May 30, 2025 — Belly of the Beast
The Trump administration killed Chevron’s license extension for its operations in Venezuela in order to secure the votes of three Cuban-American politicians from South Florida on Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill last week, Marc Caputo reported for Axios.
Trump special envoy Richard Grenell had announced that Chevron’s license would be given a 60-day extension following a deal with Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro that secured the release of Joe St. Clair, a U.S. veteran imprisoned in Venezuela for six months.
But Cuban-American politicians, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were not happy about the deal.
Representatives Mario Díaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez, all Republicans from South Florida, threatened to vote against the bill if the deal went through. Rubio eventually announced the license would expire, and in turn, the three Cuban-American members of Congress voted for the “big, beautiful bill.”
The bill passed the House by a single vote.
In February, the three legislators took a similar stance on the same issue, when they pressured Trump into cancelling the 2022 Biden deal that allowed Chevron to operate in Venezuela.
Their threats at the time led House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to dub them the “Crazy Cubans” during a Miami fundraiser they attended, to which Giménez and Díaz-Balart “chuckled approvingly.”
The three Cuban-American members of Congress are allies of Rubio, who has long advocated for harsher sanctions on Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.
Rubio and Grennel have bumped heads on this and other issues, The Washington Post reports.
In a recent interview with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Grenell said that the Trump administration’s Latin America policy is to keep the Chinese away through “engagement” in the region, as opposed to sanctions that “penalize American companies.”
Rubio’s hard-line policy on Cuba and Venezuela is the antithesis of engagement.
So far, the White House has favored Rubio’s approach.
