Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the Trump administration would “love” to see regime change in Cuba, hinting at future action in the country.
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) asked Rubio if the Trump administration would rule out regime change in Cuba, to which Rubio reacted with consternation.
“Regime change? Oh no, I think we would love to see the regime there change,” Rubio answered. “That doesn’t mean we are going to make a change, but we would love to see a change. There’s no doubt about the fact that it would be of great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime.”
He bemoaned the state of Cuba elsewhere in his hearing, saying the economy was so badly mismanaged that it was not even recognizable as communist.
“That’s a country that’s been backwards,” Rubio said. “It has no functional economy. The people, you can call them Marxists, we can call them communists, but not even Lenin would recognize this version of communism and Marxism that they’ve instilled in Cuba.”
“It’s an economic model … it hasn’t worked anywhere on the planet,” he added. “The suffering in the rural areas of Cuba are acute, and they’re deep. And it’s not because of the embargo, it’s because they don’t know how to run an economy. How is it the fault of the US embargo that Cuba, one of the world’s largest sugar producers, now imports sugar because no sector of their society works? It’s frozen and it’s broken.”
RUBIO SAYS MADURO CAPTURE WAS ‘TRIGGER-BASED OPERATION’
Havana has long been a target of Rubio, whose parents fled the communist takeover of Cuba. The regime has become increasingly isolated since the fall of the Soviet Union, and invested heavily in Venezuela as one of its only socialist allies. As Rubio has pointed out in the past, former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro’s entire security detail and much of his secret police were staffed by Cuban agents.
The cutoff of Venezuelan oil has put Havana in a critical position, something that the Trump administration may pounce on to end the longtime thorn in its side.
