Son of Cuban immigrants, Trump’s secretary gets closer to the goal of changing the island
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s parents immigrated to the United States from Cuba three years before Fidel Castro seized power through the 1959 communist revolution.
They sought economic opportunities. Rubio’s father, Mario, eventually found work in Florida as a bartender, and his mother, Oriales, as a hotel maid, cashier and Kmart stocker.
Also read: Cubans protest at the US embassy in Havana after Raúl Castro’s indictment
Still, Marco Rubio talks about dismantling the communist government with the same passion that mobilizes many political exiles who left the island after the revolution. The indictment against 94-year-old Raúl Castro, the family patriarch, is in line with Rubio’s long-standing mission and is just the latest episode in a series of U.S. government efforts to weaken Havana that he supported or helped lead.
“President Trump is offering a new path between the United States and a new Cuba,” Rubio said in a brief video address aimed at the Cuban people.
“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not a U.S. oil blockade,” Rubio said in Spanish. “The real reason you have no electricity, fuel or food is that those who control your country embezzled billions of dollars, but none of it was used to help the people.”
Within President Donald Trump’s cabinet, Rubio’s focus on Cuba stands out, but it is quite common in the Cuban-American environment in South Florida. There, intense anti-communist politics are the rule, and informal conversations often revolve around ways in which the United States could one day remove the leaders in Havana from power.
“Rubio comes out of Miami’s anti-Cuban politics,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, told The New York Times in December.
Rhodes coordinated Obama’s policy of trying to reestablish, to some extent, United States economic and diplomatic ties with Cuba. At the time, Rhodes discussed this policy with Rubio, who was a United States senator representing Florida.
“He was always linked to a policy of regime change in Havana,” Rhodes said. “That’s at the core of his identity.”
Rubio was one of the architects of the Trump administration’s military campaign against Venezuela, which resulted in Nicolás Maduro being captured by US forces and sent to New York to face drug trafficking charges. In 2020, the Department of Justice obtained a formal indictment from a grand jury against Maduro.
The offensive against Venezuela was, in part, intended to weaken the pillars of the Cuban communist government. Venezuela was the main supplier of oil to Cuba, and the Trump administration pressured the country’s new ruler, Delcy Rodríguez, an ally of Maduro, to stop shipments to the island. As a result, the Cuban economy has come under greater pressure than at any time in recent decades.
In 2019, during the first Trump administration’s efforts to remove Maduro from power by encouraging an insurrection, Rubio told NPR that a weakened Cuba would be a welcome “side effect” of a change in the Venezuelan government, even if that was not “the main reason” for removing Maduro. “Anything that is bad for a communist dictatorship is something I support,” he said.
A few months ago, Rubio began speaking directly with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, Raúl Castro’s grandson, to try to negotiate an economic opening in Cuba that would include some political concessions.
U.S. officials were pushing in early March for the Castro family to remove President Miguel Díaz-Canel, which would allow the Trump administration to argue that it had successfully promoted political change in Cuba, the Times reported.
At that time, American officials were willing to tolerate the Castros remaining in power behind the scenes, as long as they agreed to lead the country through economic changes driven by the Trump administration. But U.S. officials have grown impatient with the slow pace of negotiations and what they see as resistance from the Castro family.
