As a child, Marco Rubio sat at his grandfather’s feet cigar-smoke curling on the front porch as stories spilled out — tales of Cuban heroes like José Martí and the guerilla soldiers who fought Spanish rule, and of life under the communist regime his family left behind. Even then, Rubio imagined himself as part of Cuba’s unfinished struggle.
“I boasted I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba,” Rubio recalled in his 2012 memoir, “An American Son.”
A half-century later, that childhood bravado appears strikingly prophetic. Rubio, now President Donald Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, played a central role in shaping the US military’s stunning capture of a different Latin American leader, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a longtime close ally of Cuba. In the aftermath, Trump asserted Rubio would help “run” Venezuela through the resulting upheaval.
The outcome did not unfold exactly as Rubio, 54, imagined it as a boy, but it bore the imprint of the politics that defined his upbringing. The son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio came of age in Miami immersed in the city’s exile community, rising politically within a culture where memories of the island and a deep fear of socialism remained powerful forces.
Now, as Rubio emerges as the public face of a brazen new era of American foreign policy — one that has rattled allies, undercut Congress’ war powers and thrust the Western Hemisphere into uncertainty — longtime friends and allies say they see the product of those formative forces.
“Marco has brought to the White House not just the knowledge and the history but how people feel when they have to flee everything they have,” Tomas Regalado, a trailblazing Cuban American broadcaster and former Miami mayor, told CNN. “He is what every Cuban mother wants their sons to be – loving Miami, thanking the United States but never forgetting Cuba.”
With that belief in Rubio comes the hope, if not, the expectation, that he could soon oversee the fall of the regime in Cuba as well.
“Make no mistake,” said former Hialeah, Florida, Mayor Steve Bovo, a close friend, “a free Caracas should lead to a free Havana.”
Miami’s Cuban immigrants have long commanded outsized influence in American politics, a byproduct of their prominence in Florida, a coveted battleground state until recently. Episodes that roiled the community — from the mass immigration of Cubans to Florida in 1980 known as the Mariel boatlift, to Fidel Castro’s Air Force shooting down two civilian aircraft in 1996, to the 1999 custody battle over Elián González, to President Barack Obama’s groundbreaking 2016 visit to Havana — have repeatedly threatened to reshape electoral politics.
In shops and restaurants throughout Little Havana, pictures memorialize decades of ambitious politicians sipping cafecito and donning guayaberas during pilgrimages to the vibrant Cuban neighborhood. When they come, regardless of their party, it’s expected they share their visions for a post-communist Cuba.
Exile politics are inescapable in South Florida, no matter the office on the ballot, said former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Miami Republican.
“People want to know first that you’re one of them, and then they want to hear what you’re doing about everything else,” he said. “You could not be a Castro sympathizer and expect to get any votes, even if you’re running for property appraiser. That’s why this is so baked into Rubio’s DNA.”
“When you think of Cuban American Gen Xers, our entire lives have been eclipsed by the struggle for freedom, justice and democracy in countries like Cuba and Venezuela,” Curbelo went on. “We grew up in direct contact with the people who suffered through these tragic events. But we’re very fully American. It’s a very potent combination.”
Rubio absorbed this reality through his maternal grandfather — “my mentor and my closest boyhood friend,” he wrote. His grandfather detested President John F. Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs debacle and revered President Ronald Reagan for his hardline anti-communism. He believed, Rubio wrote, that without a strong America “the world would succumb to darkness, and a strong country required a strong leader.”
Those sentiments, widely shared among Cuban exiles, have given Republicans an edge in Florida, and they became “defining influences on me politically,” Rubio said.
In his 20s, Rubio immersed himself in these politics. He interned in the offices of Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart, Cuban stalwarts on Capitol Hill. In 1996, at age 25, he served as the South Florida coordinator for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign.
Two years later, fresh out of law school and newly married, Rubio challenged an incumbent for a seat on the West Miami commission. Armed with fluent Spanish and boyish good looks, Rubio canvassed neighborhoods where conversations about local concerns reliably turned toward Cuba’s past and future.
During that campaign, Rubio later wrote, he discovered who he was.
“I was an heir to two generations of unfulfilled dreams,” Rubio wrote. “I was the end of their story.”
That story, however, has shifted over the years.
Rubio has often described himself as the Miami-born “son of exiles,” a distinction that implies his parents arrived in the US after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. He has suggested as much repeatedly, including in his official US Senate biography.
But in 2011, multiple news outlets uncovered official records showing that his parents first arrived in the United States more than two years before the Castro-led revolution, among other inconsistencies in the family timeline.
Rubio acknowledged the errors, attributing them to his family’s “oral history,” but he maintained that his parents identified as exiles because they would have returned to Cuba were it not for Castro’s rule.
“They were from Cuba. They wanted to live in Cuba again,” Rubio told the Washington Post at the time. “They tried to live in Cuba again, and the reality of what it was made that impossible.”
Rubio won his race for West Miami commissioner in November 1998. One month later, Venezuela elected a new president: the left-wing populist Hugo Chávez.
