After the intervention in Venezuela, it is now in the crosshairs of Donald Trump. This Sunday, the US president issued an ultimatum to the Castro regime, urging it to “reach an agreement” with Washington “before it is too late.” Havana, he has pointed out, will no longer receive the money and oil that it received from Caracas and that constituted its capital.
“For many years Cuba survived thanks to enormous amounts of oil and cash from Venezuela. In exchange, Cuba provided ‘security services’ to the last two dictators of Venezuela (Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro), BUT NOT ANYMORE,” Trump writes on his social network, Truth, where he recalls that the majority of those killed in the and his wife, Cilia Flores, in their hideout in Caracas were, precisely, Cubans protecting the Venezuelan president. According to figures from Havana, 56 soldiers died in the assault, of which 32 came from the Caribbean island.
“Most of those Cubans are DEAD from the latest US attack.” “Venezuela no longer needs protection” from the Cubans, “the thugs and extortionists who kept them kidnapped for so many years,” adds the White House tenant. Venezuela now has the North American army, “the most powerful” in the world “by far,” to protect it. “And we will.”
Therefore, now “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY (from Venezuela) FOR CUBA!” “ZERO! I suggest to them (the Cuban regime) that they reach an agreement before it is too late,” concludes the Republican.
The Cuban Government has rushed to respond with a series of tweets from President Miguel Díaz-Canel in
Since the January 3 military operation in and around Caracas, the US president has threatened other interventions on the continent – sometimes indirectly, sometimes explicitly – from Greenland to Colombia. He has also declared several times his conviction that the Castro regime is about to fall.
As he has said several times since then, direct US action would not be necessary to achieve that result: intervention in Venezuela, in his opinion, will precipitate the fall of the Castro regime in Cuba, as it will be deprived of the economic support that Caracas provided.
“It seems that Cuba is ready to fall,” he declared just one day after Maduro’s kidnapping, to the journalists who accompanied him aboard the presidential plane Air Force One. “I don’t know if they are going to hold on, but Cuba now has stopped having income. All its income came from Venezuela and Venezuelan oil.” Regarding the possibility of military intervention on the island, he noted that he did not believe it would be necessary: “it seems that (the regime) is collapsing.”
In his message this Sunday, Trump does not make clear whether he plans to take other pressure measures against the island, subject to the US economic blockade for six decades. Last Friday, in comments during a meeting at the White House with oil businessmen to talk about the Venezuelan energy sector, he seemed to rule it out, commenting that the regime is already more than sanctioned.
In that same meeting, his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, pointed out that “the people who control Cuba” can choose between living “in a real country, with a real economy in which people can prosper, or they can continue with a failed dictatorship that will lead to a systemic and social collapse.”
Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles — and the ideologue of the pressure policy against Maduro that led to the military operation on the 3rd — has maintained extremely harsh positions against Havana throughout his career. The head of US diplomacy has always been convinced that a change in the government in Caracas would have a domino effect in Cuba.
In his reply tweets, President Díaz-Canel has pointed out that the island’s disastrous economic situation has its origins in the US blockade: “Those who turn everything into business, including human lives, have no morals to point out Cuba for anything, absolutely nothing.” “Those who blame the Revolution for the severe economic shortcomings we suffer should remain silent out of shame. Because they know and recognize that they are the result of the draconian measures of extreme asphyxiation that the US applied to us six decades ago and threatens to overcome now,” he adds.
Even if the economic situation deteriorates further in Cuba, things may not turn out as Trump and Rubio predict, warns Dan Restrepo, former head of Latin America in Barack Obama’s National Security Council (2009-2017). “The theory in this case is that a social collapse is going to precipitate, which in turn is going to precipitate a collapse of the regime. I think Cuba has shown that they are two different things. There was already a popular revolt in July 2021, the first since the Cuban revolution itself, and the regime ruthlessly put it down, and they have continued to do so. Circumstances have worsened daily since then, and nothing has emerged,” he noted this week during a video conference organized by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
“The notion that we are going to push them to a magical cliff of some kind that will precipitate change is the wrong way to think about Cuba. The terrifying way to think about Cuba, and what it could trigger, is that Cuba is like Haiti, but closer and bigger. Cuba is increasingly like Haiti, but 150 kilometers from the United States and with more population,” this expert warns.
