What Bothers Marco Rubio

By Randy Alonso Falcon on July 21, 2026

Facing criticism from all sides for his speech at the “anti-terrorism” summit concocted in Washington last week—a speech riddled with ambiguities and lacking in evidence—Marco Rubio and his State Department came out on Monday with an even worse piece of drivel in an attempt to show why Cuba is the “capital of communism” that threatens the United States.

The aim is to fabricate a new pretext—an argument rife with historical manipulation and sensationalism—in a renewed attempt to justify and desperately seek the support of the American public for their cruel and criminal economic war that punishes every Cuban family and citizen, as well as for their aspiration to launch a military attack on Cuba.

It also seeks to criminalize and intimidate progressive figures and forces in the United States—those who fight against the obscurantism, fascism, and racism that corrode American society—as well as anyone who opposes the aggressive official rhetoric against Cuba and who also shows human solidarity with the Cuban people.

According to the nearly 100-page report titled “Cuba, the Capital of 21st-Century Communism,” the small Caribbean nation is the primary cause of many political phenomena that have taken place in the United States over the past 60 years, and is therefore a cancer that must be eradicated.

It is the same litany that the Secretary of State has been repeating for some time and to which he is now attempting to give some “official backing.” As early as May 22, several U.S. media outlets, including a Tampa television station, reported: “Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters separately that Cuba has been a threat to national security for years due to its ties to U.S. adversaries and that Trump is determined to address it.”

Let’s take a closer look at the sections of the document to understand what bothers Marco Rubio and what historical and current distortions he is making:

  1. That there is a “revolutionary state” and that “a new left” has emerged in Cuba. That Fidel Castro said in 1958 that his longest war would be against the U.S. empire, after witnessing how the Batista dictatorship fired U.S. rockets at the home of the peasant Mario in the Sierra Maestra—a fact that the State Department document conveniently omits.

During the 1950s, the Batista regime—which murdered thousands of Cubans and embraced the U.S. mafia in its corruption and business dealings—received financial, logistical, and military support from the United States under the administrations of Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. That is why there was a revolution in Cuba.

This is how Marco Rubio presents it:

“I swore to myself that the Americans were going to pay dearly for

what they were doing. When this war is over, a much wider and bigger

war will begin for me: the war that I’m going to launch against them.

I am telling myself that this is my true destiny.”

– Fidel Castro in a letter to his aide and confidante Celia Sánchez in 1958.

This is how Fidel Castro wrote it:

Sierra Maestra

June 5, 1958

Celia:

(…) When I saw the rockets they fired at Mario’s house, I swore to myself that the Americans are going to pay dearly for what they’re doing. When this war is over, a much longer and greater war will begin for me: the war I’m going to wage against them. I realize that this will be my true destiny.

Fidel

Letter from Fidel to Celia, 1958. Photo: Fidel, Soldier of Ideas.

 2. That Cuba “exports the Revolution” and has encouraged and inspired the left and national liberation movements in Latin America and around the world since the 1960s.

As if this were not the natural response of a country that had been subjected to an economic blockade, attacked militarily, and with which the United States forced all nations in the region to sever diplomatic relations—with the honorable exceptions of Mexico and Canada.

At the same time, the United States supported colonialist nations in Africa, subjugated the people of Puerto Rico, armed the Zionist regime in Israel, massacred the people of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and armed and provided intelligence to the military dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and later Chile.

Let’s not even mention more recent decades, when the empire’s militaristic power has been on full display in all its sinister magnitude.

U.S. Bombings and Interventions in the 21st Century

But this is not a new imperialist narrative. As early as February 4, 1962, the revolutionary leadership and our people had responded to the same accusation in the historic Second Declaration of Havana:

“By crushing the Cuban Revolution, they believe they can dispel the fear that torments them and the specter of revolution that threatens them. By eliminating the Cuban Revolution, they believe they can eliminate the revolutionary spirit of the peoples. In their delusion, they claim that Cuba exports revolutions. In their minds—those of sleepless merchants and usurers—there is the notion that revolutions can be bought or sold, rented or lent, exported or imported like any other commodity.

