Cuba looks defiant as it prepares for post-Maduro era

After Venezuela, there is no country in the Americas more affected by the events in Caracas than Cuba.

The two nations have shared a political vision of state-led socialism since a new Venezuelan presidential candidate, Hugo Chávez, met the old leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, on the tarmac of the Havana airport in 1999.

For years, their mutual ties only deepened, as Venezuelan crude oil flowed to the communist-ruled island in exchange for Cuban doctors traveling the other way.

After the deaths of both men, it was Nicolás Maduro – trained and educated in Cuba – who became Chávez’s hand-picked successor, chosen in part because he was acceptable to the Castro brothers. He represented the continuity of the Cuban revolution as much as the Venezuelan one.

Today, he too has left the seat of power in Caracas, forcibly removed by America’s elite Delta Force team. The outlook for Cuba in his absence is bleak.

For now, the Cuban government has vigorously denounced the attack as illegal and declared two days of national mourning for 32 Cuban nationals killed during the US military operation.

Their deaths revealed a long-known key fact about Cuban influence over the Venezuelan presidency and military: Maduro’s security services were almost entirely staffed by Cuban bodyguards. Cuban nationals also hold numerous positions in Venezuela’s intelligence services and military.

Cuba has long denied having any soldiers or security agents active in Venezuela, but released political prisoners have often claimed they were interrogated by men with Cuban accents while in detention.

Furthermore, despite endless public proclamations of solidarity between the two nations, Cuban influence behind the scenes of the Venezuelan state has actually reportedly driven a wedge between the ministers closest to Havana and those who believe that the relationship established by Chávez and Castro has become fundamentally unbalanced.

In essence, this faction considers that currently Venezuela receives little in exchange for its oil.

Venezuela is estimated to send about 35,000 barrels of oil per day to Cuba – none of the island’s other major energy partners, Russia and Mexico, even come close.

The Trump administration’s tactic of confiscating sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers has already begun to worsen Cuba’s fuel and electricity crisis and could become very acute, very quickly.

At best, the future looks increasingly complex for the embattled Caribbean island without Maduro at the helm of Caracas. Cuba was already in the grip of its worst economic crisis since the Cold War.

For months, power cuts have been occurring from one end of the island to the other. And the impact on ordinary Cubans has been extremely trying: weeks without reliable electricity, food rotting in refrigerators, fans and air conditioning that don’t work, mosquitoes swarming in the heat, and a proliferation of uncollected trash.

The island has seen a widespread outbreak of mosquito-borne diseases in recent weeks, with large numbers of people affected by dengue and chikungunya. Cuba’s health system, once the jewel of the revolution, is struggling to cope.

It’s not a pretty picture. Yet this is the daily reality for most Cubans.

The idea that the flow of Venezuelan oil to Cuba could be cut off by Delcy Rodríguez scares Cubans, especially if she seeks to appease the Trump administration after the U.S. raid on its predecessor and ward off the specter of further violence.

President Trump insists Washington is now calling the shots in Venezuela.

Even though these comments were revisited – to some extent – ​​by his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, there is no doubt that the Trump administration now expects nothing less than total respect from Rodríguez as acting president.

There would be other, potentially worse, consequences, Trump threatened, if she “doesn’t behave,” as he put it.

Such comments – not to mention the US operation in Venezuela itself – have shocked and angered critics in Washington, who say the White House is guilty of the worst form of US imperialism and interventionism seen in Latin America since the Cold War.

These critics say Maduro’s removal from power amounts to kidnapping, and the case against him should be dismissed during his eventual trial in New York.

Unsurprisingly, Trump appears unperturbed by such arguments, warning that he might even repeat them against the Colombian president if necessary.

He dubbed the worrying new situation in Latin America the “Donroe Doctrine,” in a nod to the Monroe Doctrine – a 19th-century colonialist foreign policy principle that warned European powers against interfering in America’s sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere.

In other words, Latin America is the “backyard” of the United States, and Washington has the inalienable right to determine what happens there. Rubio used this very term – “backyard” – about the region to justify actions against Venezuela on US Sunday talk shows.

It also remains the key to Cuba’s future. The American economic embargo has been in force for more than six decades and has failed to remove the Castro brothers or their political project from power.

Rubio — a former Cuban-American senator from Florida and son of Cuban exiles — would love nothing more than to be the man, or the man behind the man, who ended 60 years of communist rule in his parents’ country.

He sees the strategy of removing Maduro and imposing strict conditions on a more docile Rodríguez government in Caracas as the key to achieving this self-proclaimed goal in Havana.

Cuba has faced difficult times in the past, and the government remains defiant about this latest act of U.S. military intervention in the region.

The 32 “courageous Cuban fighters” who died in Venezuela will be honored, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said, for having “confronted terrorists in imperial uniform.”

“Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump retorted on Air Force One.