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Former defense secretary: US could face Cuban migration crisis

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by Tara Suter - 05/17/26 9:12 PM ET

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by Tara Suter - 05/17/26 9:12 PM ET

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Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned of a migration crisis to the U.S. from Cuba, comments that follow President Trump recently threatening the island.

“Does it matter to U.S. national security what happens on this island?” CBS News’s Margaret Brennan asked Gates on “Face the Nation.”

“I think that, actually, the biggest risk is, that we end up with another Mariel evacuation from Cuba that has tens of thousands of Cubans heading to the United States out of desperation, as has happened a number of years ago,” Gates responded.

According to the National Coast Guard Museum, the Mariel Boatlift involved a large group of people fleeing from Cuba in 1980.

“So, I think that’s actually, at this point, the biggest threat. You know, the Cubans have — have had a lot of security people in Venezuela, they were, they were — formed the security cordon around [Venezuelan leader Nicolás] Maduro. He didn’t trust his own people. They’ve done this in other countries, so they have been involved in ways that have impacted our national security and our interests, in their engagement in other countries, for a long time,” he added.

On Friday, Cuban officials announced that the country had run out of oil and diesel as it dealt with a humanitarian crisis that was growing worse due to an increase in pressure from the Trump administration to change its ways to follow U.S. terms or face potential military action.

Cuban officials, however, have stayed defiant against demands from the U.S., and Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said recently that the U.S. blockade on Cuba was “genocidal.”

“It is a perverse design whose main objective is the suffering of the entire people, to hold them hostage and turn them against the Government,” he wrote on the social platform X.

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