MEXICO CITY — President-elect Trump’s nomination of Florida's Marco Rubio to become the first Hispanic secretary of State has caused fewer shockwaves than his more controversial picks, but it has caught the attention of Latin America, a region not used to having a Western Hemisphere expert leading U.S. diplomacy. The three-term GOP senator and former presidential candidate, a well-known hawk on policy toward authoritarian regimes such as Cuba and Venezuela, will interact with a region that’s undergone a seismic shift in its politics, with key U.S. allies gravitating toward rivals, including Havana and Caracas. But Rubio might have limited resources to deal with the region, with red-hot geopolitical challenges in Europe and the Middle East and the ever-looming threat of Chinese expansion in the Pacific on his plate. Bipartisan support He would, however, take over State with significant political capital, as his nomination has drawn praise from both sides of the aisle. “I have often worked in this [Western Hemisphere] Subcommittee with my colleague Marco Rubio, and I’m very happy he will be, I think, secretary of State in Donald Trump’s administration,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told reporters in Spanish on a call last week. “Senator Rubio has a great interest in the Americas. In my opinion, many times in the past the secretary of State has not had great interest in the Americas, but with a Secretary of State Marco Rubio, we have a man who has worked often in the region, so I want to work with him to focus more on the Americas,” added Kaine, who currently chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, where Rubio is the top-ranking Republican. Rubio, who will be the first Hispanic top U.S. diplomat, has directly engaged Latin American issues — often as a fierce critic of leftist authoritarianism in the region — over the course of his career. Like other Cuban Americans vocal in U.S. politics, he is seen as a direct rival, if not an enemy, by officials in Havana, Caracas and Managua. For some human rights groups, Rubio’s hawkishness on those regimes is a plus, even if those organizations don’t see eye-to-eye with the incoming Trump administration on a wide array of issues. “I wish, and this is a very, very honest wish, that he would have the time to pay attention to Latin America and Cuba, as he did as a senator, I think it’s going to come to who he picks to be the undersecretary of State for the Western Hemisphere and the deputy assistant secretary of State in charge of specific affairs like Cuba,” said Hugo Acha, director of research and outreach for the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba. “If he has a team that represents his vision, which I believe, again, is in the best interest of democracy in the region, then Secretary of State Rubio can go down in the books as the guy who performed the oversight in the transition to a democratic Cuba and maybe recovering democracy in the Western Hemisphere.” 'A real opportunity' With 14 years in the Senate and eight years as a Florida state legislator before that, Rubio is well connected in the Latin America policy space. However, staffing the State Department’s nearly 300 political appointments can be a daunting task for any legislator veering into executive office. And the department’s career officials are, like others throughout the federal government, leery of the incoming Trump administration’s plans to gut the federal workforce. In the first Trump administration, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pledged to reduced combined civil and foreign service posts by 8 percent. The department cut about 1,500 jobs by the end of fiscal 2018, before growing by about 1,000 jobs under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who succeeded Tillerson. Because Latin America has long taken a back seat to other regions as a geopolitical priority, the pool of experts in the region is relatively small, meaning Rubio will likely require the expertise of State Department civil and foreign service officials to significantly sway U.S. policy in the region. And among Rubio’s supporters, expectations are high. “I think that this is a real opportunity for the Cuban people to rise up again and have their voices heard, and this time, they will have support from the Trump administration and from our secretary of State,” Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) told The Hill. “One of the biggest things we’ll try to do is get internet to the island when it comes to the protests to make sure the world sees how they have been shut down and how young people are being jailed and how they're being brutalized by the regime's military in attempt to silence them. And I think that we'll have the support this time from the State Department, where we haven't previously had it.” Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.), who was born in Cuba, said “there's always carrots and sticks,” but he set the bar on Cuba at regime change, a goal successive U.S. governments have failed to accomplish for more than 60 years. “We know that some people inside this [Biden] administration are actually sympathetic to that regime. Marco Rubio is not sympathetic to that regime, OK? And neither am I. And I actually believe this is the time. I'm Cuban. I was born in Cuba. You know, where I came from, my homeland, has been under an oppressive regime for over 60 years. This is the Western Hemisphere. We should be the champion of democracy,” said Giménez. Democrats who are opposed to Cuban communism say the aftermath of any potential regime change would present its own challenges, which could be difficult to manage under the Trump administration’s isolationist tendencies, Rubio