WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio used a weekend sit-down with Fox News host Lara Trump to walk through Washington's plan for rebuilding Venezuela after the removal of Nicolás Maduro, then pivoted to something he considers just as urgent: a newly published State Department assessment naming Cuba as the driving force behind decades of espionage and unrest inside the United States. The conversation aired on "My View with Lara Trump," and touched on China, Russia, and his own life outside the office along the way.
Rebuilding Venezuela, One Stage at a Time
Rubio described Venezuela's recovery as a three-part sequence, not a single event. The first stage, he said, was simply keeping the country from falling apart — averting civil war, a mass exodus, or widespread unrest in the aftermath of Maduro's removal.
The second stage, which Rubio said is underway now, is economic: building a legal and regulatory foundation stable enough to attract outside capital. Speaking to Lara Trump, he argued that outside investors need confidence the rules won't shift under them, saying money can flow in "so investors from America and around the world can safely invest" only once that legal groundwork exists, according to the State Department's own transcript of the broadcast.
The final stage, in Rubio's telling, is a full democratic transition — legitimate elections at every level of government. He suggested the starting point for that isn't a ballot but a truce among Venezuelans themselves, pointing to reconciliation efforts in "Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union" as a template, per the same transcript. He described Washington's ongoing role as that of a facilitator rather than a director of the process.
A Country Rebuilding Twice Over
Rubio's reference to Venezuela's economic troubles glossed over just how severe the setback has been. On June 24, 2026, a pair of major earthquakes — magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, striking only seconds apart — tore through the country's northern coast, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The disaster killed more than 5,500 people and injured over 16,000 more, with the state of La Guaira losing an estimated 80 percent of its buildings. It ranks as the country's most destructive quake in over a century. Rubio's brief mention of "an earthquake" complicating recovery understates a humanitarian crisis that is still unfolding alongside the political one.
The Reality Behind the Transition Talk
Maduro was not simply removed from office — he was captured. On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces carried out a military operation in Caracas that seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and flew them to New York to face narco-terrorism and drug-trafficking charges. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president two days later, a transition detailed by CBC News.
Months into Rodríguez's interim government, no election date has been set, and Rubio's public remarks on the subject was vague and short on specifics. A separate dispatch notes that Rodríguez has continued to describe Maduro as innocent and Venezuela's legitimate leader, even as her government negotiates oil deals with Washington — a contradiction that complicates the tidy three-phase narrative Rubio presented on air. Readers weighing his account of a steady march toward democracy should know that the interim leadership installed after Maduro's capture has so far resisted committing to any electoral timeline.
Branding Cuba the "Capital of 21st Century Communism"
Turning to Cuba, Rubio pointed to a 100-page State Department document released July 20 and titled "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism," which frames the island as the modern epicenter of anti-Western organizing. Despite a population of roughly 9.5 million, Rubio told Lara Trump that Cuba functions as an outsized "espionage superpower." It's worth noting the report itself has drawn pushback from groups it names, including a public statement from the Metro DC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America calling its conclusions an attempt to paint domestic critics as foreign agents — a dispute readers should factor in when weighing the report's claims.
To make his case, Rubio cited two individuals. The first was Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia who secretly worked as a Cuban intelligence asset for more than four decades before being caught. Rocha pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison — a sentencing that happened in April 2024, according to The Washington Post.
The second case is Ana Belén Montes. Montes rose to become the Defense Intelligence Agency's top Cuba analyst while secretly funneling classified material to Havana for roughly 16 years before her 2001 arrest, according to the FBI's own historical account of the case. She served most of a 25-year sentence before her release in 2023. Rubio's description of her penetration as one of the most damaging intelligence failures in U.S. history is consistent with how counterintelligence officials have characterized the case for years.
Are the Protests Really Orchestrated?
Rubio's most provocative claim involved domestic unrest. He argued that the same activist network behind the 2020 riots has resurfaced in campus protests, anti-ICE demonstrations, and rapid-response rallies, and that Cuba plays an organizing role within that broader coalition. As evidence, he pointed to demonstrators carrying printed signs calling for Maduro's release outside federal courthouses within 48 hours of his capture — signs that were indeed visible when Maduro was arraigned in Manhattan on January 5, according to CBS News's on-the-ground reporting of dueling rallies outside the courthouse. What Rubio's account leaves out is any independent verification that this specific protest, or the broader network he describes, was centrally funded or organized by Cuba rather than assembled through the kind of rapid, decentralized mobilization common to modern activism; that link rests on his assertion, not on evidence presented during the interview. He singled out Code Pink by name, telling Lara Trump, "There's nothing organic about it."
The Bigger Picture
Taken together, the interview lays out an administration betting on two fronts at once: a patient, multi-year rebuild in Venezuela, and a far more combative posture toward Havana's intelligence apparatus and its alleged reach into American political life. The Venezuela plan may be sound in theory, but the interim government's reluctance to commit to elections suggests the transition Rubio describes is further off than his answers implied. The Cuba allegations, meanwhile, rest on a mix of well-documented historical cases and more contested, unproven claims about coordinated domestic activism.