Chávez’s rise alarmed Cuban exiles in Miami, many of whom insist to this day they warned Venezuelans that the political forces that overtook Cuba could take hold there as well.
“Venezuelans said, ‘That can’t happen to us, we have oil, we’re not Cuba, we’re not an island,’” said Alina Garcia, the Supervisor of Elections of Miami-Dade County. “But it did.”
From 2000 to 2010, as Rubio rose through the Florida legislature to become the state’s first Cuban American Speaker of the House, roughly 70,000 people fled Chávez’s rule and resettled in the US. Many arrived in South Florida, joining Cuban exiles in demanding a hardline approach against socialism in Latin America.
“There has never been any separation in solidarity in the call for freedom for Cuba and the call for freedom in Venezuela and Nicaragua as well,” said Ana Carbonell, a veteran GOP adviser on Hispanic engagement. “And that’s something very special about South Florida.”
Garcia, who served as Rubio’s first legislative aide, said these new arrivals did not initially dominate conversations in Tallahassee. Coverage of Rubio’s time there rarely mentions the country, nor is Venezuela addressed in his first book.
“He was always inquisitive about the history of Latin America and would ask often about my father who was a Bay of Pigs veteran,” said Bovo, whose wife Viviana is a longtime Rubio aide. “But there wasn’t always a forum for it until he got to the Senate. That’s when he showed his chops.”
Floridians elected Rubio to the Senate in 2010, and he grew increasingly outspoken on Venezuela. In 2014, he cosponsored sanction legislation and delivered a blistering Senate-floor critique of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, amid violent crackdowns on protesters.
“They look more and more like Cuba economically and politically every single day,” Rubio said in his speech.
Rubio ran for the GOP nomination for president in 2016 arguing Trump wasn’t fit for the world stage. But after falling short — capped by a stinging second-place finish in Florida, where he failed to consolidate the Cuban vote — Rubio returned to the Senate with renewed focus on South America.
He often stood out as a singular voice urging the US to confront socialist regimes in its backyard. At times, he posted hourly updates about Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis on social media. He visited the country’s border to push for Maduro to allow US aid to reach his citizens.
His advocacy made him a recognizable figure across Latin America and Trump’s point person on the Western Hemisphere. Standing alongside Rubio in Peru at the 2018 Summit of the Americas, Curbelo was taken aback by the crowds that formed around them. Everyone wanted to hear from Rubio.
“Losing is very healthy for most people,” Curbelo said. “When he lost the 2016 nomination, he went from being a great politician to being a great statesman.”
A campaign by Rubio to oust Maduro, though, stalled during Trump’s first term. Although the administration — at Rubio’s urging — joined allies in recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s rightful president, the international push fizzled and Maduro maintained power. When Trump lost reelection, Rubio’s influence waned.
Meanwhile, Venezuela’s collapse accelerated migration out of the country. Nearly 8 million people have fled the country since 2014, according to the United Nations. More than 750,000 landed in the US, and nearly half of them in Rubio’s home state.
While in office, President Joe Biden granted the vast majority of Venezuelan refugees temporary protected status allowing them to remain in the US, a move Rubio vocally backed. Trump ended those protections last year and his administration made clear this week they still face deportation following Maduro’s ouster.
“Secretary Noem ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 500,000 Venezuelans,” the department said in a post on X, “and now they can go home to a country that they love.”
The Department of State did not respond to CNN’s request for comment for this story, including the question of whether Rubio believed it was safe for Venezuelans living in the US to return to their country.
Rubio is not a patient man by nature. As a child, he would complain during family visits to IHOP when his food failed to arrive quickly.
“I struggle with impatience to this day,” Rubio wrote in his book, “and when I exhibit the weakness at a restaurant or in some other public place, my wife will remind me that I am behaving like that six-year-old at IHOP.”
Yet, on Venezuela, Rubio has played a long game. He outlasted other Latin America hawks who were cast out of Trump’s orbit when he left office in 2021. Rubio endorsed Trump during the GOP primary for president in 2024 and maintained close ties with his inner circle, including campaign manager and fellow Floridian Susie Wiles. The gambit paid off when Trump won, named Wiles chief of staff and tapped Rubio to lead the State Department.
Rubio found new allies in his push for regime change in Venezuela, including senior White House adviser Stephen Miller, CNN recently reported. He also recalibrated his message.
“He recognized the winning argument was no longer about nation building and toppling a dictator and bringing Democracy but going after drug traffickers and stopping Russia and China influence,” a Republican operative close to Rubio told CNN. “It didn’t change his goals, but it reframed his argument.”
In South Florida, many Cubans have grown emboldened by Maduro’s removal and Rubio’s influence on the sudden sea change in American foreign policy.
“If you speak to any Cuban, they’ll tell you Cuba will be soon and it’ll be next,” Garcia said.
Trump has not discouraged the speculation, telling reporters Cuba may soon “fall on its own.” Rubio has been less circumspect about the fate of his ancestral home.
“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government,” Rubio said on Sunday, “I’d be concerned.”
