In the days immediately following the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the United States chose a special envoy who has not been publicly nominated. Since then, this envoy has been speaking with the Cuban leadership to propose the following deal on behalf of President Donald Trump’s administration.
This is the first step of the deal: that in the coming months, the Castro regime’s leadership will leave the island and fly to Moscow, where their old ally, Vladimir Putin, would be willing to receive them — and add them to Bashar al-Assad’s ranks in a living gallery of deposed tyrants.
The second step of the deal implies that, in Cuba, the leadership of the socialist tyranny must appoint a man or woman to assume an interim role to call for democratic elections. When should this happen, according to this first proposal from the White House? By the end of 2026. Yes, you read that right: in the next 11 months.
This information came from high-ranking sources in the State Department to the very well-informed former Argentine Vice President Carlos Ruckauf, who shared the plan for the Cuban regime in a recent interview with the influential political scientist Agustín Laje.
Conflicting Statements and Military Tension
Aboard Air Force One and surrounded by journalists, Trump assured: “We are talking with Cuba, and you will know very soon.” It remains to be seen whether the Castro regime will accept the deal or not. Will it continue to bog down an entire people in “revolutionary intransigence,” or will it learn the lesson that Maduro learned the hard way and which has him sleeping in a federal prison in New York?
However, hours later, the designated dictator on the island, Miguel Díaz-Canel, emphasized that “there are no conversations with the U.S. government, except for technical contacts in the area of ??migration.”
Two possibilities arise from these words. Either Díaz-Canel is not included in or aware of the conversations, since the White House envoy would not deal with a political figurehead of the nonagenarian Raúl Castro, who continues to control the country’s destiny from his comfortable residence in Cayo Saetía. Or the technical contact regarding migration is about the migration of the entire Cuban socialist elite.
Meanwhile, the United States recently moved two amphibious transport ships to waters north of Cuba; and the regime responded by recruiting young men to use as cannon fodder in a possible U.S. action.
Trump Brings Pressure
Trump posted on social media that the island had long lived off Venezuelan oil and money and had offered security in return, “BUT NOT ANYMORE! THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA - ZERO!” And continued urging: “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
The message on Truth Social remained in limbo, awaiting further details. But there were none.
However, the U.S. ambassador in Havana, Mike Hammer, confirmed Trump’s words this week. “When President Trump says something, he means it, and it’s very clear,” he commented in perfect Spanish. “We’ll leave it at that, I can’t go into details; but I think the intention is well known, the support that this administration, President Trump, Secretary of State Rubio, have for the Cuban people, whom I have come to know well, and we will continue to support them.”
Rubio’s Central Role
Marco Rubio, the architect of U.S. diplomacy and who has ensured the implementation of the “Donroe Doctrine,” has become a viral figure in popular culture these days through memes in which he changes clothes, pointing to the many new jobs the administration gives him — the internet has dressed him as everything from an ayatollah to someone in olive green smoking a cigar. Rubio is hardworking, no doubt.
And now he is embarking on moving the last Berlin Wall, the red island that cuts across the Caribbean, like a wound in the chest of the Americas.
His interest in the fate of Cuba would stem not only from his position on foreign policy but also from a more personal place. Born in 1971 in Miami to Cuban exile parents, Rubio grew up among people who experienced socialist oppression. And if there’s one thing we Cubans who went into exile know, it’s that these stories resurface at family dinners, gatherings with friends, and nightly prayers as frequently as waves on the beach.
In his meteoric political career, which began in 1998 as a commissioner of West Palm Beach, Florida, and later as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he has become the crowning achievement in what I have called a golden age for Cuban-American diplomacy.
It would be poetic justice if a Cuban born in exile were to deliver the final blow to the dictatorship that ruined his family’s life, and the lives of so many millions more, destabilizing the region and compromising the national security of the United States.
Rubio is an outspoken Christian; meanwhile, in contrast, the socialist regime he is now seeking to end has been profoundly anti-Christian since its inception. In that spirit, I would offer this unsolicited advice to the butchers in Havana, one that appears in Matthew 5:25: settle matters quickly with your adversary, “while you are still with him on the way.”
