Jeremy Lewin, the 29-year-old official who played a key role in Washington's policy toward Cuba and Venezuela over the past two years, left the State Department on Tuesday, just days before the midterm elections on November 3rd.
In a message on his X account, Lewin expressed his gratitude to President Trump and Secretary Marco Rubio, vowing to continue supporting the administration from the private sector. "It has been a lifelong privilege to work for President Trump and Secretary Rubio, and I am eternally grateful for their trust in me to execute their vision for foreign policy," he stated.
"President Trump has left behind decades of post-Cold War unrest — permanently transforming U.S. foreign policy to put Americans first, keep them safe, and promote shared peace and prosperity in key regions," he added.
Lewin was the Director of Political Planning at the State Department and the youngest official to hold that position in the history of the department.
According to Axios, he will marry soon and already has a job in the private sector that he will join afterward.
During his approximately two years in office, Lewin amassed a broad foreign policy portfolio for the region. In Cuba, he led bilateral talks in Havana with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as "El Cangrejo" and the grandson of Raúl Castro, and implemented the sanctions of the Trump administration against the Cuban regime, including those resulting from Executive Order 14404 signed on May 1, 2026.
In May, Lewin publicly demanded that the regime return to the Cuban people the resources that the military conglomerate GAESA is believed to have accumulated in secret accounts abroad, estimated between 18 billion and 20 billion dollars.
«The communist system of Cuba is a cruel lie. While the people suffer from hunger, poverty, and repression, the corrupt elites of the regime have directed the country's resources to a secret network of bank accounts abroad for their personal benefit,» he wrote then on X.
In Venezuela, Lewin led the diplomatic approach with the interim president Delcy Rodríguez following the capture of Nicolás Maduro, and played a central role in the structuring of the mega oil agreement between Washington and Caracas announced in August, which involves a projected investment of up to 100 billion dollars.
Lewin joined the federal government in January 2025 as part of the public spending cut program led by Elon Musk through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). His first assignment was at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where he led the dismantling of the agency—by March 2025, approximately 83% of its contracts had been eliminated—and then helped restructure foreign aid programs under the Department of State.
His departure comes at a delicate moment: the conversations between Washington and Havana have been stalled since the Cuban regime rejected the U.S. demand for Miguel Díaz-Canel to step down, a condition that Havana dismissed days ago.
The lingering question is who will take on Lewin's role as the key interlocutor with Havana, at a time when Trump has indicated that he might send Rubio himself to negotiate directly with the Cuban regime.
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