Mario Diaz-Balart, Lois Frankel press Marco Rubio on Cuba, Venezuela and international vaccine distribution
Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended work with Venezuela, pressure on Cuba and the dismantling of USAID during a testy House hearing headed by former legislative colleagues.
U.S. Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart urged his fellow Miami-Dade Republican to take a harder line on Cuba, and sought updates on an evolving situation in Venezuela. A longtime political ally with Rubio, Díaz-Balart started his questioning by raising a series of slights against the U.S. by a communist nation 90 miles off Florida’s shore.
Díaz-Balart, Chair of the House National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Subcommittee, detailed facilitation between Cuba and hostile nations like Russia and China in the West.
“Would you consider a country like that as a threat to the national security interest?” he asked.
Rubio noted that other countries in Latin America have also created tension threatening U.S. interests, and all have worked directly with the Cuban government. He pointed specifically at FARC, a terrorist army based in Colombia that has been sponsored in the past by Cuba.
“All of these violent Marxist left-wing radical terrorist groups that operate in many countries have destabilized Colombia, for example, for years, and others all found their seed money from Cuba as well,” Rubio said.
Díaz-Balart praised many actions taken in the Western Hemisphere by President Donald Trump’s administration, including the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on narcoterrorism charges. But he also pressed about the progress that’s been gained this year in a plan to transition to democracy in Venezuela, where Maduro Vice President Delcy Rodriguez remains the acting President.
Rubio reminded that the raid to take Maduro into custody took place just five months ago.
“Venezuela is not today where we hope it will be for the peoples of Venezuela’s sake, but it is on a trajectory that I think is a very positive one. If it continues, and it has to continue, as you said, our first priority was stabilization,” he said.
“We did not want to see mass migration. We did not want to see a civil war. We did not want to see societal breakdown. And that required working, to the extent possible and wise, with existing institutions — not to preserve them or to perpetuate them, but to ensure that we didn’t have systemic breakdown.”
Rubio said the nation has already entered a recovery phase, the second part of a three-part plan he previously laid out to Congress. The State Department wants to ensure money raised from natural resources within Venezuela, like oil, ends up being used to help the people and not any totalitarian regime.
U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, Ranking Democrat on Díaz-Balart’s Subcommittee, brought more adversarial questions, despite some nostalgia-fueled moments recalling when the three federal officials served together in the Florida Legislature.
But she took issue with the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under Rubio’s watch at the State Department. While Rubio pushed back on notions that the move has isolated the U.S., Frankel said it gave up a soft power tool in building support for the U.S. abroad.
“What I’m worried about, what a lot of people are worried about, is the lack of expertise,” the West Palm Beach Democrat said.
“There were thousands of people fired. I mean, how do we know that in each of these countries you have someone there who knows how to fix a water system?”
Rubio said it was in the U.S. interest to work with local partners in each of those nations.
“We’d be partnering with the local government, with a domestic government, with our host nation, to ensure that we’re relying on building their capacity to do this work, and our job depends on the country,” he said.
Frankel took particular issue with the administration appearing to adopt the vaccine skepticism of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she referred to as a “health terrorist.” She questioned the administration pressuring the Gavi Alliance to phase out international distribution of proven vaccines.
Rubio pushed back on the characterization of Kennedy as a terrorist but did signal it was ultimately the State Department’s call on how to engage with the Gavi Alliance. As an Ebola outbreak raises international concern, Rubio promised his agency would exert its authority.
“Not anything negative towards Secretary Kennedy,” Rubio said. “We’ve now reached the stage where the State Department will become more engaged in making sure we can reach an outcome, because we have to get to an outcome here. We do want the reforms that he supports.”
Frankel continued to sound skeptical.
“I don’t know what reforms, I can’t even imagine this man knows what he’s talking about. But the fact is we need to get these vaccines out,” she said.