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On Monday evening, as his administration escalated air strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump openly mused about his next moves on Cuba. “It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter because they’re really down to, as they say , fumes. They have no energy, they have no money.” He told CNN last week that “Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon.”
From the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to a blockade on oil shipments to Cuba, President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape Latin America are in full swing—impacting millions of lives. People in Venezuela continue living under a repressive government now supplying oil to the US. Meanwhile, Cuba’s healthcare system has been strangled by the US-orchestrated fuel crisis there. The fear across the region is being fanned by a US arsenal aimed at killing what Trump has labeled drug dealers.
Across the globe, protestors have condemned the administration’s recent actions in Venezuela and Cuba. But as my new three-part video series for Mother Jones reveals, I saw a different story unfolding in my hometown.
Miami is home to the country’s largest Venezuelan community, which largely wanted Maduro gone, according to recent polling. It’s also home to a Cuban community that I was born into and helped raise me—one that has historically encouraged US-backed regime change.
At the same time, these communities—which had organized together to shape US foreign policy toward Latin America—now share another concern: the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The White House has targeted Venezuelan migrants at seemingly every turn, from revoking their temporary protected status to trying to use a wartime deportation law against them. And the administration is now repatriating Cuban migrants, who had long benefitted from uniquely generous immigration policy, in record numbers.
“If Cubans fall off the Republican bandwagon and the Democrats take the opportunity to do something about it, then you have a chance to shift things,” said Guillermo Grenier, the lead researcher behind Florida International University’s Cuba poll.
But the longheld assumption that younger Cubans would drive that shift has gone unfulfilled. In fact, polling shows that younger Cubans have swung rightward. It’s a reality that’s difficult to square with my personal experience.
When I turned 16, I didn’t get my driver’s license. This enraged my grandfather, who worked for decades as a driving instructor and bus driver. It also delighted him, because it meant he could keep picking me up from school. His car speakers always blared conservative talk radio, which in the runup to the 2016 election—and after spending eight hours closeted in an all-boys Catholic school—was the last thing I wanted to hear. Mostly I just sat silently, listening to what my grandfather agreed with and wondering what he would think of me if he were ever to truly know me.
It’s easy to remember the car radio and forget the time he took every day to wash out the tumbler, fill it with a cold drink, drive across town to spend a fraction of my day with me, and then drive across town again, back to Little Havana. During my grandfather’s life, I focused on political divides between us. After his passing, I’ve thought more about what united us.
Generational politics in Miami’s Cuban American community also produced the government official at the heart of all this. The complex history of US imperialism in Latin America is bigger than any one person. But we can’t understand our current chapter in that history without understanding Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles from Miami, is the senior US government official in charge of foreign policy. That includes the capture of Maduro, the oil blockade against Cuba, and regime change efforts elsewhere. He’s project managing US intervention in Cuba, with the president’s trust and backing. And Trump is reportedly testing Rubio’s name for a possible presidential run in 2028. And to understand how this man at the highest levels of government is reshaping global politics, we need to understand something he and I have in common: the experience of growing up Cuban American in Miami.
What does it mean to be an heir to the Cuban diaspora, a group both targeted by and largely encouraging US imperialism? Marco Rubio and I have different answers to that. His could explain where Venezuela, Latin America, and our world are heading—and why Rubio is steering us there.
