ruin to all around him. Agamemnon, the king who launched the war against Troy, is dead, his throat slit by his wife, who never forgave him for sacrificing their daughter for fair winds. Troy is destroyed. Ithaca, Odysseus’ home, is overrun by suitors who seek his wife and land and think nothing of murdering his son in their pursuit. Odysseus and his men were not fighting the barbarians; they were the barbarians. And their actions led to more barbarity.

So, too, has the political movement that rose promising to make Western civilization great again betrayed its inheritance. The world now looks at America and sees us as the barbarians: the country obliterating the global order, the country that takes what it wants and demands tribute from those who cannot resist.

And what the political opposition has to do now is recognize what Nolan recognized: That it is an affirmation of our civilizational values to say that cruelty is a weakness. That only compassion and reciprocity build a durable and decent society. That order is necessary but order without ethics and restraint is perversion or authoritarianism. That there is both beauty and wisdom in the injunction to avoid inflicting on others what we would not see turned against us and in remembering that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, too.

At the end of his book, Hyde considers when the trickster’s tale ends in ruin and when it ends in regeneration. His answer is that devastation comes when you cannot rejoin the worlds. Loki is bound beneath the earth, with poison dripped on him for eternity, and the end of the world is the result. Hermes becomes a connector between our world and the underworld, allowing Persephone, and spring, to return each year. In other words, it is only when severed worlds can be bonded that cultures can rediscover their strength.

I do not want to make this too didactic, so I will just end here: Justice in America has come, repeatedly, when those seeking progress realize that the language of the Torah, of the New Testament and of the Declaration of Independence can be wielded on behalf of a new world. It has been some time since religion, liberalism and patriotism had a comfortable relationship in this country.

But the shape of the modern right has created space to do that work again. Regeneration is hard. It requires seeing old values in new ways. It requires recognizing that a moral inheritance that has collapsed into cliché holds power in an age when it has been debased and forgotten. But it can be done. It needs to be done.

Nolan’s Odysseus is not a trickster. He is a man living in the ruins brought about by tricksters. So, too, are we. This movie, and the reaction to it, is a sign that the age of the trickster is ending.

Now we need those who would remake this world.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

A Trojan Horse Is Supposed to Have Humans Inside It

 

by Emily Wilson 

 If you go to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, you may be able to purchase, for a mere $69.99, a plastic receptacle shaped as a Trojan horse. The horse is used in the film as an image of moral decline. But the repurposing of a sinister instrument of war into a popcorn container hints at the malleability of the conceit: A Trojan horse contains unexpected multitudes.

This mythical item has always been a tricky symbol, used by generations of storytellers and artists to map shifting perceptions of deception in war. The physical design of Nolan’s version is striking and wildly out of keeping with earlier representations, including ancient depictions and the pull-toy design of the giant equine in Wolf Petersen’s fun 2004 blockbuster, Troy. Nolan’s horse rears upright rather than standing on four hooves. The unwieldy creature is discovered half-buried in the sand, and proves almost impossible for the Trojans to lug into the city. This cinematic prop is an extraordinary feat of engineering: It stands nearly 40 feet tall and took hundreds of people to drag up the beach. The physical horror of people being trapped inside as the seawater rises is brilliantly and terrifyingly evoked.

But on a narrative level, Nolan’s horse is light as air. In comparison with other blockbusters—such as, say, the Die Hard films, also action-packed tales of one man’s dangerous journey back to his wife—The Odyssey contains far more pontificating about values and civilizational decline, but much less coherence and less heart. It gestures at a critique of xenophobia and violence, but it focuses primarily on the perspective of the guilty, traumatized warrior rather than that of his victims. Moreover, the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.

In ancient myth, Troy was a wealthy, powerful city whose walls were built by two gods, Apollo and Poseidon. Such walls could never be breached by mere mortals. So when Greek warriors gathered to besiege the city and retrieve the wife and wealth stolen from the Spartan king Menelaus by the Trojan prince Paris, they found themselves at an impasse: The great army, unable to break through Troy’s divinely constructed defenses, remained immobilized on the beach for 10 years.

Things changed only when Athena, the daughter of Zeus and goddess of military strategy, put an idea into the mind of her favorite mortal, Odysseus: to instruct the master craftsman Epeius to build a massive, hollow horse, inside which Odysseus and the other Greeks could hide. Odysseus was, as Nolan obviously recognizes, a mythical Robert Oppenheimer: a hero able to devise the ultimate weapon that could end a seemingly unwinnable war.

