Claver-Carone, White House advisor for Latin America, one of the promoters of the hard line in Latin America. Photo: EFE.
By Randy Alonso Falcon – May 11, 2025
The latest move in Washington has not gone down well with the arrogant Mauricio. Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as Acting National Security Advisor alongside his role as Secretary of State has upset the President’s Special Envoy for Latin America. Claver-Carone and Mr. Rubio seem to tolerate each other but do not get along.
This is clear from the assessments of the US and Argentine media on the reasons that led Carone to leak to Bloomberg that he is leaving his post to return to running his private company, Lara Fund, an investment fund based in Miami. To do so, he will invoke the 130-day law, which limits the time a person can serve as a special employee of the US federal government without formal nomination by the Senate to that number of days.
According to the right-wing Argentine newspaper Clarín, “Claver Carone had a lot of power in Trump’s first administration as a national adviser to the White House. But now he has been overshadowed—and some say they do not get along—by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who, like him, is of Cuban-American origin but has growing international prestige and national influence. Trump has just given Rubio the key position—for now temporary—of national security adviser, replacing Mike Waltz, his first major dismissal in his second term.”
Other sources suggest that Mauricio’s dismissal has more to do with conflicts of interest with his position in the government. “He went too far with his business dealings,” says Reinaldo Taladrid, a close friend and seasoned expert on these issues.
That would not be surprising for a corrupt and licentious guy like Claver-Carone, who for more than a decade made a living from the anti-Cuban industry as a lobbyist of lies in Washington and was then expelled from the post of President of the Inter-American Development Bank, where he was imposed by Trump, for granting salary and job favors to his mistress since the time he was National Security Advisor for Latin America in the first Trump administration.
In that administration, where Carone had a more privileged position than Rubio (who was then a senator), he was the main architect of the more than 200 ominous measures that the Trump administration imposed against Cuba.
His record is so odious that even in Milei’s Argentina, people are happy to see him go. “Claver-Carone’s downfall was celebrated by the economic team led by Toto Caputo, who had to endure the torpedoing of the now former Trump official during negotiations with the IMF, when he called for the cancellation of the swap with China,” reports the digital media outlet La Política online.
One of the happiest is Milei’s chief of staff, Guillermo Francos. The clashes between Claver-Carone and Francos date back to when the latter was Argentina’s representative to the IDB. The American accused Francos of having promoted his dismissal from the organization in 2022 following allegations of an intimate relationship with his chief of staff, Jessica Bedoya, whom he had promoted.
“Claver was a disaster for several reasons. For having had an inappropriate relationship, for having increased the salary of this inappropriate relationship in a disproportionate manner, for having lied, and for these arbitrary and authoritarian maneuvers that showed him to be a real bully,” Francos said in 2022.
Whatever the cause, or causes, the fact is that Mauricio Claver-Carone lasted in this administration about as long as candy at a school gate. And we won’t be mourning him around here. He was a true son of his country, which has been against the Cuban people. Boring.
