Can Marco Rubio Con Trump Into Cuban Regime Change?
After President Trump’s shocking, illegal attack on Caracas and seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in the early-morning hours of January 3, celebratory Latin America hawks didn’t wait long to turn their attention to Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, famously of Cuban descent and the nation’s Cuba hawk-in-chief, stood at the White House’s impromptu Mar-a-Lago dais and said: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.”
Trump himself approvingly shared a Truth Social post proposing Rubio as Cuba’s next president, made various proclamations that Cuba’s socialist government is set to collapse, and most significantly, announced a national emergency over the island of nine million’s “unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” threatening tariffs on any country that provides oil to Cuba—a measure targeted squarely at Mexico, which has become Cuba’s largest supplier.
At the center of this foreign-policy contradiction is the ideological gap between Trump and his point man, Rubio.
When Fidel Castro toppled the right-wing dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, many conservative Cubans fled to Florida and organized a hysterically anti-communist political faction. Rubio, like most South Florida Republicans, hails from this diaspora, and today they are smelling blood in the water, with GOP Reps. Carlos Giménez and Mario Díaz-Balart reviving old calls for “no oil, no travel, no oxygen” to Cuba, and Rep. María Elvira Salazar musing in Spanish that “a mother’s hunger” or “a child who needs immediate help” are necessary sacrifices for a policy of isolation that finally dislodges the Castro government.
In spite of the apparent interventionist fervor gripping the White House and proud declarations of the president’s “Donroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere, all is not well for the Florida camp of foreign policy. While many hawks and the right-leaning Venezuelan diaspora celebrated Trump’s lightning strike against Maduro, his policy since then has oscillated between warm-toned engagement with Maduro’s VP, Delcy Rodríguez, and attempts at transparent graft and oil plunder.
Meanwhile, right-wing opposition darling and Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado has been reduced to flitting around Washington to plead her case to rule Venezuela as Trump openly questions her ability to do so; her call for elections in Venezuela this year further illustrates the gap. The Latin America hawks may have convinced Trump to take out Maduro, but that victory increasingly looks like a monkey’s paw that cursed their aspirations for a Venezuela without Chavistas. Might their Cuba escalation suffer the same fate?
At the center of this contradiction is the ideological gap between Trump and his point man, Rubio. While Trump has recast himself as the ultimate Florida man after coming of age and building his real estate fortune in New York, he is not a creature of the South Florida diaspora politics and pathologies that molded Rubio and other Florida-based officials in his coterie. Trump, while certainly no anti-interventionist, has also shown disinterest in both the subtle, sustained regime change operations and the large-scale, blowback-prone wars born out of the neoconservative movement, preferring instead the shock and awe of operations like “Absolute Resolve” that make for empire-smut Oscar bait ten years down the line. Despite repeated assertions that Venezuela “is not Iraq,” Trump’s White House was clearly animated by fears of a repeat of “de-Baathification” when it opted to work with Rodríguez over installing Machado. Trump won the Republican Party brutally criticizing the Bush family for the Iraq disaster; he’s clearly wary of an actual occupation.
Rubio, by contrast, is a fervent longtime interventionist who was still defending removing Saddam Hussein in 2015 and has made overthrowing Latin America’s socialist governments a core mission of his career. That’s a difficult tension to navigate. Rubio, while still serving as a Florida senator in 2024, joined seven Florida Republicans to endorse Machado for the Nobel—a win the White House would later criticize and which clearly continues to irk Trump. Now Rubio is in the awkward position of defending Trump’s engagement policy with the Chavista government from interventionist senators in both parties who want to know when the U.S. will do a full regime change.
Cuba presents many of the same policy pitfalls that seemingly spooked Trump away from the Rubio-Florida policy of choice in Venezuela. Unlike Venezuela, Cuba has no multiparty elections, no organized opposition, and no major figureheads like Machado for regime change advocates to rally around. Experts believe that Cuban security forces run a tighter ship than Venezuela’s—a belief evidently shared by both Hugo Chávez and Maduro himself, who was defended by a praetorian guard of Cuban operatives when the U.S. raided Caracas and killed dozens of them. There is nobody positioned to step in and take the reins should the blockade topple Cuba’s socialist government completely.
Cuba also lacks an obvious natural resource like Venezuela’s oil that could be used to capitalize on Trump’s well-documented fixation on plundering natural resources, like his plan to “take the oil” in Iraq. Cuba even lacks the “narco-terror” casus belli ginned up for Venezuela, as the Cubans have historically cooperated with the U.S. on anti-trafficking initiatives in the Caribbean and continue to offer to do so. If an oil blockade collapses Cuba’s government, the ensuing power vacuum on the island could foster a narco-trafficker haven 90 miles off U.S. shores.
