Nathan Howard/AP Photo
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets with Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness at the office of the prime minister in Kingston, Jamaica, March 26, 2025.
After firing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees and gutting funding to programs across dozens of countries, this week Secretary of State and USAID administrator Marco Rubio set his sights on dismantling the State Department with the same hatchet-wielding fervor. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported on a plan to scale back U.S.-based staff by 15 percent, and eliminate programs related to human rights, war crimes, and democracy-building. “Non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist,” Rubio tweeted on Tuesday.
But a review of USAID programs shows that, while following the DOGE playbook in public, the secretary of state has quietly safeguarded Cuban regime change programs aligned with the island’s exile base that has long powered his rise.
One of these programs is the anti-communist publication CubaNet, based out of Miami, which saw its nearly $2 million grant cut, then restored. “Our goal has always been to counteract the propaganda of the Castro regime. Without this funding, the government in Havana will have greater freedom to intensify its propaganda and repression,” the news site’s director Roberto Hechavarría Pilia said before the cash was turned back on.
Support Group for Democracy in Cuba also saw just under a million dollars cut, then restored by Rubio, as did the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba. According to the foundation’s website, its three primary objectives include “cutting revenue streams that are used to repress the Cuban people,” “supporting the Cuban people by highlighting human rights violations,” and “empowering civil society to bring about positive change.”
A grant to the Pan American Development Foundation for “independent media and free flow of information” in Cuba was also listed as reinstated on federal contracting sites. Two people familiar with the program cuts told the Prospect that exceptions were made after Cuban exile groups lobbied the State Department to reverse their grant determinations.
Notably, at least one Cuban support program has faced cuts in the past for the exact type of waste, fraud, and abuse that Elon Musk has touted in his rampage through the federal government. Support Group for Democracy in Cuba (or Grupo De Apoyo a la Democracia, in Spanish) had its funding cut in the mid-2000s when an investigation found that one of its members had rung up over $10,000 of personal expenses.
“I’ll defend that until I die,” Frank Hernández Trujillo, executive director of Grupo De Apoyo a la Democracia, told The Guardian in 2006 while describing his group’s decision to spend federal dollars on video games shipped to Cuba. “That’s part of our job, to show the people in Cuba what they could attain if they were not under that system.” The same report also details U.S. funds to Cuban democracy programs being spent on leather coats, cashmere sweaters, Godiva chocolates, and other luxury goods purchased with portions of $70 million in USAID grants.
Even if scrupulously run, it’s hard to see what decades of federal funding for dissident regime change groups have done for anybody, other than helping to sustain an embargo that has immiserated the Cuban people.
SINCE HIS EARLY DAYS IN POLITICS, Rubio’s pursuit of regime change in the country where his parents were born has extended beyond any personal family interest. Powerful business leaders representing the Cuban diaspora in Miami have long found a sympathetic ear in the former senator and secretary of state, and have dropped millions of dollars to win and defend his political office.
Benjamín León Jr., a Cuban exile who made his fortune selling an HMO clinic business to UnitedHealthcare for $500 million, has donated millions to both Rubio and anti-Castro regime change organizations. According to a report in The Nation, “Besilu Stables, a company León owns, contributed $2.5 million to the Rubio-supporting super-PAC called Conservative Solutions.”
In addition to seven-figure contributions to Rubio, León has also made six-figure donations to the right-wing Cuba Democracy Advocates (CDA), an anti-Castro group spearheaded by executive director Mauricio Claver-Carone. In 2016, as Rubio attempted a presidential bid, it was Claver-Carone who worked unsuccessfully as his presidential sherpa on Capitol Hill. Claver-Carone is now Trump’s special envoy for Latin America.
In January, Trump announced that León would serve as his ambassador to Spain, writing that “Benjamin is a highly successful entrepreneur, equestrian, and philanthropist. He came to the U.S. from Communist Cuba at 16-years-old, with only Five Dollars in his pocket, and proceeded to build his company, Leon Medical Centers, into an incredible business.”
In addition to restoring grants for Cuban exile organizations, Rubio has also ramped up his war on all things Cuban. He has banned a company from processing remittances from the U.S. to Cuba, which led to Western Union pulling out of the island nation. And he has threatened to cut off visas for participants in a medical outreach program that places Cuban-trained doctors in Caribbean hospitals to provide lifesaving care.
“The doctors are not paid; payments are made to the Cuban government. The Cuban government decides how much of anything to give them. They take away the passports. They basically operate as forced labor,” Rubio said last month at a press event with the Jamaican prime minister, who criticized Rubio’s remarks.
With Elon Musk expected to depart from his seat at the Department of Government Efficiency, Rubio’s chief rival in Trumpworld will no longer be able to criticize his work in front of the rest of the cabinet, as The New York Times reported last month. Still, it remains to be seen whether Rubio will be able to inject the State Department and USAID with his blend of anti-communist, interventionist ideology, which has long been at odds with the views of Donald Trump and much of the isolationist MAGA movement.
The deep irony in Rubio’s decision to spare programs seeking regime change in Cuba is that the narrative he once told about his family emigrating in flight from Fidel Castro’s repression is patently untrue. As Politico detailed in 2015, Rubio’s family left Cuba in 1956, years before the revolution, and continued to visit Cuba for years afterward.
“The real essence of my family’s story is not about the date my parents first entered the United States. Or whether they traveled back and forth between the two nations,” Rubio said at the time, despite correcting the earlier story on his website. This embarrassment did not alter Rubio’s hard-line approach, however.
At the same time Politico’s investigation into Rubio ran, Donald Trump tweeted, “Marco Rubio is a total lightweight who I wouldn’t hire to run one of my smaller companies—a highly overrated politician!”
