Trump administration business allies look to pick off scraps of Cuba’s starved economy
Even as the Trump administration seeks to force regime change in Cuba through withering economic isolation, allies of Trump and Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, are angling to get rich off the island’s collapse.
Reporting for The Guardian, Lee Schlenker and Ed Augustin found that business interests connected with Trump and Rubio, the architect of current US designs on Cuba, are jostling to fill the void left by companies squeezed out of the island by the latest barrage of US sanctions.
A few key takeaways: A pair of Trump-friendly Texas business magnates are fighting to take over a Canadian company’s stake of Cuba’s mineral wealth. Sources close to the matter say that Trump Organization leaders, operating under a company closely tied to the president’s family, have traveled to Cuba to explore hotel deals after a pair of Spanish hotel chains fled the island. And Franklin Graham, a close ally of Trump on the evangelical right and head of the evangelical aid organization Samaritan’s Purse, recently won a $40m federal contract to oversee the distribution of humanitarian assistance on the island Trump is pushing toward collapse.
One source with decades of background in Cuba policy put it succinctly: “If I had done during the Biden administration what Trump’s friends have done now, I’d have been put in jail.”
The Trump administration has taken an especially severe stance toward Cuba since the start of Trump’s second term. Rubio, the child of Cuban immigrants, has led that campaign, seeking to bring about his long hoped-for goal of collapsing Cuba’s communist leadership and seeing a new US-friendly government in its place.
The goal of regime change in Cuba has echoes of the Trump administration’s playbook in Venezuela, where Rubio helped orchestrate the toppling of a leftist dictator and the funneling of the country’s oil revenues to US coffers.