We do not know who first told the story of the Trojan horse, but it was in circulation by at least the early seventh century B.C.E. The earliest extant artistic depiction is on a large storage jar (in Greek called a pithos) from the island of Mykonos. It features a long-legged horse that has square cutout windows for the warriors to be seen through; outside the horse, more fighters are enslaving terrified women and children. The image is, like the popcorn-bucket horse, a joke: It would ruin the trick if the horse had windows.

The Homeric Odyssey, along with The Iliad and the poems of Hesiod, were likely composed around roughly the same time as the making of the Trojan-horse pithos, using the new technology that had become available in the Greek-speaking world in the mid-eighth century B.C.E.: the alphabet. This development enabled one or more composers—“Homer”—to create and preserve monumental written poems based on the oral tales about the great, lost days of heroes—characters who did extraordinary things and were closer to the gods than any normal mortal. The myths included partial, fictionalized folk memories of the earlier period of Greek prosperity, when the Mycenaeans built palatial structures and formed extensive trade routes across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Homer’s Odyssey draws on many generations of preexisting myth but reshapes the old stories for its own era—a time of migration, colonization, urbanization, political and social diversity, and technological change.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus repeatedly finds new ways to reenact his most famous trick of hiding inside the horse (an assumed backstory not described in the main narrative). He hides in the care of Calypso (whose name suggests “hiding”), beneath the name of No Man, under the sheep of Polyphemus, and in the guise of an old beggar. Eventually, he replicates his triumph at Troy in his own house by technological mastery of another trick involving a wooden weapon (this time, his bow). Odysseus’s mastery of technology enables him to invade a heavily defended home in disguise, achieve an impossible victory, and break an impasse, answering the long-deferred question of which man will claim the household and Penelope as his bride.

In one of only two extensive passages in Homer that evoke the horse explicitly (a long episode that Nolan excises), Odysseus, while enjoying the lavish hospitality of the Phaeacians on Scheria, asks a blind poet to sing the story of the Trojan horse. The poet complies, and Odysseus weeps at the story of his greatest triumph. The narrator offers a surprising simile: Odysseus sobs “as pitifully as a woman weeps” while watching her warrior husband die in a failed attempt to defend his city and his children. The woman falls desperately on her dying husband, but his killers are behind her, hitting her with spears as they force her into a life of enslavement. The simile suggests a connection between the victorious Odysseus and the victims of his greatest success. We are not told whether Odysseus is crying because he feels guilt and pity at the thought of those he has killed, tricked, and enslaved, or because he is tormented to be trapped so far away from either the battlefield or Ithaca—the spheres where he can be honored and known. The scene is a memorable reminder that warfare has victims as well as victors, and that it may sometimes be difficult to tell which is which.

After many misadventures, and eight years in the beds of two different goddesses, Odysseus makes it home from eastern Troy to western Ithaca. He is able to move from what Homer’s contemporary Hesiod calls the brutal “age of bronze” and the glorious “age of heroes” into the conflict-ridden “age of iron,” because he has mastered not only warfare with bronze weapons but also the more social skills of rhetoric, cunning, and technology—skills that enable him to survive and win eternal glory, even when he is far from the battlefield. Homer’s Odysseus specializes in clever scheming—in Greek, mētis—and the narrator does not invite us to moralize against a flexible relationship with the truth.

Many centuries later, Virgil set his Roman epic, The Aeneid, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, and modeled its narrative on both The Odyssey and The Iliad. The protagonist, Aeneas, is like Odysseus in that he is a warrior on a journey from Troy to his western homeland. But whereas Odysseus returns to his original home, Aeneas is a migrant Trojan, fleeing his fallen city for a new homeland to which he has never been: Italy, where he will begin the historical process that is fated, one day, to lead to the foundation of the glorious city of Rome. Virgil reinvents the story of Odysseus in a double way. Homer’s hero becomes both the pious refugee, Aeneas, and the cruel liar, Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus), who destroys a city through his unscrupulous wiles.