“Ignorant of the objective laws governing the development of human societies, they believe that their monopolistic, capitalist, and semifeudal regimes are eternal. Educated in their own reactionary ideology—a mixture of superstition, ignorance, subjectivism, pragmatism, and other aberrations of thought—they have a view of the world and the course of history tailored to their interests as an exploiting class. They assume that revolutions are born or die in the minds of individuals or as a result of divine laws, and that, moreover, the gods are on their side.”

[…]

“In response to the accusation that Cuba wants to export its revolution, we reply: Revolutions are not exported; they are made by the people.

“What Cuba can give to the peoples—and has already given—is its example.

“And what does the Cuban Revolution teach? That revolution is possible, that the people can make it happen, that in the contemporary world there are no forces capable of stopping the peoples’ liberation movement.

Our triumph would never have been possible if the revolution itself had not been inexorably destined to arise from the conditions existing in our economic and social reality—a reality that exists to an even greater degree in a good number of Latin American countries.”

3. That Cuba is an “espionage empire,” an effective security and counterintelligence service, that ensured all agents recruited by the CIA in the 1980s were double agents, that has managed to infiltrate that country’s structures, and that has maintained a “highly professional,” “highly disciplined” intelligence service—a “formidable adversary”—to this very day.

Marco and his scribes forget that the credit goes not only to our Ministry of the Interior and its finest men and women, but also to the relentless dirty war waged by U.S. intelligence agencies against the Cuban Revolution—from the attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra and more than 600 other times throughout his life, to the CIA’s covert operations, the funding and supply of anti-Cuban terrorist forces, subversive actions, the introduction of viruses and pests, and the organization of military operations—all of which have forced our security services to prepare themselves and become the guarantors of the defense of the Revolution, our people, and their leaders.

Regarding the selfless work of these men and women, Fidel stated on the fourth anniversary of the founding of the Ministry of the Interior, on June 16, 1965:

The enemies are particularly relentless against the men who carry out this task and who are on the front lines of the revolutionary struggle. The enemy hates most those who fight him most fiercely; he hates most those whom he fears most; he hates most those whom he sees as the representatives of the Revolution’s ever-alert and ever-combative spirit.

It is only natural that the task of defending the Revolution against the covert enemy—that is, the task of defending the Revolution against all of imperialism’s efforts to promote every kind of counterrevolutionary activity, ranging from sabotage and espionage to the organization of criminal gangs, on a large scale— and since the Revolution has had to defend itself against these enemy activities, public attention regarding the ministry’s activities has focused on that effort.

What is truly macabre is not Cuba’s effectiveness in defending itself; what is truly macabre are the thousands of plans and the billions that U.S. intelligence agencies have allocated to try to destroy the Cuban Revolution by any means necessary.

 4. Marco Rubio is concerned about “revolutionary tourism” and is afraid of the Venceremos Brigade, Pastors for Peace, Cuba Solidarity Groups in various parts of the world, the recent “Nuestra América Solidarity Convoy,” Karen Bass (the current mayor of Los Angeles), and other organizations, public figures, men, and women from around the world who have visited Cuba in solidarity.

They are terrified that men and women who stand in solidarity with the suffering of a people under attack and under siege will, driven by their commitment to social justice, come to fight for that justice and fraternity within U.S. society and in other parts of the world.

He fears that the impact of that solidarity will lay bare the enormous human suffering caused by the United States’ genocidal policies.

Although, to tell the truth, Marco Rubio and the establishment truly fear the American people; that is why they prohibit U.S. citizens from simply going on “vacation” in Cuba. It would be far too subversive.

“Cuba is the only country on the planet that cannot be visited by U.S. citizens; but Cuba exists and stands firm, just 90 miles from the United States, waging its heroic struggle.”, Fidel would write in a Reflection dated January 19, 2011.

 5. The “Racial Revolution” terrifies Marco Rubio. As a deeply racist individual, the Secretary of State is concerned about the struggles of Black people demanding their rights: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Black Lives Matter, Antifa.

According to the report, Cuba is the mother, father, and teacher of the Black civil rights movement. It is the ideology instilled by Cubans—and not the racism, discrimination, poverty, injustice, and exclusion prevalent in U.S. society—that is the cause of the struggles of African Americans and other forces opposed to racism and class privilege in the United States.

