Trump and Rubio’s Friends Secretly Prepping to Cash in on Cuba

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Trump are trying to bring down Cuba’s government, and their friends and allies are looking to profit from it. 

The Guardian reports that Republican donors, Cuban exiles, and even Trump Organization executives are all eyeing business opportunities from the U.S. pressure campaign against Cuba. Many are charging high sums to help business clients work around the Trump administration’s new sanctions and set themselves up to make even more money if the communist regime falls. 

Among them are Ray Washburne, who organized the Republican midterm convention in Dallas last week and was the vice chair of Trump’s 2016 Victory Committee, and Albert Huddleston, an oil executive with his own ties to Trump. Both are trying to take over a nickel and cobalt mining joint venture with the Cuban government after a Canadian firm, Sherritt International, was driven out by a Trump executive order in May.  

An Australian firm, Antilles Gold Ltd., also had to end its Cuba operations in June thanks to the Trump administration’s sanctions. That company just received approval from the White House to transfer its stake in a copper-gold mine in Cuba to New York–based investment fund Global Emerging Markets, according to the newspaper. 

Executives in the Trump Organization have recently traveled to the island as well, sources told The Guardian. They did so under a new moniker, Dominari Holdings, and met with people like Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, to discuss business opportunities. Two major Spanish hotels, Meliá and Iberostar, recently left the island, and these executives, who have visited the country before and even registered the Trump trademark there in 2008, now may be looking to fill the void.

A shipping line based in Florida, Crowley Maritime, is also benefiting from the Trump administration’s sanctions, with all of Cuba’s imports now being routed through Florida. The company is a major donor to Florida Republican Representatives Mario Díaz-Balart and María Elvira-Salazar, both Cuban Americans. 

“If I had done during the Biden administration what Trump’s friends have done now, I’d have been put in jail,” one expert in Cuba policy told The Guardian.

Meanwhile, the Cuban people are increasingly suffering under the U.S. sanctions and fuel blockade. So far, Trump’s efforts have only benefited wealthy interests outside of Cuba—the very reason behind the island’s political revolution in the 1950s. It seems that Trump, Rubio, and their wealthy friends want to control Cuba so they can profit from it at the expense of its people. 

An immigration and customs enforcement agent long wanted in Minnesota for allegedly shooting a Venezuelan immigrant was finally captured by local authorities.

Christian Castro was booked in the Hennepin County Jail on Wednesday. He faces four second-degree assault charges, and another charge for false reporting of a crime, according to the jail’s inmate records. He is being held on a $200,000 bail.

Castro will appear in a downtown Minneapolis courtroom on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. CST. He has not yet entered a plea.

Castro was one of thousands of agents that descended upon Minnesota during Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge. On January 14, Castro allegedly chased Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, a DoorDash driver, to the entryway of his home. Upon arriving at the residence, Castro shot Aljorna’s roommate, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, in the leg. Castro claimed at the time that he shot Sosa-Celis in self-defense, purporting that the Venezuelan national had attacked him with a snow shovel.

But even Trump’s Justice Department had a difficult time proving that one. In a rare reversal, the DOJ moved to dismiss charges relating to the assault against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna, and Castro was the one left facing criminal consequences. Surveillance footage of the encounter released in April showed Sosa-Celis tossing the shovel early into his exchange with the ICE agent, and Castro firing shots into the home.

Extraditing the 52-year-old federal officer back to Minnesota proved to be a difficult task, however. Castro was initially arrested in Texas, days after a state court issued a nationwide warrant for his arrest in May. But Texas Governor Greg Abbott refused to hand Castro over to Minnesota, questioning whether Castro qualified as a fugitive since he had not technically fled Minnesota but had rather been transferred to work in Texas by the Department of Homeland Security.

Castro’s fate was stuck in limbo for months as the two states duked it out. He was released from jail in August after the 90-day limit on his detention had expired, and after a federal judge declined to intervene in the cross-country matter.

Yet the complications surrounding Castro’s case don’t end there. Earlier this month, a federal grand jury indicted Castro in a separate case, charging him with six counts of making false statements pertaining to the shooting.

The change was a stunning downgrade from the aggressive civil rights violations initially sought by the assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota, Matthew Evans, who was in charge of prosecuting the case. It was also the result of Washington’s direct intervention.

On September 2, Evans told his staff that Castro would be charged “only with False Statements.” The shift would carry far less severe consequences if Castro is found guilty, but would also allow the DOJ to prosecute the case without having to debate whether the shooting was justified.

“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the U.S. Attorney,” Evans wrote in an internal email obtained by ProPublica. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”

The next day, Evans was fired. Castro turned himself in later that week while making his initial appearance in a District Court ​in McAllen, Texas. He was then released on bond.

Castro reappeared in Minneapolis this week under an agreement with Minnesota law enforcement, voluntarily driving himself across state lines in order to turn himself in. But state agents got him first, arresting Castro around 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday in Minneapolis, the department shared in a statement.