Homer leaves the Trojans to decide for themselves whether to take the horse into the city. But Virgil adds a character who persuades them to do so: Sinon, a cousin of “cruel Ulysses,” who shares his penchant for lies. Sinon, whose name means “harmer,” is found bound and alone after the Greeks pretend to sail away. He tells the Trojans a pitiful story about how he barely escaped being sacrificed by Ulysses, claiming that the horse is an offering specifically for Athena (Minerva in Latin), who will ensure the city’s salvation if they take the horse inside. Yielding to their pious respect for the gods, and their eagerness to show mercy toward vulnerable suppliants, the Trojans free Sinon from his bonds and take the deadly horse inside their city. Aeneas, who narrates the story to the Carthaginian queen Dido, comments (in the translation by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright):

His tactics and the tears he falsely shed

now captured us—we who had not been beaten

by Tydides, Thessalian Achilles,

ten years of warfare, or a thousand ships.

The addition of Sinon makes it clear that deception happens not primarily through inanimate mechanical objects but through people deliberately using rhetoric to manipulate audiences, and through the choices of those audiences about what and whom to believe. With the Sinon episode, Virgil asks his readers to consider whether cities and civilizations may fall for noble motives rather than because of moral failures.

Virgil’s version of the Trojan-horse episode was written in the time of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. The new leader was a canny manipulator of words and imagery who presented his revolutionary autocratic regime as if it were in line with Roman tradition. Virgil showcases the dangers of deception and offers an account of how easily good people can be deceived. The scene offers an ambivalent reflection on the culture and politics of its time. We might read Sinon’s deceptions in light of his Greekness: Perhaps the future Roman people need fear no such schemes, as long as they hold fast to their own identity and maintain suspicion of all foreigners, especially Greeks. But we can also see a dark shadow in Augustus’s manipulation of the Roman people through clever storytelling that disguised and enabled the destruction of the old Republic and the slide into one-man rule.

Where Virgil’s Ulysses is cruel and predatory, and his mendacious instrument, Sinon, is unambiguously a bad guy, Nolan re-creates Sinon as his film’s sinless moral center. The focus on “sin” is presumably the reason for the odd but consistent pronunciation of the name: More normally pronounced by English-speakers as Sigh-non or See-non—echoing the long i of the Latin—in Nolan’s film, it’s always Sin-none as if to reinforce the Christlike innocence of Elliot Page’s version of the classical “harmer.” Nolan’s Sinon is not a trickster but a poor innocent to whom Odysseus has lied by omission, in failing to tell him about the trick with the horse. The episode is a cautionary fable about a director who fails to trust an actor to play his part: Odysseus lies so that Sinon will give the most convincing possible performance when he falsely tells the Trojans, with his dying breath, that the horse is a gift.

The film’s oft-invoked “Zeus’s law” is explained as a version of the Golden Rule: We must host beggars and strangers kindly, to “do as we would be done by,” and because they could be gods in disguise (a quite different point). The unkindness of Penelope’s suitors to Odysseus’s poor dog Argos and to the blind Eumaeus is a clear violation of this principle. Yet the film also suggests that the law of Zeus is concerned with a quite different moral problem: deception. The horse is presented as the ultimate violation of the law of Zeus, because it entails wielding a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a gift. The Homeric Zeus is a cunning schemer, whereas Nolan’s Zeus takes a particularly hard line on deceit, especially in relationships between hosts and guests. The film’s arch-villain, the lead suitor, Antinous, proves his villainy by being a bad guest, and a bad host, and an entertainingly weaselly liar. The horse is presented as breaking “civilization” because it represents the moment when the good guy, Odysseus, echoes the behavior of the bad guy by being a deceitful, ungrateful guest. But the film does not explain what “hospitality” has to do with a narrative situation in which the Greeks have been besieging Troy for 10 years already; the Trojans are not their hosts but their enemies in war. If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s choice to yield to the empire’s demands. The visually impressive spectacle of the horse on a stunning stretch of pristine beach (shot in Essaouira, Morocco) contributes to the narrative muddle: The Greeks have supposedly been encamped there for the past decade, yet it shows no sign of human habitation.

Nolan shot the Calypso episodes in the disputed Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara without the consent of the Indigenous Sahrawi people. The choice underlines the lack of seriousness in Nolan’s thinking about his themes: the ethical and cultural costs of entering other people’s homes uninvited, for the purpose of extracting resources without respect for an unwilling host.

