Thank You, Marco Rubio

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

The phrase “moral clarity” gets tossed around a lot these days, often by those who do not evince it. But there may be no better description for how Secretary of State Marco Rubio navigated an inquiry posed to him on Wednesday by Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz.

 

It’s not entirely illogical for Schatz to use a hearing devoted to the operation that resulted in Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s capture to compel Rubio to swear off a “U.S. regime change” operation in Cuba. Given the odor about the Iraq War in the public imagination, Schatz probably imagined that Trump’s chief diplomat would answer with a demure but unequivocal affirmative. Instead, Rubio summarily rejected Schatz’s premise.

 

“I think we would like to see the regime there change,” Rubio replied without hesitation. “That doesn’t mean that we’re going to make a change, but we would love to see a change. There’s no doubt about the fact that it would be of great value, a great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime.”

 

Schatz was not impressed. “You know what we mean by regime change,” he barked. Clearly, given Rubio’s preemptive declaration that Washington would not “make a change,” he did. Still, Schatz pressed the case: “We don’t mean, ‘I wish someone else were in charge,’” the Hawaii lawmaker continued. “When we talk about regime change, we’re talking about using the power of the United States, usually kinetic power, but often other kinds of coercion.”

 

Again, Rubio was impassive. He noted that U.S. law all but compels America to pursue regime change in Cuba. “It requires regime change in order for us to lift the embargo,” he said in an implicit rebuke of Barack Obama, for whom the law was no obstacle to his desire to normalize relations with Havana. “We want it to become a normal oil economy,” the secretary of state later remarked in response to a similar inquiry from Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley. “That’s what the ultimate goal is here.”

 

That prospect — the notion that floating commodities on the open market rather than nationalizing them, reserving whatever remaining profits are derived from a throttled energy sector for the families of communist cadres — is anathema to the left. And yet, as Rubio noted, what the left wants for Cuba, Venezuela, or any other socialist backwater is what ensures they will remain backwaters.

 

“It’s an economic model that hasn’t worked anywhere on the planet,” he said. And contrary to the socialist mythology, the embargo has nothing to do with it. “How is it the fault of the U.S. embargo that Cuba, one of the world’s largest sugar producers, now imports sugar?” Rubio asked. “It’s because no sector of their society works. It’s frozen, and it’s broken.”

 

It takes courage to not only acknowledge the truth that’s in front of all our eyes but to articulate it plainly for the benefit of the upper chamber’s most obtuse members. The communist regime in Cuba isn’t only oppressive and backward. It’s also a national security threat. Havana has bedeviled U.S. policymakers with its anti-Western adventurism since the unitary socialist republic’s founding. And Cuba’s attacks on U.S. interests are not ancient history. The alleged sonic attacks on U.S. government personnel, deemed “Havana Syndrome,” were a myth before they were attributed to Havana and its Russian allies. Moreover, it was considered “very unlikely” that those attacks were attributable to a “foreign weapon” until clandestine American operatives purchased one on the black market.

 

Not only would America be better off if the regime in Cuba collapsed, but the United States also has every rational and legal justification for pursuing that outcome. Thank you, Marco Rubio, for saying as much.