Summary
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio is navigating the most volatile moment in US-Cuba relations in decades.
- The administration has imposed a fuel blockade, sent the CIA director to Havana with an ultimatum and indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro.
- Rubio faces a difficult balance between his lifelong goal of a free Cuba and Trump’s desire for a “good deal.”
AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.
In the final days of his 2016 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Marco Rubio stood before a friendly Miami debate crowd and named his baseline for any negotiations with Cuba: free elections, a free press and free speech for the 11 million people living on the island. The GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, offered something much vaguer — an unspecific pledge to work out “a good deal” with the Castro regime.
Rubio ridiculed the answer. The crowd roared.
Now, as secretary of state, Rubio is navigating the most volatile moment in US-Cuba relations in decades on behalf of the man he once mocked. For months, Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has teamed with Trump to pressure Cuba’s leaders to the negotiating table while trying to hasten conditions for their ouster.
A fuel blockade has left Cubans with rolling blackouts ahead of the sweltering summer months. Last month in Havana, CIA Director John Ratcliffe delivered a rare in-person ultimatum to Cuban officials to enact political changes. Five days later, the Justice Department indicted former President Raúl Castro. The USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group is close by in the Caribbean.
On Thursday, the US piled on more pressure, imposing sanctions on Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canal, his wife and stepson; family members of Raúl Castro; and several organizations it asserted were tied to the Cuban government.
It remains an open question whether Rubio will achieve the liberated Cuba he has sought for most of his life, or whether the moment will end, as others have, with what Trump deems “a good deal.”
There is growing frustration within the White House over how difficult it has proved to force the island’s regime into making major concessions. And Trump has recently expressed doubt about forcing a change in the Cuban government, telling reporters last month when pressed about specifics of a potential deal, “Well, I don’t know about changing the regime.”
On Thursday, Trump vowed to eventually turn his full attention to Cuba — though it would have to wait until he first finds a resolution to the Iran war that’s eluded him for months.
“We’re going to handle that as soon as we finish. I like to do one thing at a time,” he said. “As soon as that’s done, on our way back, we’ll just make a little brief stop.”
Meanwhile in South Florida, where more than 1 million Cuban Americans reside, hope is surging for a Cuba without a Castro in power.
“I think we all can envision what we want Cuba to look like, and it doesn’t have to happen overnight,” Rubio said Wednesday in testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“The United States is open to a negotiated situation that puts Cuba on a path towards democracy, prosperity, freedom, normalcy. We would be open to that, and we would work with whoever is open to doing it,” Rubio told lawmakers.
“Obviously, it will be challenging,” he said.
The pressure campaign on Cuba is just the latest audacious effort to reshape global diplomacy undertaken by Rubio, who has become a primary driver behind Trump’s sprawling and at-times chaotic foreign policy agenda.
A career politician who has long harbored presidential ambitions, Rubio’s unlikely alliance with Trump — who once derided him as “Liddle Marco” — has granted him broad power within the administration, and numerous job titles to go with it.
In addition to secretary of state, Rubio is acting national security adviser, making him the first to hold both jobs since Henry Kissinger. From those perches, the 55-year-old Rubio has played a central role in Trump’s forays into Iran and Venezuela, while also managing increasingly tenuous relations with the US’ allies in Europe and with its chief rival, China.
Yet Cuba is his most personal challenge yet. And as Rubio plots another potential run for the presidency in 2028, it’s the one whose success or failure could most closely define him.
Rubio grew up steeped in Cuba’s history, and he has credited the exile community with shaping his hawkish worldview. That community’s aspirations are now largely resting on his shoulders — but so are the demands of a president who has expressed fleeting interest in wholesale regime change.
“This is the golden ring for Marco Rubio. This is what he has dreamed about, both personally and professionally,” said Lawrence Gumbiner, who led the US Embassy in Havana during Trump’s first term. “I think he realizes he’s got to dance around his boss, President Trump, and the expectations of the (Cuban) diaspora, and the reality.”
Discussions between South Florida business and community leaders — including longtime Rubio supporters and allies — have intensified as they consider how they might help rebuild Cuba should the regime topple. The State Department has been in contact with some about assisting with humanitarian efforts if needed, a person with knowledge of the discussions said.