In Homer, deception is relatively benign. In Virgil, it is evil. But in both poems, we learn directly about how the Greeks enacted their schemes, as well as the decision-making process of the pious, thoughtful Trojans. In Nolan, we never see Odysseus planning the construction of the horse or lying to the innocent Sinon, and his Trojans take mere seconds to make up their minds. The film is not interested in the social or psychological questions of how people deceive and are deceived. Deception is a fait accompli: The horse appears on the beach in the opening sequence as if deposited there by helicopter, and Sinon does not know that he is not telling the truth. What matters cinematically are the logistics: the rolling of the horse uphill and the claustrophobic, waterlogged interior. Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism is observed at great length. The script tells us loudly that people matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space.

Nolan’s Odysseus goes to war to protect his biological son, Telemachus, but in so doing betrays his quasi-son, Sinon—an irony whose emotional impact is dulled by the film’s frenetic pacing. Page is a luminous, heartbreaking presence on-screen, whereas the Trojans are mostly masked nonentities. Odysseus’s moral development is retold in miniature on the island of Circe, where he shoots what he thinks is an animal but then realizes was actually a human being. Yet neither Odysseus nor the film itself seems to move beyond the occasional moment or two of noticing the humanity of all humans. The face of the slaughtered deer-man is not shown, and the film’s narrative rushes on. The final massacre of the cartoonishly bestial suitors inside Odysseus’s house is presented with thrilling exuberance, and the camera does not linger on the pain and humanity of those who die or allow for the possibility that they, too, should be mourned. Instead, the long, repetitive final fight sequence fixates, again, on logistics: how the weapons are hidden, and how they descend from the storeroom through a hole in the ceiling. The film’s primary fascination with maneuvering objects creates a mismatch between what we see and what we are being told to think and feel. We see inside the horse, but we do not see inside the characters or their world.

In the final sequence of the movie, Odysseus leaves home for yet another journey. It draws heavily on Alfred Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, whose narrator abandons his “agèd wife” and leaves his son, Telemachus, on the throne of Ithaca, while he departs for the “untravell’d world” “to follow knowledge like a sinking star.” Matt Damon as Odysseus likewise embarks in a boat toward the sunset, although he gets to take his wife (played by Anne Hathaway) along for the ride. The self-imposed exile of Odysseus enables his son (Tom Holland) to rule over the Ithacans who survive. The camera depicts the newly becrowned prince as a sunlit golden boy, who can receive the power and wealth won by his father’s bloody hands without having to taint his own—although we have been given no reason to believe that Telemachus is ready for the role, or that the concentration of power and wealth in one man is beneficial for anyone.

The final goal of Nolan’s Odysseus is not infinite knowledge but redemption: He is at last awake from his amnesia and intends to bury the comrades left uninterred on his journeys. Yet the waking vision of the protagonist, and hence also of the film, remains extraordinarily narrow. There is no suggestion that he will offer burial to the Trojans, or the suitors, or the various foreigners killed during his journey. Despite Odysseus’s spiritual awakening, the dead remain as dead as ever. But there is a spectacular sunset and yet another lavish display of a large vehicle grandly making its way through space, across churning waves.

Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the “apparent magic” of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually stunning, emotionally empty film.

ATLANTIC 

C.I.A. Sets Up Secret Cuba Task Force as Trump Pressures Havana

 

 

By Adam Entous

The C.I.A. has secretly established a Cuba task force, setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political and leadership changes demanded by President Trump, according to people briefed on the action.

The creation of the task force will allow the agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at Cuba, they said.

The task force has begun adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence analysts, officers who conduct cyberoperations and officers who specialize in covert influence operations, the people said.

In 1960, the C.I.A. established an earlier Cuba task force, whose members oversaw the failed, agency-backed invasion of Cuba the next year known as the Bay of Pigs.

The people briefed on the new task force said its mandate is more limited: to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in hope of pressuring the Cubans to replace perceived anti-American hard-liners with more practical leaders more amenable to Mr. Trump’s demands.

Image

Arms that belonged to the Cuban and American mercenary soldiers who landed at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro were seized in 1961.Credit...Keystone-France

The C.I.A. declined to comment.

“The intentions here are no surprise, since Cuba has long been the target of the C.I.A.’s efforts at espionage, subversion and destabilization, including terrorism,” Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, said in a statement to The Times. “And yet the State Department has the audacity to call Cuba a threat for exercising its right to legitimate self-defense.”

