President Trump said Monday that Cuba’s communist government is collapsing and predicted it will be gone soon. He spoke in the White House briefing room on the same day Secretary of State Marco Rubio, at a G7 meeting in Paris, said bringing change to the island remains a priority for the administration.
“Cuba is falling. It’s a failing nation. It’s got an ideology very similar to what the Democrat ideology is,” Trump said, in a clip posted by the Trump War Room account on X. “We’ll see what happens. Cuba is going to be interesting. I would imagine it will fall fairly soon.”
Trump described the regime as communist and socialist and said the United States is already sending the Cuban people humanitarian help, according to CiberCuba, a news site that covers the island. He did not say what that help includes.
Rubio lays out the terms
Rubio spoke to reporters in Paris on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting, and the State Department released his remarks. As reported by CiberCuba, he called the men who run Cuba stubborn and said Washington will keep working on the issue because it is a priority.
Rubio said the United States wants Cubans to be able to earn a living on their own, as people do in nearly every other country in the hemisphere, without depending on the government. He accused the regime of choking off private economic activity on purpose, so that ordinary people must rely on the state for everything they have. He said that model has driven millions of Cubans to leave, many of them for the United States, and called the island’s instability a threat to American security.
He also pointed to GAESA, the business conglomerate run by Cuba’s armed forces, and said people tied to the regime keep large sums in foreign bank accounts while the population goes without. Asked whether his earlier call for Cubans to work with the CIA had produced results, Rubio declined to answer, saying disclosure could put people at risk.
Rubio noted that the U.S. embargo is written into law and cannot be lifted unless Cuba makes political changes. Last week the State Department added sanctions aimed at networks that serve the Cuban military elite and their foreign suppliers.
Life under the regime
Meanwhile, Cubans are sitting in the dark. On Saturday the state electric company, the UNE, forecast that it could meet only about 38 percent of nighttime demand, with 1,070 megawatts available against demand of 2,830 megawatts, CiberCuba reported, citing the state portal Cubadebate. On Friday, the shortfall peaked at 1,814 megawatts.
The island’s thermoelectric plants have run for more than 40 years, and the regime lacks the hard currency to buy spare parts.
The bottom line
The President is right about Cuba, and he is right to say it out loud. A government that cannot keep the lights on for its own people after 67 years in power has failed on its own terms. The blackouts come from decades of central planning by a regime that put its generals’ bank accounts ahead of its power plants.
Rubio is offering the Cuban people a future built on private work and private property, and he is holding the line on the embargo until the regime gives ground. That policy should not change because Democrats will run Congress in January.
The administration should keep the sanctions on GAESA and the military elite, keep helping ordinary Cubans directly and be ready to support a free Cuba the day this regime goes.