notwithstanding. “Marco, as the secretary, might have all of the best intentions in the world to do what's needed to push Cuba to finally make this change to democracy. But what happens if the Cuban people do what they need to do, and then what happens the day after? There's got to be a commitment by the administration to support those efforts in whatever way that looks like, but most likely it would be resources,” said María Cardona, a Democratic strategist. “So that, I think, is the challenge when you have Trump as the incoming president, whose focus is ‘America first,’ and huge focus on isolationism, if you will. Will he be able to look beyond that to the benefit of having a democratic Cuba 90 miles to the south of our border? And what will that mean in terms of committing resources to make sure that that happens in the way that it should so it doesn't fall into — like the USSR did — doesn't fall into like criminal enterprises, the cartels, which I'm sure are ready to pounce, whenever that happens, what is the administration ready and committed to doing?” And hawkishness on Cuba and Venezuela will not reap praise among some key U.S. partners in the region, particularly Mexico. Relations with Mexico “Probably the most important thing right now is oil. As you probably know, three ships have basically saved the regime's neck in the last couple of weeks, one of them being a Mexican tanker, you know, the other ones were Russian,” said Acha, referring to a tanker carrying 400,000 barrels of oil that Mexico dispatched in October to help Cuba navigate its energy crisis. Mexico will, regardless of what happens in Ukraine, East Asia or the Middle East, require significant attention from the Trump administration. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is sympathetic with the Cuban government, at least to the tune of all that oil, but she has committed her country’s economic future to North American economic integration under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which is up for revision in 2026. Mexico and the United States have the single biggest country-to-country trading partnership in the world, with significant cross-border investments that have created integrated supply lines that, if broken, are likely to cause inflationary pressures. It’s a near certainty that bilateral cooperation — or lack thereof — on migration and transnational crime will seep into USMCA negotiations, which will already be tense, given growing Chinese investment in Mexico. “I think [Mexico] would like to cooperate with the United States. Understand that the majority of the people that crossed the border illegally are not Mexican nationals. They are people from all over the world, literally over 100-plus countries from all over the world, and Mexico is just the transit point,” said Rubio on EWTN’s “The World Over With Raymond Arroyo” earlier this month. Rubio said the Biden administration’s immigration policies incentivized Mexico and its southern neighbors to allow migrants to cross their territories on their way to the United States. Mexican enforcement has been a significant factor in the drop in border crossings over the past six months. “Now, if the president is saying, ‘No, you can't come here anymore, we're not going to allow you to come in.’ Now, the Mexican government is going to have an incentive to say, ‘Well, you're not coming through here either.’ And that will go right down the chain. I mean, that will also apply all the way up and down to Panama, where in the Darien Gap is — where some of these journeys begin for many of these migrants. I do expect them to cooperate because it's in their interest to cooperate, but they're only going to cooperate if it aligns with our policies, and they will under Donald Trump.” It’s still unclear how much Mexico will tolerate U.S. pressure on Cuba and to what extent the country can keep up its migration enforcement efforts, but direct U.S. military involvement against cartels on Mexican territory, which Trump has threatened, is almost certainly a red line. Rep. Tim Waltz (R-Fla.), Trump’s pick for White House national security advisor, has been hawkish on U.S. military intervention against Mexican cartels, a possibility that Rubio said could happen “as long as there is cooperation from the Mexican government.” In a 2023 interview with Mexican daily El Universal, Rubio, who is fluent in Spanish, criticized former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s mentor, who often presented a friendlier face in direct interactions with the United States while spouting sharp anti-American rhetoric to domestic audiences. “Mexico is an important partner of the United States. The country, its institutions. But López Obrador is not a good ally. The current president, unfortunately, is dedicated to talking nonsense, to interfering in U.S. policy. His thinking is beyond the left, a strange thinking in terms of that line with all these dictators in the hemisphere. And he has a domestic policy with which he has handed over a large part of his national territory to the drug traffickers who control those areas,” said Rubio in the interview. Rubio’s understanding of regional politics is certain to be tested, but Latin America observers say a secretary of State with any in-depth understanding of the region will be a welcome change from past U.S. administrations. “In my opinion almost no administration pays enough attention to the Americas, but I have confidence that Secretary Rubio will pay a lot of attention to the region, and I will do what I can to support his efforts in the region. Many other nations, especially Russia, China and others are paying more attention than the United States, and it’s time for a big change on that,” said Kaine.