Rubio and his scribes forget that in August 2025, Gallup conducted a survey showing that 64% of Americans overall and 83% of Black men in that country believe that racism against Black people is widespread in the United States. This figure matches the previous reading, from 2021, as the highest recorded in Gallup’s periodic surveys since 2008.

Fidel Castro analyzed this masterfully in his speech at the Summit Against Racism in South Africa in 2001:

“Brutal exploitation did not end when many countries gained independence, nor even after the formal abolition of slavery. The leading ideologues of the American Union—composed of the 13 colonies that broke free from British rule in the late 18th century—gave rise, from the earliest years of independence, to concepts and strategies of an unquestionably expansionist nature. Guided by these ideas, the former white settlers of European origin, as they advanced westward, seized the lands that the indigenous peoples had occupied for thousands of years and exterminated millions of them. They did not stop at the borders of what had been Spanish possessions, and Mexico—a Latin American country that achieved its independence in 1821—was likewise stripped of millions of square kilometers and incalculable natural resources.

In the increasingly powerful and expansive nation that emerged in North America, the odious and inhumane system of slavery was maintained until nearly a century after the famous Declaration of Independence of 1776, in which it had been proclaimed that all men are born free and equal.

“Following the merely formal abolition of slavery, African Americans were subjected for another hundred years to the cruelest racial discrimination, many of whose features and consequences have persisted to this day for nearly four additional decades, following their heroic struggles and the advances achieved in the 1960s, which cost the lives of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and other prominent activists (Applause). For purely racist reasons, the harshest and most prolonged criminal penalties are imposed on African Americans, and within America’s affluent society, they face the greatest poverty and the most miserable living conditions (Applause). Equally terrible—and even worse—are the contempt and discrimination faced by what remains of the indigenous populations that once occupied much of the current territory of the United States.”

 6. Marco Rubio also fears “front groups and fellow travelers.” That sounds familiar—wasn’t that the same thing from point 4? The Secretary of State lashes out at the National Network of Solidarity with Cuba in the United States, once again Pastors for Peace, the National Lawyers Guild, The People’s Forum, Code Pink, and even the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), while describing the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples as a sinister arm operating within the United States.

The Secretary of State thus reinforces the U.S. administration’s new McCarthyist attempt to criminalize and persecute or neutralize the forces within the United States that oppose war, anti-immigrant raids, xenophobia, and imperialist aggression against other peoples. Labeling them as tools of Cuba is intended to discredit them.

It reflects the fear of reactionary forces regarding the political rise of figures and organizations that are capitalizing on the growing discontent within U.S. society. They are attempting to sow a narrative tailored to their own ends ahead of next November’s midterm elections.

What Rubio fails to understand is that neither walls nor blockades can stop the solidarity between peoples. Fidel Castro made this clear during that visit to New York in September 1960: “One of the most difficult things for us is that we always have to explain the difference between the people and those responsible for acts for which the people cannot be blamed. (…) Whatever the difficulties may be, there will always be love for the people of the United States.”

 6. To top it off, the Secretary of State expresses fears of an “Anti-American International” (in the vein of “America for Americans”) and returns to the spectres that keep the White House awake at night: China, Russia, Iran, the Palestinians. And Cuba as the power broker that brings them all together:

The regime continues to act as a force multiplier for a much broader anti-American coalition, positioning itself as a platform for a wide range of foreign adversaries to carry out operations against the United States. At the same time, Cuba functions as a kind of intermediary service for anti-American actors, providing them with access to internal influence and intelligence within the United States and facilitating contacts with American groups and movements. Cuba’s hemispheric networks offer a similar value proposition, serving as a conduit for Iran, Russia, and numerous other regimes to project influence throughout the region.

And as if they didn’t mean to, the scribes casually mention the alleged presence of Iranian drones in Cuba.

Given all this fearmongering, it’s hard to understand how Rubio accompanied Trump all the way to Anchorage to meet with Putin, or humbled himself by having his last name changed just to enter China recently, or talks about reopening negotiations with the Iranians—all while sabotaging any civilized dialogue with Cuba to steer the course toward military aggression against our nation.