Unlike in the 1960s, when the earlier task force oversaw the training and equipping of a partner force of Cubans that launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, the current task force has no organized Cuban partners. Nor is it allowed to enable lethal operations, though a task force at the C.I.A., by nature, is flexible and the authorities under which it operates can be changed at any time by the president.

The creation of the task force shows the extent to which the agency is preparing for what may be a protracted covert campaign against what has long been one of its hardest targets.

The C.I.A.’s action coincides with stepped-up efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to get a better understanding of the situation on the ground inside Cuba.

Every administration sets out its intelligence-collection priorities in a document known as the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, or NIPF.

The Trump administration recently revised its version of the document to designate Cuba a NIPF “Priority 1.” (Among the other Priority 1 countries are China, Iran and Russia.)

In response, U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, among others, have started turning more intelligence-collection assets, including satellites, toward Cuba, people briefed on those activities said.

The intelligence will help the U.S. military update its options for potential military action against Cuba, if Mr. Trump opts to go that route. Before the intelligence surge, U.S. military and intelligence officers complained of having outdated information; the new intelligence will give them a better sense of Cuban intentions, military capabilities and defenses.

Officers with the Cuba task force at the C.I.A. will, in turn, scour through the newly available intelligence for inside information about the activities of Cuba’s leaders and other members of the political elite, in particular tracking shadowy money flows and business dealings on and off the island. The agency could eventually release that information publicly to try to influence the Cuban leadership and public opinion, reprising a playbook that the C.I.A. has used against other adversaries, including Russia.

Over the years, the C.I.A. has played a multifaceted role in Cuba, as a spy service that covertly operates against the Cuban government, and as an occasional intermediary between Washington and Havana.

In 2015, toward the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, the United States and Cuba formally re-established diplomatic relations. The C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, flew to Havana to meet with Alejandro Castro, the son of President Raúl Castro, and other Cuban officials to discuss increasing intelligence cooperation between the two countries.

Mr. Brennan considered Cuba’s spy agencies the most capable in Latin America, and hoped to work with them against drug cartels and terrorist networks. But those discussions soon bogged down, with the sides blaming each other for failing to follow through on proposed confidence-building commitments.

This May, with tensions boiling, Mr. Trump sent his C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, to Havana to meet with Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro, known as “Raulito” or “El Cangrejo” (the Crab), Raúl Castro’s grandson.

Mr. Ratcliffe’s message to the Cubans was that the C.I.A. saw them as worthy adversaries and potential future partners. But he also told the Cubans that they were running out of time to make fundamental changes sought by Mr. Trump, implying that if Cuba failed to seize the moment, it could be the next Venezuela.

The speed with which Mr. Trump successfully toppled one of Cuba’s closest allies — Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader — and seized control of Venezuela’s oil resources had led some of Mr. Trump’s hawkish advisers to believe that the current Cuban government could be gone by the time of the midterm election in the United States in November, people familiar with the debate inside the administration said.

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Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader who was captured by the United States in January. President Trump’s C.I.A. director has implied that if Cuba failed to seize the moment, it could be the next Venezuela.Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times

But despite a crippling oil embargo imposed by the United States, the Cubans have proved themselves to be resilient, and Mr. Trump’s drawn-out war with Iran soaked up the administration’s limited resources and attention. While the Cuba hawks advising Mr. Trump still think the administration will eventually devote the resources and attention necessary to bring down the Cuban government, they now acknowledge in private that this is likely to happen only once the war in Iran has finally concluded.

During much of the Cold War, the C.I.A. maintained a relatively small station at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, in part because the agency knew that the Cubans were incredibly effective at surveilling the American officers there. That made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to recruit and meet with assets on the island.

The U.S. government’s level of interest in Cuba diminished in the 2000s as the C.I.A. was directed to focus its financial, human and technical resources on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other suspected terrorism havens.

Then, during Mr. Trump’s first term, after a number of C.I.A. officers in Havana reported being afflicted by a mystery illness, which later became known as Havana syndrome, the agency completely shuttered its station on the island.

The C.I.A. station in Havana was re-established in 2024, toward the end of the Biden administration, but the officers there still had a difficult time operating because they were under near-constant surveillance and their movements were restricted.

Jack Nicas contributed reporting

THE NEW YORK TIMES