From an office on the seventh floor of the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, Secretary of State Marco Rubio plays at managing the life of an entire island, with the absolute coldness of someone who considers himself infallible and above the law.
He is not just another hawk in the bellicose aviary of the U.S. capital; he is the efficient employee, the meticulous watchmaker who fine-tunes the gears of others' suffering. He is not a bureaucrat who merely signs off on orders from others; he is the hand tightening the screws of economic strangulation, decreeing the genocide of an entire people.
He knows the levers of power and the timing of American politics with precision. He wants to be president and believes his time has come, supported by the pro-Israel lobby and the anti-Cuban mafia in Miami.
His ties to the pro-Zionist lobby are longstanding. Norman Braman, a Jewish philanthropist from Miami, has been Rubio's largest individual donor; through his organization, Americans for Progress, he contributed more than two million dollars to groups that supported the Republican politician in the 2022 election cycle.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) even launched a six-figure digital advertising campaign in Florida supporting Rubio's reelection on October 12, 2022. These are just a few examples.
On the other hand, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), created in 1981 by Jorge Mas Canosa, perhaps the most influential organization of the radical exile community, is a cornerstone of Marco's career.
Likewise, the US-Cuba Democracy PAC, created in 2003 by businesspeople hostile to Havana, is another key funder of Rubio.
Without the militant support of the hardline exile community, he would be a nobody in the American political spectrum; in every campaign, the CANF structure, the Mas family businesses, the counterrevolutionary media, and the exile activists have functioned as a cohesive movement that guarantees him a secure base and high voter turnout.
His political identity is built on defending a hard line toward Cuba, the rhetoric of the "dictatorship," and the promise never to normalize relations without a complete regime change.
Let's remember that Al Cárdenas, former director of the Florida Republican Party and a historical figure in the Cuban exile community, "discovered" him when he was a young lawyer, brought him into the conservative power circle, introduced him to donors, and paved his way to the presidency of the state House and later to the Senate.
This list wouldn't be complete without the Fanjul family, Alfonso "Alfy" and José "Pepe," heirs to a sugar empire that originated in Cuba before the Revolution and who, after the expropriation of the sugar mills in 1960, rebuilt their fortune in Florida.
The family has made no secret of its desire to see its former properties on the island returned, and Rubio has made this demand a central point of his discourse: insisting that any normalization requires compensation for the confiscated properties, which would directly benefit the Fanjuls.
Rubio is the ultimate embodiment of the alliance between the anti-Cuban lobby, the economic power of the exile community, and the conservative right. In return, he has been the most faithful servant of the blockade and the strangulation, closing off all avenues for understanding and transforming policy toward Cuba into a private fiefdom shielded by vested interests.
Rubio has decision-making power, a budget, influence, and the power to halt the very machinery he helped build; but he chooses not to. He chooses to blockade, he chooses to lie.