Conclusions (In the Style of the DOS Report)

Marco Rubio’s obsession with Cuba leads him to resort to any means or argument. His clear purpose is to define Cuba as the United States’ greatest enemy and, therefore, the preferred target of its draconian economic measures and potential military action.

As he positions himself for the 2028 presidential election, he also seeks to articulate an anti-communist framework that will help him rally Magas and other sectors of the right behind his likely candidacy.

Marco Rubio is one of the finest examples of the opportunism, corruption, lies, and manipulation that characterize politics in the empire. It is a politics that fears everyone, and that fear transforms into the most atrocious vengeance.

Stay alert!

P.S. By way of an epilogue, it is worth recalling this excerpt from Fidel’s speech on September 28, 1977:

The economic blockade harms us; it does us a great deal of harm, of course, but above all, it did us a great deal of harm in the past. We consider it an unjust, arbitrary, criminal policy—in just two words—against our country.

Our country would benefit from any climate of peace and détente, just like all other countries. And if, regardless of political and social systems, we can live in peace and respect one another, basing our relations on international norms, it is indisputable that our people, like all other peoples of the world, would benefit from this policy (APPLAUSE).

We have nothing against the American people. Never from this podium, never, ever, in any public statement, has our Revolution uttered words of hostility toward the people of the United States. Our words of hostility have been directed against the imperialist system, against the aggressions against our country, and against the crimes of imperialism.

We have fought, if I recall correctly—well, I’m starting to lose count—against the hostility and aggression of five different U.S. administrations: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. Five already in these nearly 20 years of the Revolution. Those administrations were very hostile toward our country, and our country knew how to respond with courage and dignity to every act of aggression (APPLAUSE).

If the sixth administration ceases its hostility toward our country, its acts of aggression, and the economic blockade, then, naturally, state-to-state relations between the United States and Cuba can improve.

But no one should be misled by this. This does not imply that there can ever be any kind of convergence between the U.S. system and that of Cuba. They will continue to be capitalists, and we will continue to be socialists (APPLAUSE). They will continue to have their bourgeois doctrines, and we will continue to be Marxist-Leninists (APPLAUSE).

[…]

Let no one be misled or confused in any way. The fact is that the Cuban Revolution is now an irreversible reality; the Cuban Revolution is indestructible, and our country has earned the right to independence, the right to the fullest sovereignty, and the right to be respected by the other countries of the world (APPLAUSE).

At first, they underestimated us. They said: “We’ll crush these people.” But all efforts to crush us were in vain: one administration after another came and went, and their policies crashed against the unshakable rock of the Cuban Revolution (APPLAUSE).

It was not we who imposed blockades against the United States or the American people; it was not we who organized acts of terrorism and subversion against the United States, nor did we smuggle weapons or devise assassination plots against American leaders. But we do know, and we do remember—and we cannot forget—all the things that the governments of that country did against our people and our homeland for nearly 19 years: all the CIA’s actions, the subversion plans, the acts of terrorism, the sabotage, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the counterrevolutionary gangs, the assassination plots, and so on, and so on, and so on—a hundred times over. We cannot forget it, and we will not forget it.

We are a country that believes in the need for peace among all the peoples of the world; we are a country that believes in the need to prevent a world war—which would be a holocaust for humanity—in the need to prevent the arms race, and in the need to prevent a return to the Cold War; we are a country committed to living in accordance with the norms of international law and to respecting other states to the same extent that our State and our people are respected (APPLAUSE).

As I said before, the Revolution has never advocated campaigns of hostility and hatred against the American people; it has always distinguished between the people and the government. That is why some of them are surprised, when they visit us, to find no displays of hatred or hostility, but rather respect, courtesy, and hospitality.

That speaks volumes about our people, because having a revolutionary consciousness is very different from being fanatics. Other political movements—reactionary ones, of course—mobilized the masses through fanaticism, through chauvinism, through national hatred.

We are neither fanatics nor chauvinists; we are internationalists and we are Marxist-Leninists (APPLAUSE). And we are strong because we have fostered a revolutionary consciousness and a political culture within our people. And those are truly solid and enduring values.

Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English