Miami-Dade mayor to Trump: No ‘backroom deal’ to keep Castros in power in Cuba
Miami-Dade’s Democratic mayor this week said that any real political change forced on Cuba by the Trump administration must leave the Castro family fully out of power.
“Reports of secret negotiations with Raul Castro’s grandson concern me deeply,” Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said in a video address posted Tuesday, referring to the Trump administration’s alleged confidential talks with Havana that first leaked in early February. “Swapping one Castro dynasty figure for another is not transition. It is continuation.”
Her release of the video coincided with a “Cuba Libre” rally Tuesday in Hialeah that had multiple Republican speakers, including the city’s mayor and Alex Otaola, a Cuban American YouTube host who is leading a recall effort against her.
In her taped remarks posted on social media, Levine Cava was offering preemptive criticism should a Trump-brokered deal not include the Castro family relinquishing their unofficial authority over the Cuban government.
The elder Castro took over for brother Fidel Castro, who died in 2016. Raul Castro is considered still effectively in charge of Cuba, despite stepping down from the presidency in 2018 in favor of the nation’s current official leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Levine Cava is in the middle of her second and final term as county mayor, a position she first won in 2020. She’s also the first Miami-Dade mayor in 30 years not to be Cuban American. The prior mayor, Carlos Gimenez, is now the only Cuban-born member of Congress.
On Wednesday, Gimenez said Secretary of State Marco Rubio told him the reports of “secret negotiations” with Col. Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro were inaccurate. He also said Levine Cava was mirroring a position Gimenez himself has already made public — and one shared by the vast majority of Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade.
“I have made my position very clear on this,” Gimenez said. “The regime must go. I also believe the community will not accept a role in post-Communist Cuba for any Castro.”
In her video, delivered in English and Spanish, Levine Cava said Miami-Dade’s Cuban American population — the largest in the United States — has waited far too long for freedom in Cuba.
“For generations, our community has carried the pain of separation, repression and lost freedom,” she said. “And today as Cuba stands at an historic crossroads, we must be absolutely clear about what the Cuban people deserve. … Not a regime swap. Not another Castro, by blood or by proxy, handed power in a backroom deal.”