BASSETERRE, St. Kitts and Nevis — Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts early Wednesday for what was intended to be a showcase of the Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere after the U.S. military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last month.
Rubio’s brief visit to St. Kitts, where he a meeting of the leaders of the Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, comes as the administration’s focus on this region is being tested by the large buildup of U.S. military assets in the Middle East and the looming threat of significant strikes against Iran if talks this week in Geneva over Tehran’s nuclear program fail to make progress.
The U.S. delegation touched down here bleary-eyed after a late departure following President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday evening, in which he awarded a Medal of Honor to a pilot injured in the Maduro raid but also devoted a chunk of his 1-hour, 48-minute speech to the Middle East, promising not to let Iran have a nuclear weapon. Rubio, who in the hours before the speech also briefed members of Congress’s Gang of Eight on Iran, is scheduled to return to Washington on Wednesday evening.
Speaking to the assembled Caribbean leaders Wednesday, Rubio joked about his busy schedule.
“It was two hours, the [State of the Union] speech, and then we got on a plane and came here. And when I told my colleagues I needed to come here to St. Kitts and Nevis on a work trip, they were like, ‘Oh, sure, you’re going on a work trip,’” Rubio said, in a response that prompted laughter, according to a transcript of his closed-door remarks shared by the State Department.
Rubio told the room that his visit was a sign of a new approach to the Caribbean for the United States.
“I am very happy to be in an administration that’s giving priority to the Western Hemisphere after largely being ignored for a very long time,” Rubio said, adding that the Trump administration wanted “the region to be seen.”
The State Department declined to say why Rubio will not stay longer at the summit, which continues until Friday. The United States is not a member or official observer of CARICOM, which has 15 full members, mostly former British colonies.
Antony Blinken, who served as secretary of state during the Biden administration, had visited a CARICOM heads of state meeting in 2023 and a high-level meeting on Haiti organized by the bloc the following year.
Rubio’s visit to the Caribbean comes amid deep uncertainty about the Trump administration’s intentions in the region. The president’s second term has offered “more questions than answers for Caribbean leaders,” said Jenna Ben-Yehuda, a former State Department official who served in numerous policy and intelligence roles in the Western Hemisphere.
Caribbean countries have been split over the U.S. military’s deadly campaign against alleged drug smugglers. Last year, amid escalating strikes on boats, CARICOM issued a statement calling the region a “zone of peace” that should be free from military intervention. Trinidad and Tobago, which has offered practical and rhetorical support to the administration’s moves, declined to sign the agreement.
Since then, the operation to arrest Maduro, as well as U.S. warnings and an oil embargo aimed at the government in Cuba, have added to a sense of regional instability. Though in what appeared to be an acknowledgment of growing concerns about the humanitarian situation in Cuba, the U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday issued new guidance loosening some restrictions on fuel shipments.
On Wednesday, Cuban authorities also announced that their forces had killed four people on an American speedboat after it opened fire on Cuban border agents. Rubio told reporters he could not confirm the details published by Cuba but that U.S. authorities would conduct their own investigation.
“We are going to find out” what happened, Rubio said. “We’re not going to just take what somebody else tells us.”
There is a “strategic anxiety right now within Caribbean states about what’s going to happen in the next few months, maybe the next couple of years” in the region, said W. Andy Knight, an expert on Caribbean politics at the University of Alberta.
Most Caribbean nations want more U.S. engagement but they are “yet to see how the promise of increased attention will translate into policy action that directly benefits them,” said Ben-Yehuda, executive vice president of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.
Rubio addressed some of these worries during his remarks.
“Irrespective of how some of you may have individually felt about our operations and our policy toward Venezuela, I will tell you this, and I will tell you this without any apology or without any apprehension: Venezuela is better off today than it was eight weeks ago,” he said.
The country’s new interim leadership had “done things that eight or nine weeks ago would have been unimaginable,” he added, noting cooperation on efforts to stop drug trafficking and energy security in the Caribbean.
Rubio, a former senator from Florida whose parents were from Cuba and who grew up adjacent to the Caribbean enclaves of Miami, is seen as a key figure in the Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere. Most notably, he took on a leadership role in the operations that resulted in Maduro being arrested and taken to New York City to face drugs and weapons charges.
The administration dubs this focus the “Donroe Doctrine,” likening it to the 1823 position put forward by President James Monroe that formalized opposition to European colonialism in the hemisphere. Under Trump, it’s been held up as a justification for everything from electoral support for Argentina President Javier Milei to the president’s public threat to seize the Arctic territory of Greenland.
Rubio held two bilateral meetings while at the summit: one with St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Terrance Drew and the other with Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar.
Drew, the event’s host, recently announced that St. Kitts and Nevis had reached an agreement with the United States to accept deportees from other countries. He was criticized, however, for stating that his nation would not accept Haitians deported from the United States. Haiti is also a member of CARICOM.
Knight, with the University of Alberta, said that divisions with CARICOM were a major concern for the region as the organization has served as an “anchor” for small nations in the Caribbean who were weaker on their own. “Small states thrive under a situation where there are rules and where there are norms,” he said.
Now, he added, “those norms are being attacked by the world’s most powerful country.”
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