A member of the State Department’s press team made a humiliating online blunder transcribing Donald Trump’s comments about Marco Rubio.
The department posted a video to X on Wednesday of the president answering reporters’ questions about the Trump administration’s increasingly hostile stance toward Cuba.
A short transcript of Trump’s remarks accompanied the post. “PRESIDENT TRUMP: We have a lot of people in Cuba. We have the CIA there. [Rubio] is from there, so we have a lot of expertise,” the text reads. “We’re going to help the Cuban people out. We’re freeing up Cuba.”
Whoever wrote the post appears to have forgotten their boss is not actually from Cuba. Secretary of State Rubio was born in Miami, Florida, to Cuban immigrant parents who fled Fidel Castro’s 1959 communist revolution.
The 79-year-old president—notoriously inclined to forget or otherwise confuse the names of foreign leaders, other countries, companies, leading business figures, even where exactly his own father was born—managed to remember that fact.
The clip shows the president, contrary to the State Department’s transcript, very clearly stating, “Marco is there, Marco’s parents, as you know, were from Cuba.”
The blunder comes as the Trump administration ramps up its campaign against the communist island nation with the indictment of Cuba’s 94-year-old ex-president, Raúl Castro, for conspiring to kill U.S. nationals. The charge relates to an incident 30 years ago in which four Cuban-Americans in exile were killed after their aircraft were shot down in the Straits of Florida.
Cuba has faced a U.S. blockade of oil shipments since the capture and abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier in January, in a raid in which dozens of his Cuban security guards were killed.
That move has deepened an already disastrous energy crisis in Cuba itself, which relied on Venezuelan oil to power its economy.
Trump has repeatedly suggested the Cuban government is “ready to fall” and said that the U.S. is standing by to launch a “takeover” of the country.
The president’s attention has largely been focused on his war with Iran over the past several months. But Rubio posted a Spanish-language video Wednesday addressing the Cuban people directly, suggesting the issue may now be inching its way back up the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda.
“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not because of an oil ‘blockade’ by the United States,” he 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.”
Announcing the Castro charges, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a Miami news conference that a grand jury returned an indictment last month, but it was not unsealed until Wednesday.
“They were unarmed civilians and were flying humanitarian missions for the rescue and protection of people fleeing oppression across the Florida Straits,” he said of the four people killed in the 1996 attack. “The United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the State Department for comment on this story.