The FBI believes women pretending to be tradwives are targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in order to dox them, The Guardian reported Thursday.

In February, the FBI in Chicago disseminated a brief memo warning that a “small group of women allegedly were creating fictitious online dating profiles with the purpose of attracting and then doxxing law enforcement participating in immigration enforcement.”

“These profiles were incorporating imagery of a ‘traditional wife’ aesthetic and listing specific interests in an attempt to appeal to … individuals in law enforcement,” the memo continued. “The objective was to lure affiliated law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, after which the individuals would be publicly exposed and doxed online. The tactic is intended to generate public embarrassment and deter immigration enforcement activity.”

The memo was obtained through a public records request by Property of the People, a government transparency nonprofit. The memo came shortly after Chaya Raichik, the conservative influencer behind LibsOfTikTok, sounded the alarm about groups of TikTokers who were organizing to lure federal agents onto dates and expose their personal information. Her post did not include any mention of “tradwives.” It is unclear if Raichik’s claims were true.

Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People, slammed the FBI for issuing such a humiliating memo in the first place.

“It’s absurd the FBI issued a thinly-sourced security alert about ICE agents’ online dating troubles,” he said in a statement. “It’s equally ludicrous the FBI is spending taxpayer dollars to protect ICE agents from possible ‘embarrassment’ at the hands of a supposed ‘small group of women’ who might name and ridicule them online.”

Recently, ICE reportedly began quietly firing new officers hired during the agency’s chaotic push to recruit thousands of “Homeland Defenders,” citing poor performance and red flags that should have been identified in the vetting process.

A Republican congresswoman running for reelection in Florida’s 27th congressional district has come out with an ad criticizing President Trump.

“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, whose district voted for Trump by 15 percentage points in 2024, said in the ad. She cited statistics pointing out that 50 percent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 50,000 detainees in July had no criminal record.

“Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” Elvira Salazar said. “You can be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism.”

That point makes no sense, as slavery ended with Lincoln and Reagan presided while the Soviet Union fell, and Elvira Salazar is not proposing an end to immigration. But the Cuban-American representative’s main point with the ad appears to be saving face with her Hispanic constituency. The district she represents is 54.2 percent foreign-born and more than 70 percent Hispanic, many of whom are of Cuban descent like her.

If a member of Congress in a solidly Republican district is afraid of being associated with Trump, that doesn’t bode well for November’s midterms. Trump and Republicans keep polling lower and lower, and ICE’s violent mass deportation tactics, paid for by billions of dollars in government funding, are among the many reasons why.

Elvira Salazar herself voted for that funding, and now she’s trying to run away from it. Meanwhile, ICE arrests of Cuban nationals have gone up by a staggering 463 percent since December 2024. One political ad might not be enough for her to survive at the polls in November.

Senator Mitch McConnell’s handlers would like the American public to believe that he’s still physically and mentally fit to be in office, but that no longer seems to be the case.

The longtime Kentucky Republican suddenly reappeared in Congress this week after an unexplained three-month absence, apparently ready to vote on Senate proceedings. But when tasked to do so during Wednesday’s Senate Agriculture Committee meeting on the Farm Bill, McConnell hazily sided with the Democrats.

The “no” vote was clearly a mistake, and visibly concerned North Dakota Senator John Hoeven, who was seated on McConnell’s left. Hoeven leaned over to the Kentuckian and said something quietly, as did committee chairman and Arkansas Senator John Boozman, seated on McConnell’s right. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the committee’s top Democrat, smiled and nodded along encouragingly as the trio struggled to address the lapse.

Nonetheless, the momentary error spurred murmurs from the table and the surrounding crowd of congressional aides.

“Aye,” McConnell quickly corrected.

McConnell’s office issued a statement on the senator’s X account shortly after the vote. The statement was written in the first-person, suggesting that despite McConnell’s vacant expression hours earlier, he was suddenly well enough to articulate via the written word that he was “proud to vote yes on the Farm Bill on behalf of the hardworking farm families across Kentucky.”

“America’s farmers are the cornerstone of our nation and the backbone of Kentucky’s economy and I wish our Democrat colleagues would have joined Republicans supporting the many important provisions in this Farm Bill,” the post continued. “My hope is the bill receives robust bipartisan support on the Senate floor and demonstrates our commitment to our Nation’s farmers and rural communities.”

McConnell was found unconscious in his Washington, D.C. home and rushed to the hospital on June 14. For weeks, his office refused to explain his extended hospitalization or elaborate on his eventual return to Capitol Hill. But the 84-year-old is clearly not the same: Since returning to Congress this week, McConnell has been repeatedly photographed with a blank gaze and his mouth hanging open, including just after his Farm Bill vote. He does not seem lucid or aware—save for the occasional wave towards the camera—and has refused to speak with reporters trying to assess his current health condition.