The New York Times reports:

A pre-dawn phone call jolted President Trump awake. His national security adviser had urgent news about Venezuela.

Protests were erupting, soldiers had defected, and the country’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, had been hustled to a military compound. It looked like he could be forced from power. “Wow,” Mr. Trump said, according to a memoir by John R. Bolton, the national security adviser at the time.

That hopeful moment for Mr. Trump, in his first term, was short-lived. Partly because of help Mr. Maduro got from Cuba, the revolt failed, according to administration officials. That disappointed not only the president and his top aides, but also Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida who had been a driving force in seeking the ouster of the Venezuelan leader.

Nearly seven years later, Mr. Maduro is still in power. Mr. Rubio, now Mr. Trump’s secretary of state and interim national security adviser, is a primary architect of an escalating military pressure campaign against Venezuela. And while pushing out Mr. Maduro appears to be one immediate goal of U.S. policy, doing so could help fulfill another decades-long dream of Mr. Rubio’s: dealing a critical blow to Cuba.

“Their theory of change involves cutting off all support to Cuba,” said Juan S. Gonzalez, who was President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s top White House aide for Western Hemisphere affairs. “Under this approach, once Venezuela goes, Cuba will follow.”

Mr. Rubio has hinted at the idea in public, telling NPR in early 2019 that a weakened Cuba would be a welcome “byproduct” of a change in Venezuela’s government, even if it were not “the central rationale” for pushing out Mr. Maduro. “Anything that’s bad for a communist dictatorship is something I support,” he said.

In private, he has been more direct. As a senator, Mr. Rubio routinely discussed Mr. Maduro’s support for Havana in detail with his colleagues, as well as with U.S. officials and foreign diplomats, according to a former Senate aide who was often present for the discussions. The former aide said Mr. Rubio had “articulated a vision” in which splitting Venezuela from Cuba would have disastrous consequences for the Cuban government.

“It all goes back to Cuba — anything he can do to weaken the regime in Cuba,” said another U.S. official who was in briefings with Mr. Rubio during the first Trump administration. [Continue reading…]