Steve Bovo, the former mayor of Hialeah, Florida, and a close ally of Trump and Rubio, told CNN he has warned local officials that regime change could generate some domestic chaos if Cuban Americans on the mainland rush to rescue people or deliver humanitarian aide by boat.
“The fact that Rubio is there in the thick of it is probably what gives everyone in the exile community a lot of calm,” said Bovo, the son of a Bay of Pigs veteran.
Bovo, whose wife is a longtime Rubio aide, also acknowledged the angst within his community as the US and Cuba near a tipping point. “There would be a massive disappointment if by the end of Trump administration there isn’t a degree of change in Cuba that is either a straight line to total freedom or total freedom,” Bovo said.
Many who have watched Cuba policy up close, though, are skeptical the hopes of the exile community — and Rubio himself — can co-exist with Trump’s limited appetite for a protracted foreign engagement.
“If Rubio wants a diplomatic, negotiated outcome,” said Juan Gonzalez, senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs on the National Security Council under President Joe Biden, then, “he’s going to have to betray his political base in South Florida.”
Gonzalez acknowledged regime change in Cuba would be “historic,” but noted that the stakes for Rubio are incredibly high.
“If (Rubio) pulls it off, it will potentially launch him nationally as a broader political figure, whereas I think up to now he’s still been seen as a Florida politician,” Gonzalez said, adding that the opportunity also carries real political risk. “So for him, this is table stakes. If this is a mess, he’s done.”
Within the administration, Rubio has emerged as Trump’s key adviser on the Western Hemisphere. It’s as close as he’s come to the role he envisioned as a boy, when he “boasted I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba,” he wrote in his memoir, “An American Son.”
Rubio was also a trusted voice on the region for the White House during Trump’s first term. “Then-Sen. Rubio’s imprint was visible across the administration’s approach to Cuba and Venezuela,” a person close to Rubio told CNN.
As with the majority of Trump’s foreign policy priorities, the team working on Cuba has been small. Rubio, who spends much of his time at the White House, has a tight cadre of aides working on the issue, including several from his years in the Senate. Within the administration and at the State Department, Cuba policy is largely shaped by political appointees. However, career ambassador Mike Hammer has remained on the ground as the US charge d’affaires in Havana.
In March, Rubio acknowledged his principal role in the work, telling reporters, “any reporting on Cuba that you didn’t get from me or the president is a liar, because those are the only people working on it.”
After toppling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s regime, Trump officials sought to quickly capitalize on their newfound influence in the country to weaken Cuba by disrupting the flow of Venezuelan oil to the island and pressuring Mexico to slow its own oil deliveries.
The administration has increasingly turned its sights on the military conglomerate that controls much of Cuba’s economy, and Rubio on Wednesday said the US is “open to an arrangement that allows” revenue to begin to flow to the Cuban people.
Despite crushing economic sanctions and the threat of military action, Cuba’s leadership has refused to negotiate a quick deal, attempting instead to outlast Trump’s enthusiasm for yet another foreign entanglement and keep its grip on power. Cuba’s foreign minister recently dismissed the notion that Cuba is a threat to the US and said in a post on X that Havana is “open to dialogue to resolve bilateral issues, based on respect for our sovereignty, our constitutional order, and our political system.”
One former State Department official noted that the Cuban government has historically moved into “siege mentality” when faced with US pressure.
“There’s so much more that’s required for political change in Cuba,” said Frank Mora, the former US ambassador to the Organization of American States during the Biden administration.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly praised Rubio in a statement as “instrumental in executing the President’s foreign policy agenda to protect our homeland from threats in the region.”
But despite asserting the so-called Donroe Doctrine that Trump has claimed to reassert American influence across the Western Hemisphere, she stopped short of promising major political change in Cuba.
“As the President stated, Cuba is a failed country that has been horribly run for many years,” Kelly said. “The United States will be there to help, but its flailing leaders should make a deal with the United States before it is too late.”
Cuba’s government has said it’s open to negotiations with the US but will not bend to pressure to remake the island’s single-party communist form of government. Cuban officials have told CNN that they feel Rubio’s personal animus to Havana is stymying any possible deal.
Cuban government social media accounts have also posted parody videos of a puppet doll version of Rubio called “the blond worm,” a combination of Rubio’s last name, which means blond in Spanish, and a highly offensive epithet that Fidel Castro hurled at Cubans who fled the island after his 1959 revolution.
