Despite Marco Rubio’s Warnings, This is the Time to Go to Cuba in Solidarity Against the Latest U.S. Aggressions

When visiting Cuba, one can see quickly the terrible effects of the almost seven decades of the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba.

By Former U.S. Diplomat Ann Wright

I came back from Cuba over last weekend.  I had not been in Cuba since a year ago.

Despite the warnings from the U.S. State Department and Marco Rubio, now is the time for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba in solidarity with the Cuban people against the latest U.S. aggressions in the Caribbean and Latin America.

You Can Go to Cuba

Now of all times, it is important for U.S. citizens to show solidarity with the Cuban people against the threats of the U.S. government by travelling to Cuba.

Yet, most U.S. citizens do not realize that they can go to Cuba as an individual or in a group.

A great resource for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba is “Yes, You Can Travel to Cuba,” a 5 minute video that gives information on the details of how one can make arrangements for travel to the largest island in the Caribbean, a mere 90 miles from Key West, Florida.

You have to obtain an electronic visa from the Cuban embassy in Washington or consulate government that takes a couple of days, costs $50 and then book a flight.  There are three U.S. airlines that fly several times a day from Florida. American and Delta airlines fly from Miami and Southwest flies from Tampa, Florida.

There are plenty of hotels in Havana and the other larger cities in Cuba as lots of tourists come from Europe.

Canadians are the largest number of tourists to Cuba. Sadly, on February 9, Canadian airlines announced suspension of flights to Cuba from Canada due to lack of fuel in Cuba to refuel the aircraft.

However, persons travelling on airlines from Florida are not affected by the fuel shortage as U.S. airlines travel such a short distance from departure points in Florida that they don’t need to refuel in Cuba

If you want to go to Cuba with a group, you can contact a number of organizations to see if they have scheduled trips in the near future: National Network on Cuba, CODEPINK, Busboys and Poets.

More Tough Times for Cuba

When visiting Cuba, one can see quickly the terrible effects of the almost seven decades of the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba.  The current fuel shortage due to the U.S. stopping fuel from Venezuela and strong-arming Mexico, effects everything, from moving food from the countryside to the cities, getting people to workplaces, keeping medical equipment operating in hospitals and clinics, to picking up garbage from the streets.

While Cuba has increased the use of solar energy from 3% to 10% of energy needs of the country, the country still depends on petroleum products for most of its electricity and transportation needs.  The list of the impacts of U.S. aggression is long and documented well.

U.S. increases Sanctions and Aggressions

Trump’s latest salvo toward Cuba is his January 29, 2026 executive order that sanctions any nation that provides any amount of oil to Cuba, essentially strangling the daily life of Cuban citizens with the aim that they will “overthrow” their own government.

This explicit threat to the survival of Cuba by the U.S. to cut off oil supplies to Cuba is a culmination of almost 70 years of hatred of the Cuban revolution that took the country back from the oligarchy who had kept the population in poverty and slavery. Much of the oligarchy moved to Miami, Florida and has formed the base of the Republican party’s political fortunes in the state, to include former U.S. Senator and now Secretary of State Cuban-American Marco Rubio.

More about Rubio’s birthright citizenship and deportation order of his grandfather from the U.S. later in the article.

More U.S. Aggressions in the Caribbean and Latin America

Topping the list of U.S. aggressions in Latin American, is the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. On January 3, 2026, the U.S. military kidnapped Maduro and Flores from their home on a Venezuelan military bases, flew them to a U.S. naval ship, and then to New York where they have been charged with narco-trafficking.  32 Cuban military and police and 24 Venezuelan military who were part of the security for President Maduro were killed by U.S. military.

The latest U.S. military aircraft bombing of small boats was on January 23 which killed two persons bringing the known death toll to 125 in the Trump administration’s campaign that claims to be targeting drug smugglers since early September 2025. The bombings have been conducted without evidence made public that the boats and people were actually involved in drug smuggling.  Secretary of Defense Hegseth ordered the US military to kill two survivors who were clinging to a boat bombed on September 2, which by the law of warfare is illegal the kill people who are out of action and pose no threat.

