Rubio's Latest Claims About Cuba Spying Powers Decried as 'Completely Batshit Insane'

Officials in the Trump administration have spent the past 18 months insisting the US has the right and the military might to take over any country it chooses in order to secure US "interests" in the Western Hemisphere, and it has already moved to take control of Venezuela's oil reserves and cut off the energy supply to Cuba.

But to hear Secretary of State Marco Rubio tell it in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the US is in some ways at the mercy of the latter country—an island nation of approximately 10 million people whose healthcare system, social services, and energy grid have ground to a halt recently as President Donald Trump has escalated economic warfare and threatened other nations with tariffs, should they provide oil to Cuba's communist government.

Rubio told Fox News host Lara Trump—the president's daughter-in-law—that "when it comes to things like espionage and influence operations," Cuba is "an influence and espionage superpower."

The secretary of state, who is the son of Cuban immigrants who came to the US years before the Cuban Revolution, and who has long called for regime change on the island, pointed to just two examples of spies that he said Cuba has "consistently implanted and embedded" in the US: former US Ambassador to Bolivia Victor Manuel Rocha, who was arrested in 2023 and admitted to working as a secret agent for Cuba's government; and Ana Belén Montes, a former analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage in 2002.

"If you look at the history of espionage in the United States, Cuba is the only country that consistently implanted and embedded spies in our system without even paying them," said Rubio of the two spies.

"It is not, and we shouldn’t go to war to settle family feuds of the 1960s," replied US Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) on social media, referring to Rubio's family history with the island.

Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, pronounced Rubio's claims about Cuba's purportedly expansive and dangerous espionage powers "completely batshit insane."

Both Rubio and Trump also repeated claims that were central to a report released by the State Department in July, which alleged that Cuba's government, led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel, has "waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States," including by backing "an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil."

Like the report, which called Cuba "the Capital of 21st Century Communism," Trump named the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and "the surge of radical activism that we've seen all over college campuses"—with students protesting in recent years against US support for Israel—as protest movements that Cuba is "influencing."

"Absolutely," said Rubio, adding—with no evidence—that Cuba has organized "the same network of protesters around the country" to protest against police brutality and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and in support of Palestinian rights.

Bruno Rodríguez, the minister of foreign affairs of Cuba, accused the secretary of state of once again spreading "a ridiculous and clumsy lie, which neither he nor his corrupt colleagues believe," about the island.

The report cited by Trump and Rubio, and the diplomat's comments, amounted to a "desperate attempt to justify the current genocide of the Cuban people through collective punishment," said Rodríguez.

He added that they served as a "fantastical pretext for a military aggression, which would provoke a bloodbath of Cuban and American citizens."

The Trump administration has previously claimed in recent months that Cuba plans to wage drone attacks against the US—drawing from intelligence that actually said Cuban officials were determining how they could use the weapons defensively, not in preemptive strikes.

The White House's "patently absurd" claims about Cuba, said Max Steele of the gun violence prevention group Everytown for Gun Safety, surpass the George W. Bush administration's "most fever dream propaganda about Iraq" in the lead-up to the US war there.

Rubio's latest comments came just before the entire island was plunged into darkness Sunday night after the country's state-owned power grid collapsed due to the strain caused by the US oil blockade.

"The extremity of the economic warfare being waged by the United States on Cuba is WILDLY out of proportion to the 'threat' that they pose to the United States," said financial crime expert Brett Erickson. "To be abundantly clear, Cuba poses ZERO threat to the United States."

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said Rubio's comments were the latest evidence that the Trump administration is eager to claim Cuba poses a threat to national security as a pretext for an invasion of the country.

"This is a set-up to go in," said Pocan.