U.S. Senator Rubén Gallego, an emerging profile of the Democratic Party, considers it highly likely that the Donald Trump Administration will bet on a new military intervention to force a regime change in Cuba. “Cubans in Florida have a lot of power and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has an obsession with the island,” he said this Friday in a meeting with journalists at the headquarters of the Real Instituto Elcano in Madrid. “But I don’t believe Cuba is a threat to the United States, it is a very poor country of nine million inhabitants,” he added.
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The representative from the State of Arizona has criticized the White House’s strategy of appealing to arms to seek political changes in Latin America. “The United States should not start wars to overthrow governments and I believe that practically 99% of Democrats holding public office are against this war,” Gallego said. Last March, this senator presented a bill in the upper chamber, where his party does not have a majority, to prevent Trump from launching an operation similar to Venezuela’s without Congressional authorization.
Gallego, ex-marine and Iraq war veteran, has pointed out that although the operation to capture Nicolás Maduro last January was very effective from a military point of view, the political results have not been what was expected. “What have we changed in Venezuela? We went from one dictator to another, so from a geopolitical point of view it has been a failure and will continue to be a failure until Venezuela smoothly transitions to democracy,” he added. “Maduro is a horrible person, a corrupt one,” he commented, “but that does not give us a license to overthrow these governments.”
The senator predicts that the mismanagement of the war against Iran, increasingly unpopular among U.S. voters, will take a toll on the Trump Administration and the Republican Party in the upcoming November midterm elections. All seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate will be renewed, and the forecast is that the Republican majority, at least in the former, is at risk. Gallego is optimistic and has said it is very likely that his party could even have control of the upper chamber.
“The war is a problem for voters,” he said about the majority rejection of a conflict that has been a choke point for the White House and the economic impact of the military campaign. “It is distracting the Government from things that matter to Americans, everything costs a lot right now in the United States,” he added.
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Winning back the Latino vote
Although historically Latinos have leaned towards the Democrats, the 2024 presidential elections reversed that trend and Trump obtained support from the majority of Hispanic men. Now, a survey by the organization UnidosUS presented this week points out that one in four Latinos regrets having voted for the Republican.
Of Mexican father and Colombian mother, Gallego has acknowledged that his political training fell short two years ago when trying to convince Latino voters. In 2024, the senator obtained a 22-point advantage among Hispanic voters in Arizona over his Republican rival, a support higher than that obtained by the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, in the state among members of that community. “We talked about what mattered to people, which were two things: economy and migration,” he emphasized about his campaign.
“We must stop seeing Latinos as we would like them to be and see them as they are,” he said. “Many leftists in the Democratic Party would like them to be more liberal on issues like migration as children of migrants,” he suggested. “But my own family told me that the border was out of control and that the president had to do something to change that. Those who understood it did well. Those who didn’t ended up losing.”
Although many candidates have raised their hands two years before the presidential elections, it is still unclear who will step forward among the Democrats after the failure in the last elections. Gallego, who has been mentioned among the vast pool of potential candidates, has stated that there are many good profiles in the party, although he has not wanted to reveal who, in his opinion, would be the ideal one in the race to reach the White House. He also did not want to say if he is interested in the candidacy or what his plans are for 2028. “We have to think first about 2026 and then we’ll see, besides I have three children,” he said with a laugh.
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