U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington in March. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has long called for an end to the Communist dictatorship.JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
Hours before the U.S. Justice Department indicted former Cuban president Raúl Castro on murder charges this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered residents of the beleaguered island nation una nueva via – a new way – without the Castros, the iconic family that has dominated Cuba since the 1959 revolution.
In a Spanish-language video posted on X, Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who has long called for an end to the Communist dictatorship, blamed Cuba’s problems on the elites who oversee GAESA, the military-run conglomerate founded by Mr. Castro that controls most sectors of the economy, including tourism.
“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to a blockade by the United States,” Mr. Rubio insisted. “The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.”
He accused GAESA, formally known as Grupo de Administración Empresarial, S.A., of enriching its leaders and their families, while most of Cuba’s remaining population of around 9.5 million have suffered chronic shortages of food, fuel and medicine that long preceded the country’s current crisis.
Cuba’s ex-president Raúl Castro indicted in U.S. on murder charges
“Cuba is not controlled by any ‘revolution.’ Cuba is controlled by GAESA,” Mr. Rubio charged. “The only role played by the government is to demand that you continue making sacrifices and repressing anyone who dares to complain.”
To be sure, the immediate cause of the blackouts that have left Cubans in the dark in recent weeks is the U.S. blockade on oil shipments to the island from Venezuela since President Donald Trump authorized the January military raid that captured former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. But GAESA’s corruption and incompetence – it has failed to modernize Cuban industry, investing instead in (now empty) hotels built to house Canadian and European tourists – is at the root of the country’s economic collapse.
The indictment of the nearly 95-year-old Mr. Castro – the brother of the late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, who died in 2016 – may well serve as the pretext for a potential U.S. military invasion to capture the nonagenarian Mr. Castro, who succeeded his elder brother as president in 2008 before handing the reins to current President Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2018.
The U.S. charges relate to Cuba’s 1996 downing of two small planes operated by Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue), a Miami-based group that ran rescue missions over the Florida Straits in search of Cuban migrants in distress. The aerial assault left three Americans and a U.S. resident dead. Raúl Castro was Cuba’s defence minister at the time and, according to the indictment, sat atop the chain of command that ordered the strikes.
Despite formally surrendering formal titles, Mr. Castro and his extended family have remained at the centre of power in Cuba. Mr. Castro’s son, grandson and great-nephew are all influential players in Cuban affairs, leading many observers to conclude that the family still pulls the political strings, including at GAESA.
That leaves the Castros with the most to lose from any reforms aimed at opening up the Cuban economy or political system. By indicting Mr. Castro, and threatening to imprison him in the United States, the Trump administration may also seek to apply pressure on the family to remove itself from power and even go into exile in exchange for clemency for their patriarch.
That would clear the way for new leadership to take over, mimicking the situation that has emerged in Venezuela under President Delcy Rodríguez.
As a Florida senator until 2025, and member of the state’s fiercely anti-Castro Cuban-American community, Mr. Rubio had long sought to rid Cuba of the Castros. In 2014, he denounced former president Barack Obama’s moves then to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba and ease the decades-old U.S. embargo by allowing more travel and remittances to the island.
“Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naiveté,” Mr. Rubio said then.
Mr. Trump partially rolled back Mr. Obama’s measures in 2017. But during his first term, he did not heed the calls of the Cuban-Americans to indict Raúl Castro. The President’s embrace of a much bolder stance toward Cuba now is a direct result of Mr. Rubio’s influence.
Cuba’s long-suffering population deserves relief. But whether Cubans support the kind of change Mr. Rubio is promising remains another matter altogether. Seeing their country becoming a vassal of a Trump-led United States would not likely be their first choice.