Marco Rubio has long set his sights on liberating Cuba from Communism, riding a wave of Cuban-Exile idolization to the White House. He also lied about his parents fleeing Castro’s Cuba as “exiles.”
Jan 20, 2026
(The Havana statue of Jose Marti, the father of the Cuban Independence movement, and one of the most prolific writers in the Spanish language. Photo by Steve Villano, 2017)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is on sort of a roll lately, if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands of human beings whose deaths he directly caused this year because he cut the guts out of USAID, which distributed $40 billion worldwide before Trump’s second term, for food assistance, medical care, training police and combatting drug trafficking, often to the most impoverished people on earth.
No, it wasn’t Elon Musk nor the DOGE dogs that did it, by Rubio’s own admission. Earlier this year, Rubio bragged to the Senate Appropriations committee, when questioned about who made the decision to eviscerate USAID’s life-saving work:
“The DOGE team didn’t do anything. I did it. I was the one who made the decision. I remember being in a hotel—I believe in Guatamala—going through line by line, spreadsheets of contracts that were cancelled.”
What kind of Secretary of State—other than Henry Kissinger, the last to be both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor 50 years ago—would pump himself up by proudly taking credit for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings? What kind of human being does that, especially one who fashions himself as a devout Christian?
Since the beginning of his tenure in the US Senate 15 years ago, Rubio has wanted to be the head hombre hatching and crafting US policy in Central and South America—kind of a modern day John Foster Dulles (Eisenhower’s Secretary of State) and Allen Dulles (head of CIA and John’s brother) all in one; a kind of solo entrepreneur for American Imperialism in Latin America. He told Trump as much when the US Senate confirmed Rubio as Secretary of State by a 99-0 vote, on January 20, 2025. He was Trump’s first major appointment in his second term.
In an article in the January 12, 2026, New Yorker by Dexter Filkins entitled: “How Marco Rubio Went from Little Marco to Trump’s Foreign Policy Enabler,” Rubio’s worldview was ripped raw for all to see:
“For Rubio, who grew up among Cuban immigrants in Florida, hostility toward leftist governments in Latin America was kind of a birthright. As recently as 2023, he had warned of ‘the horrors occurring not far from our shores.’ People who knew him say that was not just rhetoric.
“He really believed that Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and Columbia should be great countries and staunchly anti-communist,” a former US official said. Rubio has a special loathing for Nicolas Maduro, whose regime devastated Venezuela’s economy and sent millions of its citizens streaming out of its country.
As Rubio said at the time of Maduro’s capture (or kidnapping) by US forces on New Year’s weekend, Maduro was surrounded by Cuban intelligence officers, many of whom died in the US raid.
The New Yorker elaborates:
“Maduro was aided substantially by Cuban intelligence officers, who helped root out threats to his rule. As part of the alliance, Venezuela sent Cuba about 50,000 barrels of oil a day, propping up an otherwise desperate economy. In Florida, the expat community has long dreamed that if Maduro fell, his allies in Havana would follow.”
A former Florida politician who knows Rubio, painted a clear picture for the New Yorker of the emerging political landscape for Rubio:
“If Rubio took down Maduro and the regime in Cuba, he’d be a hero in Miami forever.” A successful intervention could also build support in his base for another run at the White House. “It’s part of the Rubio-for-President strategy,” said a former US official who worked in Latin America.”
The irony here, is that while Rubio spent time growing up in the midst of an authentic, and angry, West Miami community of “exiles” from “Castro’s Cuba,” his own family were not exiles, despite Rubio casually spreading that falsehood to get elected to the US Senate.
Rubio’s parent, Marco and Oriales Rubio, left Cuba in May,1956—more than two-and-a half-years before Fidel Castro came to power on January 1, 1959. They suffered under the right wing dictator and corrupt kleptocrat General Fulgencio Batista, who ruled the country with an iron fist from 1952 through 1958—when John and Allen Dulles handpicked Batista to protect US interests, and cooperate closely with the CIA’s teammates in Havana, Meyer Lansky and American Organized Crime.
It was Batista’s denial of fundamental rights and economic justice for the Cuban working people, and his lapdog-like fealty to the CIA and the Mafia—who paid him thousands of dollars per week to let them freely operate their drug, gambling and prostitution industries—that drove Rubio’s parents out of Cuba, seeking better economic opportunities—and drove many other Cubans, who remained in Cuba, into the arms of Revolutionaries seeking to liberate Cuba from the three-way stranglehold of US Intelligence, US economic and Mafia authoritarianism. To many Cubans, Castro was the second-coming of Jose Marti, who gave his life fighting for Cuba’s independence from Spain, their rulers who had kept Cubans in slavery until 1886.
In her detailed book on life in Cuba entitled Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (by Julia E. Sweig, 3r Edition, Oxford University Press, 2016), the author finds:
“By mid-decade (1950’s) US capital controlled over 40% of the Cuban sugar industry, 23% of all non-sugar industry, 90% of all telephone and electric service and 50% of Cuban railway service. Havana, long a tourist destination for Americans, experienced a boom in the sex and gambling industries, both of which were promoted by the American Mob…”
Under Batista, there was little concern giving for the average working family, forcing Marco Rubio’s parents to seek their “American Dream” in Florida, where generations of “expat” Cubans sought refuge and a better life, going back to the Spanish occupation of the Island, 100 years earlier. Rubio’s parents—Little Marco wasn’t born until 1971 in Miami—weren’t “exiles from communist Cuba,” as Senator Rubio often lied; they escaped from a corrupt, right-wing, Mob & CIA run government that served US and Mafia financial interests, and enabled Batista to amass a $300 million fortune (in 1958 dollars) when he fled to the Dominican Republic (with help from both the Mob and the CIA) when Castro came to power.
(End of Part 1)