The catastrophic economic collapse that beset Cuba in 2021—triggered by the dual hits to the tourism industry from COVID-19 and Trump’s sanctions—drove more than 442,000 undocumented Cubans to the U.S. border, part of a staggering 18 percent drop in the country’s population from 2022 to 2023. Progressive opponents of sanctions in Congress have sought to tie sanctions to mass migration in Latin America, and while Venezuela hawks seem to have convinced Trump that Maduro deliberately sent an unsavory cast of migrants to the U.S., no such case has been made to apply to Cuba yet. The White House may fear a humanitarian crisis that spikes migration levels anew. The issue of Cuban migration has already sparked tensions within Trump’s coalition between the anti-communist Florida diaspora and the immigration hard-liners who seek to deport their family members.
These complications could foreshadow another disappointment for Rubio and the Floridians hopeful to finally oust the Castro family. As far back as his 2016 GOP primary campaign, Trump said of the cold U.S.-Cuba relations that “50 years is enough,” and that Obama “should have made a stronger deal.” Indeed, Trump recently said, “We’re starting to talk to Cuba,” and that “[Cuba] probably would come to us and want to make a deal.” In an interview with CNN, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister said the country was ready for “meaningful” dialogue with the U.S. New reporting suggests Rubio’s State Department could be actively lying to Trump about whether these talks are happening, another sign that Rubio knows he needs to skirt his boss’s dealmaking tendencies. Trump’s threatened tariffs on Mexico for selling Cuba oil may never come to fruition, as the U.S. and Mexico are in active trade talks over the USMCA, and Trump repeatedly balked at implementing tariffs on Mexico after “Liberation Day.”
While Cuba has little oil of its own for Trump to plunder, there are potential economic benefits (and perhaps some graft) to Trump in engagement; U.S. agribusiness and its supporters in Congress have long pushed for expanded access to Cuba’s markets, a particularly noteworthy concern at a time when agricultural producers are badly squeezed by Trump’s trade wars and feeling jilted by curious policy decisions like Trump’s announcement of a mass purchase of Argentine beef. Cuba’s flagging tourism industry could even provide Trump an opportunity to invest with favorable terms and line his own pockets. Trump’s surprisingly cordial engagement with post-Maduro Venezuela shows how he could benefit from a “Nixon in China” effect, wherein his reputation for flagrant militarism and “FAFO” retaliation gives him an unusual runway to negotiate away an embargo that has become baked in in Washington.
The Miami gang may be reading the tea leaves in Venezuela and sensing they have limited time to push Trump for regime change in Havana before his next deal-making about-face. The enormous human price that innocent Cubans are paying for Miami’s regime change obsession goes without saying; when Rep. Salazar waves away “a mother’s hunger” as an acceptable price for isolating the socialists, she’s not speaking of hypotheticals. Trump hasn’t changed course yet, and his push to deprive Cuba of both Venezuelan and Mexican oil is exacerbating the worst economic crisis in the island’s post-1959 history and causing longer and more frequent blackouts. Experts recently assessed that Cuba only has a few short weeks’ worth of oil left should supplies dry up. The Cuban population has endured deep hardship across more than six decades of the U.S. blockade, but these times may be the hardest yet.
Trump’s Venezuela détente hasn’t just scrambled the politics for Republicans. Congressional Democrats have also contorted themselves into an ideological pretzel—voting for a Venezuela war powers resolution to restrain Trump while simultaneously lauding Maduro’s removal and pushing Trump to install Machado. Democrats have turned to deploying and legitimizing a line against Trump that has historically been used against their own: You can’t cut a deal with the bad guys. While congressional Democrats have a longer and deeper history of opposing the blockade on Cuba, which President Obama substantially relaxed, a Trump deal could engender some reflexive hawkishness from Democrats, much as his incomplete regime change in Venezuela has.
The ideological battle over Trump’s foreign policy is very much in flux—one need look no further for proof than Lindsey Graham’s desperate pleas that the president bomb Iran. Florida Republicans may have gotten Trump to bomb Caracas, kidnap a head of state, and tighten the economic noose on Cuba. Paradoxically, their grip on Latin America policy may be closer than ever to slipping away. If Trump defies hawkish orthodoxy and cuts a deal with Cuba, for graft or otherwise, ordinary Cubans will almost certainly benefit nonetheless. If the Floridians get their way, Cuba may see suffering like never before.
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