With Rubio's selection as next secretary of state, Cuba leaders' worst fears come true

A group of Cuban-American Republicans is poised to play prominent roles in the upcoming Trump administration and Congress in the coming years, bringing to life the worst fear of the Cuban regime: that Cuban exiles and their descendants would be able to dictate U.S. policy toward the island.

News that President-elect Donald Trump will pick Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as the next secretary of state, the first Hispanic and the first Cuban American in such a role, doubtless spread shock waves in Havana, where he is regularly demonized in state media as the nation’s enemy.

And Rubio is likely to be joined in Washington by other like-minded Cuban Americans in a position to influence U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba and the entire Latin American region.

U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart may be in line to become the next chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, while Carlos Trujillo, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Organization of Americas States during Trump’s first term, may be nominated as the next assistant secretary of state for Latin America affairs or a similar position, sources told the Miami Herald.

As the chair of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, María Elvira Salazar, another Cuban American Republican from Miami, said on X that she shared with Rubio “the commitment to fighting communism and protecting freedom.”

In a publication in Spanish trolling the rulers of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, she added that “it is time to extirpate the cancer of socialism.”

Rubio has been one of the most vocal opponents of the Cuban government in Congress.

When President Barack Obama announced in December 2014 that he was restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, Rubio vowed to do “everything possible” to block the engagement policies in Congress.

“The President’s decision to reward the Castro regime and begin the path toward the normalization of relations with Cuba is inexplicable,” Rubio said at the time. “Cuba, like Syria, Iran, and Sudan, remains a state sponsor of terrorism…. Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naiveté during his final two years in office. As a result, America will be less safe.”

He hammered Obama for going to Havana to meet Raúl Castro and called his decision to remove Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism “terrible.” And when President Biden took office, Rubio urged him not to repeat “Obama’s concessions.”

“We know far too well who would suffer: those who seek a freer, more democratic Cuba, including the island’s dissidents, political prisoners, artists, and activists. Instead of turning our backs on them, it is critical for American leaders to support those brave Cubans standing up to a brutal communist regime,” he wrote at the time in an opinion piece in the Miami Herald.

Cuban leaders’ animosity against Rubio stems not just from the fact he is the Miami son of Cuban parents who vehemently oppose communism on the island, but also because he was the mastermind behind sanctions against the Cuban military under the first Trump administration.

The policy, left in place by President Biden, successfully deprived the military conglomerate Gaesa, which controls much of the country’s economy, of much of the foreign currency it used to get, and redirected it toward the private sector

Cuban government officials, who routinely criticize the U.S. on social media, have not publicly commented on Trump’s victory nor Rubio’s nomination.

With Rubio with a seat in the Cabinet as the top U.S. diplomat, more pressure against Cuba and other authoritarian regimes in Latin America he has regularly denounced, like Venezuela and Nicaragua, is likely.

“The tyrants in Havana, Caracas and Managua will not sleep today,” said Miami U.S. Rep. Carlos Giménez in a post on X Monday evening. In a video, Giménez, the only Cuba-born member of Congress, said Rubio’s nomination “is a great honor for Cuban-Americans and we are super proud of everything the senator has accomplished.”

A key architect

Another Cuban American who was a key architect of Trump’s Cuba and Venezuela policy during his first term in office, Mauricio Claver-Carone, is helping Trump’s transition team set priorities regarding U.S. policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean.

“There are no surprises; we know what President Trump’s priorities will be: immigration and protecting the border; confront tyrannies and organized crime in the region and protect American influence in our hemisphere,” said Claver-Carone, a former Treasury Department and National Security Council senior director in the Trump administration and former president of the Inter-American Development Bank.

Even if Cuba is not at the top of the list of foreign policy priorities for the second Trump administration — which will have to deal with wars in Ukraine and Gaza, an emboldened Iran and an increasingly aggressive China — Cuba can expect the same pressure that it encountered during his first term.

“The main focus should be on modernizing Cuba sanctions so that they can have third-party effects, akin to the Venezuela sanctions,” Claver-Carone said.

If the Cuban government fails to cooperate with Trump’s promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants or is seen propping up Maduro in Venezuela, both likely possibilities, it could open itself to more sanctions, sources told the Herald.

For the Cuban government, Trump’s victory and Rubio’s nomination come at the worst possible moment.

The country is on a path similar to that of failing states — the bankrupt government can no longer provide basic services in the midst of the most severe economic crisis in several decades. The combined effects of failed economic policies, government mismanagement and tightened U.S. sanctions have rapidly accelerated the country’s downward spiral. And yet, Cuban hardliners seem to stand in the way of further reforms and an expansion of an emerging private sector.

While Russia, Venezuela, Mexico and China have sent emergency humanitarian aid to help the Cuban government deal with the effects of several recent natural disasters, including an earthquake and two hurricanes, the island’ political allies have signaled they will not rescue the country’s economy unless Cuban leaders embark on modernizing its centrally planned economy.

Missed opportunities

The second Trump administration is unlikely to find strong opposition to tightening sanctions on Cuba, as many Cuban Americans who supported President Barack Obama’s engagement policies have grown disappointed with how the Cuban government has squandered several opportunities to improve relations with the U.S. while holding more than a thousand political prisoners in its jails.

Progressives in Congress have burned political capital by traveling to the island and advocating for the easing of sanctions, only to find that the Cuban government has been reluctant to make any concessions regarding the political prisoners.

And Cuban leaders have baffled Biden officials by failing to react to the historic approval by the U.S. Treasury Department of U.S. investments in the private sector on the island. The Cuban government never authorized those investments on their end.

While China and other countries have used U.S. sanctions as opportunities to restructure or strengthen their economies, “Cuba just complains and asks others to help them so they do not have to make difficult decisions,” said John Kavulich, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, who was granted the first Treasury license to invest and provide financing to a small private business in Cuba.

Kavulich believes the conversation between Rubio, members of Congress and Trump officials will likely center around how productive it would be to push Cuba and Venezuela to achieve regime change.

Already, former U.S. officials in the Trump and Biden administrations have shared concerns about what could happen on the island in a transition amid what many see as a leadership vacuum.

But if Rubio wants to keep his presidential aspirations — he ran for president in the Republican primary in 2016 — he will need accomplishments, and Cuba and Venezuela policy are areas in which he can excel, Kavulich said.

When Claver-Carone was appointed as senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council in 2018, “everyone involved in anything relating to Cuba was terrified because for the first time, there was a person whose previous life’s focus was Cuba and how to dismantle anything that smelled of engagement, cooperation, or appeasement,” Kavulich said.

The same will happen with Rubio in office, and this time with far more authority, he added.

“Rubio speaks Spanish and will have the capacity, energy, and desire to sit one-on-one with the heads of state and heads of government of the countries in the Americas to make his case about Cuba and Venezuela,” Kavulich said. “For Cuba, this is the worst of all nightmares – and one that could last four years.”