Trump hints Cuba takeover as Rubio pushes regime change

Trump hints – President Donald Trump has said other presidents looked at Cuba for “50, 60 years,” adding “it looks like I’ll be the one that does it.” He also previously suggested a “friendly takeover of Cuba.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Cuban-American hawks i

When President Donald Trump talked about Cuba during a brief Oval Office chat with reporters last week, it didn’t sound like a distant option. It sounded like a job he believes he can personally finish.

“If you ask me,” Trump told reporters, “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years, doing something. And it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. And it would be happy to do it.” The line landed with the weight of a promise—especially coming from a White House that has struggled to stay steady as it enters its next confrontation with the world.

Just weeks earlier. on the eve of Trump’s war with Iran. he had floated a different idea: that a “friendly takeover of Cuba” might be on the cards. The language was striking, and not only because of what it implied. It also came at a time when the administration was already looking to pressure rivals with the kind of disruption that has. in this story. repeatedly been paired with hope for a change regime leaders can point to.

At the center of this push is Secretary of State Marco Rubio. and Rubio’s orbit in the Cuban-American political world of South Florida. For Rubio and others in that right-wing Cuban-American universe that “birthed and nurtured him. ” the opportunity to bring down the faltering Cuban government is framed in deeply personal terms. The same political energy is also bound up with anger over Cuba’s revolutionary history and a drive for outcomes that go beyond diplomacy.

The pressure isn’t only political—it’s also legal. The Justice Department made what the article describes as a “bizarre decision” to indict Raúl Castro. Cuba’s 94-year-old former president and the last survivor of the revolutionary leadership that seized power in 1959. The indictment is tied to a “murky incident three decades in the past.”.

That incident dates to 1996, when Cuban fighters shot down two U.S. private planes, killing four people. The episode is being treated differently depending on where people sit: it can be described as an avoidable tragedy. a dreadful mistake. or a war crime. But the piece stresses that outrage about the 1996 episode appears selective when compared with other mass-casualty wars. including the 1. 700 civilian deaths from the U.S. bombing campaign in Iran, which includes at least 250 children, and the 75,000 civilian deaths of Israel’s war in Gaza.

If Cuba is now being placed in the crosshairs. it is also because the administration is searching for what the article calls a “second Venezuela”—a weaker. smaller nation it can victimize after the “extraordinary humiliation” of its botched war with Iran. Whether Cuba becomes a target for military intervention, and whether any intervention would succeed, is presented as far from certain. The argument is blunt: there is no substitute leader or deposed figure that U.S. power could install the way it is described as having been done in Venezuela. or hoped for in Iran—at least not without full-on invasion. conquest. and occupation.

That is why the article places a spotlight on timing and trajectory. It notes that Barack Obama began forging what it characterizes as more reasonable and humane relations with both Cuba and Iran barely a decade ago. implying that today’s turn is running against the grain of earlier efforts at engagement.

Rubio’s role, in this telling, is not just policy. It’s influence. The piece argues that Trump understands the issue “only in the vaguest and most vainglorious terms,” and suggests Rubio has been “dripping poison in his ear.”

For some of the administration’s skeptics. the legal and historical backdrop makes the current rhetoric feel like a revival of older authorities. The article says Rubio likely knows about the 1901 Platt Amendment, which granted the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuba anytime it wanted “to maintain ‘a government adequate for the protection of life. property. and individual liberty.’” It also points out the amendment was removed from Cuba’s constitution in 1940. many years before Fidel Castro. Still. it questions whether Trump’s legal team and a Supreme Court majority could find a way to argue it is somehow still in force.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is brought in to frame another concern: susceptibility to a war-minded faction. Murphy told Andrew Roth of the Guardian last week that Trump “spends his days sleeping and worrying only about his ballroom. ” and that he has become “increasingly susceptible” to a “crowd of Cuba hawks who have always wanted us to invade. ” who Murphy said may believe they can exploit an “increasingly checked-out old man.”.

The article also argues that the Cuba policy debate is being driven by two competing generations of longing and grievance. For Cuban Americans who grew up on the hard line of the Bay of Pigs era. it’s covert warfare and revenge that still hold emotional power. For those attached to old revolutionary socialism. it is the hope of survival for a state that once offered promise—now stuck in a failing shape.

Still, it insists the human and social story inside Cuba is not as simple as the slogans aimed at overthrow. It describes the revolutionary society under Fidel Castro as neither as grim as the police states of the Soviet bloc nor as “awesome” as it appeared during the radical-chic years that drove many Florida exiles “insane.” It says Cuba made “enormous strides” in providing universal education and free healthcare to all citizens. and notes that as recently as the COVID pandemic the country could still offer a level of social services “far above” those available to lower-income Americans.

The piece then confronts the tradeoff it sees at the center of Cuba’s system: those achievements came with an autocratic, bureaucratic and increasingly corrupt regime that suppressed free expression and imprisoned or expelled poets, artists, and political dissidents.

That mix—social provision alongside repression—is presented as part of why the question of intervention is so loaded. If Cuba is facing sanctions imposed by American politicians who claim to act in Cuba’s best interests. the article says ordinary Cubans may feel trapped between what it calls “two fading 20th-century hangovers. ” served with rum and “tepid seawater.” It adds that “nobody in either country voted for any of this. ” leaving the debate to play out among outsiders and heirs of past politics.

The article’s closing mood is uneasy rather than triumphant: it argues that change is always possible, even in the darkest hour, and that defeat is not forever—while still warning that the Cuban tragedy has lingered through unanswered questions, fatal mistakes, and sliding-doors alternatives.

In the meantime. Trump’s words are already on the record. Rubio’s push for regime change is framed as personal and persistent. and the Justice Department’s indictment of Raúl Castro keeps the legal pressure moving. Whether the administration’s next step is another diplomatic escalation. a covert turn. or something closer to invasion remains unresolved—but the stakes. as the story tells it. are moving faster than caution.

United States politics Cuba Donald Trump Marco Rubio Raúl Castro regime change Platt Amendment 1996 shootdown Justice Department sanctions foreign policy Oval Office remarks