In December, 2025, Admiral Alvin Holsey, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command who reportedly had “reservations” about the legality of the military strikes on boats, after only one year in his office,  retired at the demand of Hegseth. In November 2025,  Britain suspended its intelligence-sharing agreement with the Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S), an intelligence group that monitors narco-trafficking across the Caribbean and Latin America, concerned that it was being used to violate international law.

Trump Pardon of the Convicted Former President of Honduras for Taking Bribes from Drug Traffickers

In an another Trump assault on the U.S. judicial system on December 1, 2025, President Trump pardoned former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández, sentenced by a U.S. Federal court in 2024 to 45 years in prison for taking bribes from drug traffickers to allow them to move 400 TONS of cocaine to the United States.

When Trump was asked about why he pardoned Hernandez, Trump responded: “I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras. They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country. And they said it was a Biden administration set-up. And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”

Terrible U.S. History of Aggression Toward Cuba- Assassinations, Bombings and Blockades

For almost 70 years, since 1959, 13 successive U.S. presidential administrations have attempted to overthrow the 1958 Cuban revolution that ousted the U.S. puppet dictator Baptista.

The Cuban revolution nationalized the resources of the country to implement literacy, healthcare, housing programs for all citizens of the small country of 11 million people.

Many of the rich of the country decided that their personal wealth was more important than the humane treatment of the poor of the country and left, settling in southern Florida and becoming an important political force in U.S. elections.

Beginning with the Kennedy administration and the attempted coup against the Cuban revolution in the notorious CIA orchestrated 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion attempt and continuing through the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, Trump 1, Biden and now Trump 2 presidential administrations have had a brutal economic blockade on Cuba, have orchestrated over 600 attempts at assassinating the leadership of the revolution and have placed extremely severe restrictions on the 11 million people to push them to overthrow the revolutionary government. In the almost 70 years, the Cuban people have NOT overthrown their government.

Only during the last two years of the Obama administration, did the U.S. government modify its economic and political blockade of Cuba by opening an Embassy and signing 22 agreements with the government of Cuba that were mainly for the protection of U.S. national security.  Those agreements which range from migration, counter-narcotics, and law enforcement to environmental protection, public health are still in effect and are being adhered to by Cuba, Cuban efforts being ignored much of the time by the U.S. government.

To the chagrin of those in the U.S. Congress who wanted the people of Cuba to suffer under the severe economic blockade the U.S. created, the agreements negotiated by the Obama administration also allowed U.S. citizens to travel by plane and ship to Cuba in the greatest numbers since the 1958 revolution.  The Cuban government then began allowing private enterprises to form, particularly in the restaurant field.

Humanity and Morality Has Not Mean Anything to U.S. Presidential administrations, Particularly the Trump administration

Trump defeated Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election and immediately began throwing out programs of cooperation that benefited both the U.S. and Cuba. Trump’s campaign platform was strongly influenced by the Cuban elite who settled in southern Florida and became the most powerful political influence in Florida where Trump had purchased Mar a Lago hotel and resort complex.

Another era of brutal blockades began and in the final days of his first administration, on January 11, 2021, Trump reinstated the designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, which had been reversed during the period of rapprochement between Cuba and the United States during President Obama’s second term in office.

Joe Biden, Obama’s Vice President, levied new sanctions on island officials and the national revolutionary police after hundreds of Cubans were arrested during demonstrations in Havana and other cities to protest shortages, power outages and government policies. They were the first such protests since the 1990s.

Human rights groups and activists, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, pressed the Biden administration to lift the designation to ease the suffering of Cuban people who feel the impact of Cuba’s economic isolation. However, Biden maintained the Sponsor of Terrorism on Cuba until the final days of his administration.

Trump 2 Has Cuba as a Target for the next Decapitation action of the U.S.

Trump’s second administration, with Cuban-American Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, put the country back to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list the day after his inauguration in January 2025.

