US army intelligence-gathering flights are surging off the coast of Cuba, a NCS evaluation of publicly accessible aviation knowledge exhibits.
Since February 4, the US Navy and Air Force have performed at the least 25 such flights utilizing manned plane and drones, most of them close to the nation’s two greatest cities, Havana and Santiago de Cuba, and a few coming inside 40 miles of the coast, based on FlightRadar24.
Most of the flights have been by P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol plane, which are designed for surveillance and reconnaissance, whereas some have been by an RC-135V Rivet Joint, which makes a speciality of alerts intelligence gathering. Several MQ-4C Triton high-altitude reconnaissance drones have additionally been used.
The flights are notable not just for their proximity to the coast, which places them nicely inside vary of gathering intelligence, however for the suddenness of their look – previous to February, such publicly seen flights have been exceedingly uncommon on this space – and for his or her timing.
Trump’s public utterances in opposition to Cuba hardened noticeably within the weeks simply earlier than the surge, with the US president reposting on Truth Social a remark by Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen that Trump would go to a “free Havana” earlier than leaving workplace. Just a couple of days after that publish, Trump ordered an oil blockade of the island.
Fast ahead to as we speak and Trump is imposing an expanded sanctions regime on Cuba and insisting it represents a “threat” to US nationwide safety. (Cuban officers in the meantime have dismissed the suggestion their communist-run authorities poses any hazard to the US. They insist they are open to negotiations, although have additionally vowed to conduct an prolonged guerrilla struggle in opposition to US forces if attacked.)
The Pentagon declined to touch upon these findings; NCS has additionally reached out to the Cuban authorities.
Similar patterns, by which ramped-up rhetoric by the Trump administration coincided with an uptick in publicly seen surveillance flights, occurred within the lead-up to US army operations in each Venezuela and Iran.
In the case of Venezuela, Trump introduced on September 2 the first US strike on an alleged drug vessel within the Caribbean, particularly alleging a connection to Venezuela’s then-President Nicolás Maduro, whom he accused of “mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror.”
Publicly seen surveillance flights started every week later off the coast of Venezuela, persisting – with a spot in October and November – into the times earlier than US particular forces captured Maduro in his compound in Caracas.
An analogous development unfolded in Iran, the place a much more in depth assortment of intelligence-gathering plane and unmanned drones overtly surveilled Iran’s southern shoreline forward of joint US and Israeli strikes. The P-8A Poseidon, RC-135V Rivet Joint and MQ-4C Triton, which in current weeks have all been noticed close to Cuba, are among the many planes lively within the Iran battle.
Since early 2025, dozens of those identical US surveillance plane have been lively across the warzone in Ukraine and close to geopolitical hotspots on the Korean Peninsula and alongside Russia’s western border. Bulk knowledge aggregated by adsb.exposed exhibits flights in these and different areas working persistently over many months.
However, the uptick in flights noticed off the Cuban coast is new and deviates from the place these plane have traditionally been deployed.
All the flights described above have been tracked utilizing publicly accessible open-source flight monitoring dashboards like Flightradar24 or ADS-B Exchange.
And in some instances, these flights have been shared broadly throughout social media, whether or not on X, Discord, or different platforms.
That is regardless of the plane concerned being succesful – ought to they so select – of masking their presence by turning off their location beacons, which raises the query of whether or not the US is intentionally signaling the presence of those plane to its adversaries.
Whether or not the signaling is explicitly meant by the US army or administration, the message is more likely to be unsettling, to say the least, for Cuban officers.
NCS’s Natasha Bertrand and Patrick Oppman contributed to this report.
How we reported this story
- For Cuba, we polled FlightRadar24’s API for intelligence-gathering flights lively over a 4-month interval ending on April 28, 2026, each 10 minutes. We recognized surveillance plane by their ICAO sort codes, trying to find P8, R135, This autumn, E3TF, E8, U2, and Q9s lively within the space of curiosity. We then manually reviewed candidate flights off the island’s coast to take away plane passing via the search space that didn’t exhibit indicators of intelligence-gathering operations. To visualize flight paths round Cuba, we revisited the API for extra granular knowledge exhibiting the paths of every plane.
- For Venezuela, we transposed our FlightRadar24 API search methodology with a analysis window of September 3, 2025, via January 3, 2026 (the day of the Maduro raid.)
- For Iran, we used the identical methodology with a window of October 28, 2025, via February 28, 2026 (the launch of strikes on Iran).