With the Iran war dragging on, top Trump political aides are eager to turn the president’s attention back to domestic issues ahead of November’s midterms — even as the president appears to be digging in, warning recently that Tehran’s efforts to outlast him won’t work because he doesn’t “care about the midterms.”
Within the administration, there are indications that the US intends to ratchet up its economic and political pressure campaign against Havana. Officials have also contemplated a range of potential military actions against Cuba, former diplomats and others close to the White House said. But they all come with major risks and no guarantee of generating a quick victory.
Carrying out a Venezuela-style raid in Cuba is viewed as a far more complicated proposition with less upside; Castro is nearly 95, and there’s little assurance that capturing him would weaken a regime that’s kept an iron grip on power for decades. There is also no equivalent to Delcy Rodríguez — the US-backed interim leader of Venezuela — in the Cuban system, experts say.
Rubio on Wednesday said there are “people within the technocratic realm of the government that could play some role in all of this.”
“But ultimately, if you’re asking me, is there a singular individual right now that we would trust and rely on to lead this transition from start to finish? I can’t give you that name right now,” he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Some Republican lawmakers eager to pry open Cuba’s political and economic system have pressed Rubio and the administration to mount such an operation anyway.
“Look at Venezuela,” Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, a daughter of Cuban exiles, said following Castro’s indictment. “I do believe we should follow that example.”
Even that outcome — a successful change in leadership, but without a timetable for elections and liberation for the island’s residents — risks falling short of the vision embraced by a Cuban American community that is close to Rubio and has overwhelmingly supported Trump across his three elections.
“You’ve got the Rubio team and the Cuban Americans who have a real, serious, deep objective Cuba,” said Ricardo Zúñiga, a former longtime senior State Department official. “And you have the president, who just wants to win — and he doesn’t care what that win looks like.”
Trump’s willingness to strike quickly to remove the political leadership in Venezuela and Iran has emboldened Cuban exiles to imagine a similar fate for Castro, said Jorge Duany, a longtime chronicler of the diaspora at Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute. Surveys of Cuban Americans increasingly show support for a US military intervention to liberate the island, he said.
“There’s a sense of desperation since nothing has worked to produce significant change on the island,” Duany said.
Expectations are now so high that a failure to meet them could be politically damaging.
“You will see a huge exodus of Cuban Americans from Republican Party, or at least from Trump’s party,” said Marcell Felipe, a prominent Cuban American businessman and chairman of the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora. “It would be political suicide.”
Felipe, like many other Cubans living in the US, wants to see the release of political prisoners and for the country to more closely resemble its Caribbean neighbors like the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas.
However, some have argued that Trump has built up enough goodwill within the diaspora that they would be willing to accept a transitional period where some from the former regime remain in place.
“There’s a segment of the exile community that will tolerate nothing but a Castro hanging from the highest tree possible,” Bovo said. “Now, there may have to be some sort of bitter juice to swallow.”
It’s a daunting tight rope for Rubio, not only as the country’s chief diplomat and as a Cuban American but also as someone increasingly viewed as a future GOP presidential contender. In private conversations, Trump has compared Rubio with Vice President JD Vance as he mulls his potential heirs, CNN previously reported. Vance has publicly joked he and Rubio are contestants on the latest version of “The Apprentice.”
Rubio has impressed many potential Republican primary voters with how he has stepped onto the world stage, even as a growing number of them express frustration with Trump’s continued focus on foreign priorities. But that could change if the situation in Iran doesn’t improve or if Venezuela crumbles under the instability left by Maduro’s ouster.
Nor does his improved standing account for Rubio becoming the face of another unpopular foreign intervention. Americans already overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump’s handling of Cuba, according to a March Associated Press-NORC poll. And 78% of Americans — including 6 in 10 Republicans — oppose using US troops to overthrow the Cuban government, a survey from Ipsos and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found.
Felipe is optimistic Rubio remains committed to the vision for Cuba he outlined a decade ago as a presidential contender. He has less faith in others within Trump’s inner circle who have urged the president to reorient his administration around domestic affairs.
“That’s exactly where his political enemies would like to put Rubio — in a position where he has to choose between Trump’s good graces or his people’s good graces,” Felipe said. “If he has to choose between one of those, his political future will be damaged. I think that’s something his political rivals and competitors and the Castro regime would like to see happen.”
