Cuba prepares for post-Maduro era

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

Ever since Venezuelan presidential candidate Hugo Chávez met aging Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on the tarmac of Havana airport in 1999, the two countries have shared a political vision of state-led socialism.

Their mutual relationship deepened over the years as Venezuelan crude oil flowed to the communist island in exchange for Cuban doctors and medical personnel traveling in the other direction.

After their deaths, Nicolas Maduro, who had been trained and mentored in Cuba, became Chavez’s handpicked successor, chosen in part because he was acceptable to the Castro brothers. He represents the continuity of the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions.

Now, he too has been forcibly ousted from his seat of power in Caracas by America’s elite Delta Force. In his absence, Cuba’s prospects look bleak.

Currently, the Cuban government strongly condemns the attack as illegal and declares two days of national mourning. 32 Cuban citizens were killed in US military operations.

Their deaths reveal a well-known key fact about Cuba’s influence over Venezuela’s president and military: Maduro’s security forces are composed almost entirely of Cuban bodyguards. Cuban nationals also serve in numerous positions within the Venezuelan intelligence services and military.

Cuba has long denied there are active soldiers or security personnel in Venezuela, but freed political prisoners often claim they were interrogated in detention by men with Cuban accents.

Moreover, despite the two countries’ constant public declarations of unity, the reality is that Cuba’s influence behind the scenes of the Venezuelan state is seen to be driving a rift between the ministers closest to Havana and those who believe the relationship initially forged by Chavez and Castro has become fundamentally imbalanced.

Essentially, this faction believes that Venezuela today receives minimal returns from its oil.

Venezuela is believed to be sending around 35,000 barrels of oil a day to Cuba – something neither the island’s other major energy partners, Russia and Mexico, can match.

The Trump administration’s strategy of seizing sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers has begun exacerbating Cuba’s fuel and power crisis and threatens to quickly become very serious.

At best, without Maduro at the helm of Caracas, the troubled Caribbean island’s future looks increasingly complicated. Cuba has fallen into its worst economic crisis since the Cold War.

For months, the island has been experiencing rolling blackouts from one end to the other. The impact on ordinary Cubans has been devastating: weeks without reliable electricity, food rotting in refrigerators, fans and air conditioners not functioning, mosquitoes swarming in hot weather, and uncollected garbage festering.

The island has suffered a widespread outbreak of mosquito-borne diseases in recent weeks, with large numbers of the population infected by dengue fever and chikungunya fever. Cuba’s health care system, once the crown jewel of the revolution, is currently struggling to cope.

This is not a pretty picture. Yet this is the daily reality for most Cubans.

The idea that Delcy Rodriguez might cut off Venezuelan oil supplies to Cuba fills Cubans with fear, especially if she seeks to appease the Trump administration and avert the specter of more violence after the U.S. attacked her predecessor.

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

While these remarks were somewhat walked back by his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, there is no doubt that the Trump administration now expects full compliance from Rodriguez as acting president.

Trump threatened further and potentially more serious consequences if she “did not do what he said.”

Such comments — not to mention U.S. actions in Venezuela — have alarmed and outraged critics in Washington, who say the White House is committing the worst form of U.S. imperialism and interventionism in Latin America since the Cold War.

These critics argue that removing Maduro from power amounts to kidnapping and that the case against him must be dismissed at a final trial in New York.

Unsurprisingly, Trump seemed unfazed by these arguments, warning that he might even take this approach again against the Colombian president if need be.

He called the alarming new situation in Latin America the “Donro Doctrine,” a nod to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine was a 19th-century colonial foreign policy principle that warned European powers not to interfere with the United States’ 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 decide the situation in Latin America. Rubio used the term “backyard” to describe the region when he defended action against Venezuela on a U.S. Sunday talk show.

He remains key to Cuba’s next steps. The U.S. economic embargo has been in place for more than sixty years but has failed to unseat the Castro brothers or their political project.

Rubio, a Cuban-American former Florida senator and son of Cuban exiles, wants nothing more than to be the man, or the man behind the man, to end 60 years of communist rule in his parents’ homeland.

He sees the strategy of ousting Maduro and imposing strict conditions on the more pliant Rodriguez government in Caracas as key to achieving that self-professed goal in Havana.

Cuba has gone through difficult times in the past, and its government remains defiant in the face of the latest U.S. military intervention in the region.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said the 32 “brave Cuban fighters” who died in Venezuela would be honored for “wearing imperial uniforms and fighting against terrorists.”

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