Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks at the start of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting on Oct. 30, 2026, in Atlanta.
Photo: Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images
Imperial ambitions are
ever-shifting under President Donald Trump. Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba are oftentimes spoken about as one continuous train of complete victories and soon-to-be-complete-victories. With the
midterms
fast approaching, and the date for an apparent telegraphed return to the Iran war on its heels, talk of easily overthrowing regimes has returned, if it ever truly left.
At a rally in Florida last Friday, Trump
laid out
his grand vision, which he promised would come to pass once the Islamic Republic is neutralized as a threat to the world: “We’re going to come back from Iran. Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We’ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They’ll raise up their hands, and then we’re going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal.”
Rubio’s Paranoid Cuba Report Designed to “Justify a Military Attack on Cuba,” Says Democratic Rep.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the descendant of Cuban immigrants who left under President Fulgencio Batista (though Rubio later tried to
claim
his parents fled Castro, who came to power three years later), has long put overthrowing the Communist government in Havana at the top of his agenda, with the hope of replicating the relative
ease
of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Rubio turned some heads last Friday when he publicly
posted
on X that those seeking “to create positive change in Cuba” could “seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”
The post was widely met with bewilderment (Bloomberg’s White House correspondent
wrote
: “Checked like four times that this was real”), but U.S. officials and members of Congress also shared the post, elevating the public call for collab
