Marco Rubio’s State Dept. Falsely Claims Trump Said the Secretary Is ‘From’ Cuba

Screenshot via Fox News

The official X account for Marco Rubio’s State Department falsely claimed on Wednesday that President Donald Trump said the secretary was “from” Cuba.

The post included a video of the president answering a reporter’s question about his administration’s stance on Cuba, followed by a short transcript of Trump’s response.

“PRESIDENT TRUMP: We have a lot of people in Cuba. We have the CIA there. @SecRubio is from there, so we have a lot of expertise,” the written text of the post read. “We’re going to help the Cuban people out. We’re freeing up Cuba.”

Marco Rubio is not from Cuba. He was born in Miami, Florida, to Cuban immigrants.

Yet oddly, Trump did not claim in the video attached to the post that his Secretary of State was from Cuba. The president’s actual remarks were correct in noting that Rubio’s parents were born in Cuba, not their son.

“We have a lot of people in Cuba. We have the CIA there. We have– Marco is there. Marco’s parents, as you know, were from Cuba,” said Trump in the video.

The State Department’s online gaffe comes amid a sharp uptick in the administration’s rhetoric against Cuba and the secretary’s role in combatting the country. Trump has floated a U.S. “takeover” of Cuba for months, claiming that the country’s communist government was “ready to fall” days after the capture and arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Days later, Trump instituted an oil blockade on the country, which in March caused Cuba’s electrical grid to collapse due to dwindling fuel.

On the same day the State Department’s post went up, Rubio posted a five-minute video addressing the Cuban people, in which he spoke only in Spanish. The secretary discussed the blockade on the country, claiming it was the Cuban government and not U.S. action that was causing hardship for the country’s people.

“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not because of an oil ‘blockade’ by the United States,” Rubio said. “The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel, or food, is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.”

Hours after that post, the Department of Justice indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro for the alleged murder of American citizens in relation to the downing of two planes near the Cuban coast in 1996.

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