As President Donald Trump suggests that Cuba could soon fall, his administration has begun exploring whether federal prosecutors could charge members of the regime or the Communist Party with crimes, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The administration is working to develop possible criminal cases tied to issues like drugs or violence, according to the person. The multiagency effort is being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.
"Federal prosecutors from across the country work every day to pursue justice, which includes efforts to combat transnational crime," a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.
U.S. officials charged Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife with drug conspiracy charges in the U.S. after they were captured by the military in January at a compound in Caracas. They have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Federal charges against Cuban officials could ratchet up public pressure on the country and be used as the basis to levy additional economic sanctions imposed by the State Department, which is being consulted as part of the effort, according to the person familiar with the matter. The U.S. already has a commercial, economic and financial embargo on Cuba that dates back decades.
The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Cuban officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has been talking about Cuba’s government increasingly since the raid on Venezuela, one of Havana’s closest allies. The president suggested following the raid that the island nation could collapse on its own because its economy was so weak and the oil shipments that it depended on from Venezuela had stopped.
This week, just days after the U.S. attack on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top leadership, the president suggested that Cuba's collapse was upcoming.
“Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon,” Trump told CNN in a phone interview Friday. “Cuba is gonna fall too. They want to make a deal so badly.”
“They want to make a deal, and so I’m going to put Marco [Rubio] over there, and we’ll see how that works out. We’re really focused on this one right now. We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready — after 50 years,” Trump said.
A day earlier, Trump said at the White House that it’s only a “question of time” before American Cubans would be able to return to their home country, as he praised Secretary of State Marco Rubio during an East Room event.
“He’s doing some job, and your next one is going to be, we want to do that special Cuba,” Trump said. He said that Rubio is waiting until the war on Iran is complete.
“We could do them all at the same time, but bad things happen,” Trump said. “If you watch countries over the years, you do them all too fast, bad things happen. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to this country.”
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has long been a Cuba hawk who as a senator pushed for regime change on the island, as well as in Venezuela.
“Cuba’s status quo is unacceptable,” Rubio said late last month after Cuba said its military killed four Cubans from the United States who were on a boat that entered its territorial waters. “Cuba needs to change. It needs to change, and it doesn’t have to change all at once. It doesn’t have to change from one day to the next. ... Everyone is mature and realistic.”
But, Rubio insisted, the island needed to change dramatically, especially to improve quality of life for its people.
“They need to make dramatic reforms, and if they want to make those dramatic reforms that open the space for both economic and eventually political freedom for the people of Cuba, obviously the United States would love to see that,” Rubio said.
After spending years railing against the lack of human rights and democracy in Cuba, Rubio has been quieter in recent weeks and has pivoted to talking about the need for economic changes on the island.
Initially, Cuban government officials denied there were negotiations between the U.S. and Cuba, and they haven’t publicly commented on the talks in recent weeks.
Cuban American members of Congress wrote a letter to Trump in February asking the Justice Department to consider indicting former President Raul Castro over his role in the 1996 shooting of two unarmed civilian planes on missions for Brothers to the Rescue, a volunteer group. Four Cuban Americans were killed.
The volunteers routinely flew over the Florida straits looking for Cuban refugees making their way to the U.S. on makeshift boats. Castro was head of the armed forces at the time.
Florida’s attorney general said this week that a state-level case against Castro would be reopened.
Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla told The Associated Press last fall that when Trump first took office, the island saw an opening for a potential thaw in relations. But Rubio’s effort is personal, and it has led the administration to lean even harder into an anti-Havana stance.
“The current secretary of state was not born in Cuba, has never been to Cuba, and knows nothing about Cuba,” Rodríguez said at the time. “But there is a very personal and corrupt agenda that he is carrying out, which seems to be sacrificing the national interests of the U.S. in order to advance this very extremist approach.”
Any action against Cuba could be further complicated by the existence of Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, where some of America’s most high-profile detainees are held, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Cuba and the U.S. entered into a lease agreement for the land the base sits on in 1903 that has no end date, and the lease can only be ended if both parties agree.
While the military detention center once held hundreds of detainees, just 15 are still held there, with dozens of military personnel for each remaining detainee. Democratic President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the detention center, but it never happened.