After decapitating the leadership of Venezuela with the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife and the theft of Venezuelan oil for U.S. oil corporations, Trump 2 has targeted Cuba as the next victim of illegal U.S. actions.

The Trump administration cited Cuba’s support for Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and its refusal to extradite Colombian rebels to Colombia, among other issues, which also including its harboring of wanted Americans.

The Trump administration has made Cuba one of seven countries facing heightened restrictions on visitors and revoked temporary legal protections that had shielded about 300,000 Cubans from deportation. The administration has also announced visa restrictions on Cuban and foreign government officials involved in Cuba’s medical missions, which Rubio has called “forced labor.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a “Birthright” U.S. Citizen, a status he wants to Deny to Others

Trump nominated and the U.S. Senate confirmed their fellow colleague Florida Senator “Little Marco” Rubio to become the pitbull and very undiplomatic Secretary of State. In his rewrite of his family history for his political career, contrary to what Rubio stated in his campaign materials, Rubio’s parents did not flee Cuba from the Cuban revolution. Instead Rubio’s parents left Cuba in 1956, as immigrants, not refugees, three years before the revolution while dictator Baptista was ruling the country for the rich.

Marco Rubio was born in 1971 in Miami, Florida, five years after his parents moved to the U.S. His parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of his birth. They were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 1975, four years after Marco Rubio became a U.S. citizen by birth, a status that the Trump administration is attempting to take away from others born on U.S. soil to non-U.S. citizen parents.

Rubio has visited Cuba only once and for only a few hours in one day….to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Naval Base

As a U.S. Senator, Rubio led the mean-spirited Congressional efforts to undermine Cuba economically and politically, yet, as a Cuban-American, he had never set foot in Cuba to understand first-hand the effect of U.S. policies.

 Finally, in May 2012, at age 41, Marco Rubio made his one and only trip to Cuba …a one day trip to the notorious U.S. prison for prisoners from the War on Terror at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s grandfather was an Illegal Immigrant and was to be deported before a benevolent US government decision allowed him to stay

Adding to the duplicity of Marco Rubio’s view on Cuba and immigrants, Rubio’s grandfather, Pedro Victor, came to the United States and six years was in the country illegally before getting legal status, for which his grandson, as Secretary of State, would have had deported him.

Victor first came to the United States in 1956, the same year as his daughter and son-in-law, Rubio’s parents. Unable to find work, he moved back to Cuba and took a government job. He returned to the U.S. in 1962 without a visa as Cubans couldn’t get a visa after U.S. consulates in Cuba were closed in January 1961.

Rubio’s grandfather Victor was detained in the U.S. for entering the U.S. without a visa and ordered to return to Cuba. However, lucky for him, he ended up staying in the U.S. another six years as the Cuban missile crisis happened at the same time and commercial air traffic from the U.S. to Cuba was suspended.

Ignoring a deportation order (as many undocumented immigrants do today), Pedro Victor simply stayed in the United States and was eventually able to become a permanent resident in 1967, following the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act.

In a benevolent gesture, unlike what Rubio and the Trump administration is doing now, the U.S. government did not force him to leave in midst of the crisis or in the subsequent six years.  He eventually was allowed to receive legal status in 1967 following the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act after being in the country illegally for six years.

Rubio Destroys USAID but saves the Anti-Cuban programs

After destroying the U.S. Agency for International Development employees and gutting funding to programs across dozens of countries, in early 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio exempted from elimination Cuban regime change programs that Rubio and his Cuban allies in southern Florida want and groups lobbied the State Department for restoration.

These restored programs include the anti-revolution publication CubaNet, based out of Miami, which had its nearly $2 million grant cut, then restored as did the Support Group for Democracy in Cuba and the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba that had almost $1 million each cut and then restored.

About the author: Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel.  She was also a U.S. diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia.  She resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq.  She has visited Cuba frequently and has spoken multiple times at the seminar “Abolition of Foreign Military Bases,” held in the city of Guantanamo, Cuba. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”