Trump on “Fallen” Cuba: “I’m Going to Put Marco Over There”

We encounter a lot of garbled, confusing quotes from President Donald Trump on a daily basis, many of which are rendered effectively meaningless by their tenuous grasp on the English language. But even by those standards, this brief exchange that the President of the United States apparently had with CNN on Friday morning about the impending, U.S.-caused “fall” of Cuba is some real “furrow your brow as you attempt to understand even a little of what the hell Trump is talking about” material. Put succinctly, Trump says that Cuba is going to fall, and … maybe Secretary of State and renowned Cuba hawk Marco Rubio will be in charge? What would you say that any of these words actually mean?

“Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon, by the way, unrelated, but Cuba is gonna fall too. They want to make a deal so badly,” a rambling Trump said to CNN’s Dana Bash, while getting distracted from his topic of the deadly Iran War that is not even a week old. “They [Cuba] want to make a deal, and so I’m going to put Marco (Rubio) over there and we’ll see how that works out. We’re really focused on this one right now. We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready — after 50 years.”

Trump then added that “I’ve been watching it for 50 years, and it’s fallen right into my lap because of me, it’s fallen, but it’s nevertheless fallen right into the lap. And we’re doing very well.”

CNN’s Dana Bash reports on a conversation she just had with Trump: “He quickly turned to Cuba. He said without being asked, ‘Cuba is going to fall pretty soon.'”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) Mar 6, 2026 at 9:10 AM

Okay then. When Trump says that it has “fallen right into my lap,” he is likely referring to the economic disaster that the U.S. has wrought on Cuba over the course of decades, but recently vaulted to new heights by cutting off the flow of oil from the similarly toppled Venezuela, where Maduro’s former vice president Delcy Rodríguez has seemingly embraced her role as a pliant puppet ruler. This crucial (and free) oil was practically the only thing keeping the vestigial Cuban economy afloat, and without the oil, 11 million Cubans are poised to starve amid ever-increasing power blackouts. Nevertheless, even with its capabilities at practically zero, the Trump administration has argued that Cuba represents an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the U.S. in order to justify a national “emergency” targeting it with even more punishing restrictions. Trump seems to fervently believe that regime change in Cuba will just suddenly happen overnight one of these days, despite the fact that the country doesn’t even possess an organized, anti-government opposition party.

Within the last few weeks, Trump has referenced the possibility of a “friendly takeover” of Cuba by the United States, and said at the White House on Thursday that it’s just a “question of time” until American Cubans could return to their home country. He’s cryptically spoken about Cuban leaders wanting to make “deals” as he so often does, without bothering to explain in the tiniest detail what kind of “deals” these would be, or who the “deals” would be with. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, for his part, told state media this week that the country needed immediate and urgent economic transformation, saying: “We must focus, immediately, on implementing the urgent, most necessary transformations that must be made to the economic and social model.” That does sound kind of like a leader preparing the public for radical changes?

Blackout hits most of Cuba amid US oil chokehold reut.rs/3PibBg0

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— Reuters (@reuters.com) Mar 4, 2026 at 4:45 PM

Whatever happens, one can expect Trump to put Marco Rubio in charge of a pet project that the Secretary of State and former Senator will relish. The son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio has referred to Havana as the “head of the snake” in the region and has backed every possible hawk stance against Cuba, and would likely see it as the accomplishment of a lifetime to see the entire island descend into bloodshed and chaos, as long as the U.S. can say that it successfully toppled the communist regime that has persisted there for 67 years in the face of incredible hardships. This is of course all that really matters to Trump at the end of the day as well: He wants to put an end to Cuba because it’s something that other Presidents didn’t manage to do, and he honestly believes he’ll be remembered positively for it, rather than for his involvement in what will no doubt turn into another atrocity. Speaking to reporters at the White House about Iran but sidetracking to Cuba yet again, Trump gave the following incomprehensible statements about Rubio and the nation:

“He’s doing some job, and your next one is going to be, we want to do that special Cuba,” said Trump on Thursday, presumably talking about Rubio. “He’s waiting. But he says, ‘Let’s get this one finished first.’ We could do them all at the same time, but bad things happen. If you watch countries over the years, you do them all too fast, bad things happen. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to this country.”

That’s how you want to see the President of the United States talking about wars, military action and regime changes, right? You don’t want to get into a situation where you’re “doing them all too fast,” or else “bad things happen.” Remember when we used to expect the most powerful person in the world to have the ability to articulate above a grade school level, particularly while they’re speaking about the prospect of overthrowing other nations? Seems quaint now, doesn’t it?

At least when Marco Rubio eventually explains his own plan to chop up Cuba for parts, we’ll presumably be able to understand what the fuck he’s talking about.