Rubio Tweets Cubans a 'Discrete Partnership With the CIA'

A Warship, Fifty Yards, and Some Raised Hands

Here is how the president of the United States laid out foreign policy to a crowd of midterm candidates in south Florida on Friday, as reported by The Guardian. A shouted question about Cuba came from the audience. Trump answered with what sounded like a bit he'd workshopped in the car.

"We'll do a little stopover," he said. "Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We'll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They'll raise up their hands. And then we're going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal."

Raise up their hands. Who is raising their hands? The ships? The island? The ten million people living on it? Nobody asked, because it was a rally, and rallies are where foreign policy goes to become a stand-up set.

Rubio Cannot Spell 'Discreet,' and Also Cannot Be Discreet

Rubio's follow-up arrived almost immediately. Addressing "those who seek to create positive change," he told Cubans that "now is the time" and urged them to "seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA."

Read that again. The nation's top diplomat posted a public solicitation for covert intelligence cooperation. On social media. In the same breath he got the spelling wrong, using "discrete," meaning separate, instead of "discreet," meaning secret. Which is the whole point of the word he was reaching for.

The typo is funny. The bigger problem is that a secret recruitment pitch is no longer secret once you broadcast it to the planet. Anyone in the Cuban government who wasn't already watching Rubio's feed certainly is now.

The Intervention Talk Has a Rerun Problem

None of this is new. Trump first floated the Cuba idea earlier this year, then went quiet on it for months. He suggested Cuba would "be next" after the Iran war, a war he has long said was winding down and which has not, in fact, finished winding down.

In May, Trump and Rubio raised the specter of military intervention, and the threat gained weight after the administration announced criminal charges against former Cuban leader Raúl Castro. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that presidents had considered intervening for decades but "it looks like I'll be the one that does it."

Then came September. At the UN General Assembly, Trump said Rubio was "deep into negotiations with Cuba." Days later he told reporters, "I don't think we'll need the military. Cuba is failing very badly." So the position as of last month was a deal, no military. As of Friday it is a warship and some hands in the air. The policy changes with the room.

Why Now? Look at the Calendar

The rally happened days before midterm elections. Voters have been telling pollsters they are worried about what the Iran war has done to prices, from gas to groceries. That is a miserable thing to campaign on.

South Florida, meanwhile, is home to a large Cuban American electorate that has waited decades for a president to say exactly what Trump said Friday. Nobody has to prove the timing is cynical. The timing proves itself. When your war is making groceries more expensive, a second war pitched as a quick stopover starts to look like a very expensive distraction wearing a nautical costume.

Meanwhile, the Actual Diplomacy Is Stalling

Rubio and other top Trump aides have met with Cuban officials in recent months to explore better relations. The US side left unimpressed, and the response was more sanctions on the Cuban government. This week the two countries clashed at the UN as Washington tried again to rally opposition to the annual vote condemning the decades-old US embargo.

Rubio's last extended public comments on Cuba came on September 29 with Sean Hannity. "Cuba has already fallen," he said. "It doesn't have a functional economy." He made no mention of any CIA operation then. Three and a half weeks later, the CIA is apparently open for business.

The suffering on the island is real. Cuba has been in an economic and energy crisis since 2020. The economy has shrunk, and its ten million residents have endured blackouts, food shortages, and inflation. Waves of protests have come, and hundreds of thousands of Cubans have left. Those people deserve a serious policy. They got a rally bit.