A senior Cuban diplomat has issued a scathing criticism of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose longtime calls for the overthrow of the island nation’s communist leadership appear to be gaining momentum in President Donald Trump’s administration.

During a wide-ranging interview with Newsweek, Cuban Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ernesto Soberón Guzmán accused Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants who left the Caribbean country 2 1/2 years before the 1959 revolution that brought late longtime leader Fidel Castro to power—of perpetuating “false premises” regarding the Cuban American community’s opinion on Cuba and the necessity of pursuing hawkish positions on the issue for winning votes in Florida, where many Cuban Americans reside.

“What is clear to me is that Rubio has never come to Cuba, and he’s talking about something he knows nothing about,” Soberón Guzmán told Newsweek. “His parents came to the United States before the revolution. It’s false this image people have that they came to the United States running away from the revolution. They came to the United States fleeing the dictatorship that existed in Cuba, which was supported by the U.S. government at the time, under [then Cuban President Fulgencio] Batista.”

As such, Soberón Guzmán asserted that “Rubio and his family are not part of what they refer to as the Cuban exile community,” however, the former Florida senator has “built his political career around the Cuban issue and with the most reactionary segment of the Cuban community living in the United States that maintain the position that they only have as an alternative the confrontation and to go back to the Cuba that we had before 1959, and that’s what has led him to this point.”

“This is my speculation—and I think I have the right to speculate because they speculate quite a bit—that he has an obsession with Cuba,” Soberón Guzmán said. “Whether it’s harmful or not, whether it’s clinically harmful or not, whether it’s clinically proven, that’s something you have to find out as a journalist.”

“But, obviously, his position towards Cuba reflects that relationship he has maintained with the part of the Cuban exile community that holds that confrontational stance, which has financed his political career,” he added. “And as we say in Cuba, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune.'”

Newsweek has reached out to the U.S. State Department for comment.

The Rise of Rubio

While Rubio’s parents settled in Florida before the Cuban Revolution, his maternal grandfather did flee later in 1962 after a brief return, the same year the island was at the center of one of the most dramatic nuclear-charged U.S.-Soviet standoffs of the Cold War, known as the Cuban missile crisis. Rubio has denied media accusations that he deliberately portrayed his parents as having left Cuba during communist rule in past statements, telling The Washington Post in 2011 that his accounts were based on “the oral history of my family.”

His office later confirmed that his parents indeed arrived in the U.S. in 1956, though the inconsistency has done little to slow Rubio’s ascension as one of the Republican Party’s most popular and influential figures.

Having served in the Florida House of Representatives for eight years, including as speaker from 2006-2008, Rubio’s successful bid for the Senate in 2010 helped propel him into the national spotlight as a young and charismatic conservative who quickly drew speculation toward a potential presidential run.

When Rubio entered the 2016 Republican primary, he frequently clashed with rival candidate Trump, who went on to win his first term. Their quarrels garnered significant media attention, with Rubio calling into question Trump’s fitness to lead as well as the size of his hands, and Trump deriding his fellow Republican as “little Marco.”

The feud quieted during the first Trump presidency, with Rubio emerging as a key supporter of Trump reversing former President Barack Obama’s thawing of relations with Cuba, which has been subject to a U.S. embargo since the early years of Castro’s rule in the 1960s. Rubio also backed the White House’s tougher stances on other nations, including Venezuela, Iran and China.

Rubio continued to serve as an influential voice on these issues in Congress throughout former President Joe Biden’s administration. And while he at times expressed skepticism of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party, he quickly gained momentum as a top pick for a prominent position in what would become Trump’s second administration in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

That role became official when Rubio was nominated for secretary of state just days after Trump’s second nonconsecutive election victory. Rubio gained another powerful title as national security adviser in May following the removal of Mike Waltz, who now serves as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

Polls and popular speculation often place Rubio alongside Vice President JD Vance as potential successors to Trump, who has also identified the two men as possible heirs to the U.S. leaders’ MAGA movement.

Now serving at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, Rubio’s history of hard-line positions has once again come into the spotlight as Trump pursued direct strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June—with new U.S. intervention now being threatened amid ongoing negotiations—and oversaw a U.S. Delta Force raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their home in Caracas last month.

Among the dead in the Venezuela operation were 32 Cuban personnel tasked with guarding Maduro, a close regional ally and key oil supplier for Cuba. Maduro has been succeeded by his deputy, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who has since entered talks with the Trump administration despite criticizing the U.S. operation.

Cuba itself has since fallen into the White House’s crosshairs as Trump referred to the country as a nation that is “ready to fall.” Rubio voiced his enthusiasm for such an outcome during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee late last month, when he proclaimed that “we would love to see the regime change” in Cuba, though “that doesn’t mean that we’re going to make a change.”

“There’s no doubt about the fact that it would be a great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime,” Rubio told lawmakers at the time.

The administration’s rhetoric prompted social media humor over the prospect of Rubio adding president of Cuba to his list of current duties, to which Trump himself responded on Truth Social by saying, “sounds good to me!”

But with Rubio now leading the charge after a long line of successive U.S. administrations that have failed to oversee the overthrow of the Cuban government over the course of decades, Soberón Guzmán said he had “the impression that the secretary of state is having difficulty admitting that he has made a mistake.”

“Show a little modesty,” Soberón Guzmán said, “and perhaps recognize there might be a different way of doing things.”

Coming to Terms

Trump’s commitment to taking action during his second administration, as demonstrated in both Venezuela and Iran, has observers taking even some of his more seemingly outlandish statements seriously, particularly when it comes to issues related to the Western Hemisphere. U.S. allies have put been on notice as well over episodes like Trump’s claims to Denmark-controlled Greenland.

The focus on the Americas, codified last year in the National Security Strategy as a “corollary” to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, has added to the pressure on Cuba, now reeling from an executive order issued by the White House late last month to impose steep tariffs on any countries found to be sending oil to the island.

But while Trump has repeatedly predicted an impending collapse in Cuba, he has also consistently discussed his willingness to reach an agreement, without specifying any conditions beyond his desire to see exiles return freely to the country.

“Cuba’s a failing nation. It has been for a long time, but now it doesn’t have Venezuela to prop it up,” Trump told reporters earlier this month. “We’re talking to the people from Cuba, the highest people in Cuba. We’ll see what happens. I want the people that came here that were horribly treated by Cuba to be taken care of, to be able to go back, and do what they have to do.

“You know, they have their family there. They haven’t been able to see them in years, many, many years,” Trump said. “So, I think we’re gonna make a deal with Cuba.”

Soberón Guzmán affirmed that Havana was prepared to engage in dialogue with Washington on a range of issues, just as it did during the Obama era. Prospective areas including cooperation on migration, anti-drug trafficking measures, science and medicine initiatives as well as tourism—so long as negotiations were rooted in mutual respect—while he declined to provide any specific reaction to the potential for Rubio being the one to lead those discussions on the U.S. side.

“This has been our consistent position, consistent not just now but for many years that we have stated, and which has now been reaffirmed,” Soberón Guzmán said, “that Cuba is willing to negotiate with the United States, to have a dialogue based on absolute respect for our sovereignty and independence without interference in internal issues and on equal footing.”