“Are we next?”: Cuba is in shock after US attack on Venezuela

For years, first Chávez and then Maduro sent billions of dollars in oil to support the Cuban government. Support that may now be compromised

For months, as the U.S. military prepared to attack Venezuela, many Cubans asked me a simple yet unsettling question: “Are we next?”

Following the devastating attacks on Venezuelan military bases and the surgical capture of leader Nicolás Maduro by US special forces, Cuba appears to be clearly in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

Maduro’s capture represents a seismic reversal of fortunes for Cuba’s communist government, which for decades depended on massive aid packages from its oil-rich South American ally for the island’s very survival.

At a protest held on Saturday in front of the US Embassy in Havana, defiant Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel promised not to let the Cuba-Venezuela alliance fall without a fight.

“For Venezuela, and of course for Cuba, we are willing to give even our own lives, but at a high cost,” proclaimed Díaz-Canel.

But if anything, the Cubans I’ve spoken to since the attacks have seemed shocked by the ease with which the U.S. military was able to capture Maduro without any loss of U.S. personnel.

“For decades, first (former Venezuelan leader Hugo) Chávez and then Maduro warned of US intervention,” said a Havana resident, who did not want his name used. “But when it finally happened, no one was prepared for it. The Venezuelans had billions of dollars to equip their army. We don’t.”

The attack on Venezuela appears to have already taken a heavy toll on Cuba, as President Donald Trump told the New York Post on Saturday: “You know, a lot of Cubans lost their lives last night. … They were protecting Maduro. It wasn’t a good move.”

The Cuban government, in a Facebook post on Sunday, stated that 32 of its citizens died during the operation “in combat actions, carrying out missions on behalf of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior, at the request of counterparts from the South American country”. The government declared two days of mourning.

It appears to be the first time in decades that former Cold War-era enemies have engaged in combat.

And everything seems to confirm what has long been suspected: Maduro’s inner circle of bodyguards was Cuban. Foreign diplomats stationed in Caracas have reported to me for years that Maduro’s personal security detail spoke Spanish with a Cuban accent and that Maduro, who studied in Havana in his youth, often trusted Cuban advisers more than his own people.

Now Maduro’s capture puts at risk a decades-old alliance that saved Cuba from total economic ruin following the collapse of its former economic patron, the Soviet Union.

For years, first Chávez and then Maduro sent billions of dollars in oil to prop up the Cuban government, in exchange for a seemingly endless stream of Cuban intelligence and economic advisers, as well as health professionals.

Chávez, before dying of cancer in 2013 after months of treatment in Cuban hospitals, declared that Cuba and Venezuela were not two nations, but la gran patria — the great homeland.

Over the years, as I regularly traveled between Cuba and Venezuela, it was difficult to tell where one nation began and the other ended. I once came across a detachment of Venezuelan soldiers building a bridge in the Cuban province of Guantánamo. When I asked how long they had been there, the Venezuelan official, frustrated with the lack of supplies, responded harshly: “Too long!”

Most of the time, when I visited clinics in the poorest neighborhoods of Caracas, I found Cuban doctors working there. Once, while covering political unrest in Venezuela, my cameraman and I were detained for four hours in the intense sun by the feared Venezuelan secret police, the Sebin.

They threatened to interrogate and mistreat us for being American spies, but they abruptly released us after finding my Cuban resident card.

After Chávez’s death, official mourning was declared throughout Cuba, to the point that singing was banned that day at my daughter’s, then two-year-old, nursery school in Havana.

Cuba then declared Chávez as the island’s staunchest ally since the Cuban revolution and granted him Cuban citizenship, making him the only foreigner to receive this distinction since Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

But the Venezuelan-Cuban symbiotic partnership faces unprecedented pressure under the second Trump administration and could soon reach a breaking point. Invoking a new Monroe Doctrine, Trump promised not to tolerate countries in the Western Hemisphere with interests and objectives that contradict those of the United States.

“The rapid success of US military operations to remove Maduro can only strengthen advocates of regime change in the Trump administration to put other Latin American countries in their sights, starting with Cuba”, Peter Kornbluh, co-author of the book “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana”, told CNN.

The increase in belligerence could not come at a worse time for the Cubans.

Currently, on most days, a large part of the island is plunged into prolonged blackouts due to a lack of fuel and aging power plants that fail with increasing frequency. In every state television news program, a person in charge appears talking about the prospect of a worsening energy situation as if he were predicting the weather. Scarcity of food, once guaranteed by a state rationing system, threatens to push millions of Cubans closer to malnutrition.

In December, a government commentator on state television caused outrage among many on the island when he advised Cubans to stop eating rice.

“We live in a state of war without war,” a Cuban friend told me a few weeks ago.

But the real threat of military intervention may be approaching, as the end of the alliance with Venezuela would leave Cuba in the greatest isolation since the fall of the Soviet Union.

For regime change advocates in the Trump administration, the opportunity to finally eliminate an adversary just 90 miles from the United States may prove irresistible.

It is unclear whether threats alone will be enough to force Havana to bow to US pressure and release political prisoners and hold multi-party elections.

“There has never been a time when we did not face the possibility of invasion,” a Cuban official told me recently, with an impassive expression.