For Rubio the Cuba Hawk, the Road to Havana Runs Through VenezuelaMr. Rubio, now Mr. Trump’s secretary of state and interim national security adviser, is a primary architect of an escalating military pressure campaign against Venezuela. And while pushing out Mr. Maduro appears to be one immediate goal of U.S. policy, doing so could help fulfill another decades-long dream of Mr. Rubio’s: dealing a critical blow to Cuba.
“Their theory of change involves cutting off all support to Cuba,” said Juan S. Gonzalez, who was President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s top White House aide for Western Hemisphere affairs. “Under this approach, once Venezuela goes, Cuba will follow.”
Mr. Rubio has hinted at the idea in public, telling NPR in early 2019 that a weakened Cuba would be a welcome “byproduct” of a change in Venezuela’s government, even if it were not “the central rationale” for pushing out Mr. Maduro. “Anything that’s bad for a communist dictatorship is something I support,” he said.
In private, he has been more direct. As a senator, Mr. Rubio routinely discussed Mr. Maduro’s support for Havana in detail with his colleagues, as well as with U.S. officials and foreign diplomats, according to a former Senate aide who was often present for the discussions. The former aide said Mr. Rubio had “articulated a vision” in which splitting Venezuela from Cuba would have disastrous consequences for the Cuban government.
In 2019, Mr. Rubio and aides to Mr. Trump took what they saw as an important lesson from the failed push against Mr. Maduro that April: Cuba had been the pivotal player in saving Mr. Maduro, not his people or his generals.
Cuban intelligence had tipped off Mr. Maduro to the plot, and Cuban operatives inside his country helped him crush it, Mr. Bolton and other former officials said. Cuba also had a plane waiting, ready to whisk Mr. Maduro away — to Havana, Trump officials said at the time.
The Trump administration sharply escalated its pressure campaign against Mr. Maduro when it seized a tanker with Venezuelan oil in the Caribbean Sea on Wednesday. The tanker had offloaded some oil to a smaller ship bound for Cuba before going toward China, The New York Times reported on Friday.
A Cuban opposition figure, José Daniel Ferrer, who fled to the United States in October after being released from prison and met with Mr. Rubio, said in an interview that deposing Mr. Maduro “would also favor the fall, or possible fall, of the regime in Havana, which is the matrix of evil.”
Mr. Ferrer said he and Mr. Rubio discussed the ties between Venezuela and Cuba in their State Department meeting last month.
In a social media post on Friday, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who has worked closely with Mr. Rubio, described the endgame: “Hopefully the end of Mr. Maduro’s reign of terror in Venezuela is near, and then we can focus on Cuba, one of his greatest allies and one of the most oppressive regimes in our backyard.”
>Exile PoliticsFor Mr. Rubio, seeing Cuba’s government crumble would be a lifelong dream come true.
Mr. Rubio’s parents, Mario and Oriales, immigrated to Florida from Cuba three years before the triumph of Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in 1959. Rising through Florida Republican politics, Mr. Rubio cast himself as a sworn enemy of Mr. Castro (“an evil, murderous dictator”) and his successors.
“Rubio emerges out of the anti-Cuban politics of Miami,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama.
Mr. Rhodes managed Mr. Obama’s partial restoration of U.S. economic and diplomatic ties with Cuba and interacted with Mr. Rubio at the time. “He’s always been rooted in a regime change policy toward Havana — it’s core to his identity,” Mr. Rhodes said.
“There’s always been an article of faith in Miami that if the Venezuelan domino falls, the Cuban domino will follow,” he added.
Since joining the Trump administration, Mr. Rubio has pressed his cause directly, ordering new sanctions on Cuban government officials, activities and businesses.
>The CrucibleThe modern Cuba-Venezuela partnership emerged from Mr. Castro’s admiration for Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, a champion of the poor who staged a failed revolution before winning an election to take power as president in 1999.
Cuba has a singular pull on Latin America hawks, and especially for those from diaspora families like Mr. Rubio’s, said Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine, which opposes U.S. regime change efforts. Those hawks see leftist governments in the region, from Nicaragua to Venezuela, “as ultimately rather hapless appendages of Havana.”
“Cuba,” he said, “is the crucible.”
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