Cuba defiant as it braces for post-Maduro era

After Venezuela, there is no other country in the American continent that was as affected by the events in Caracas as Cuba.

The two countries have shared a political vision of state-led socialism ever since fresh-faced Venezuelan presidential candidate Hugo Chavez met the aging leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, on the tarmac at the Havana airport in 1999.

Over the years, their mutual ties have deepened as Venezuelan crude oil flows to the communist-run island in exchange for Cuban doctors and medics going the other way.

After the deaths of the two men, Chávez’s hand-picked successor was Nicolás Maduro, who studied and trained in Cuba; It was chosen in part because it was acceptable to the Castro brothers. He represented the continuity of the Cuban revolution as well as the Venezuelan revolution.

He too has now left his seat of power in Caracas and has been forcibly removed by the US’s elite Delta Force team. Without him, Cuba’s future is bleak.

For now, the Cuban government has strongly condemned the attack as illegal and declared two days of national mourning for the attack. 32 Cuban citizens were killed in a US military operation.

Their deaths revealed an important, long-known fact about Cuban influence over the Venezuelan presidency and military: Maduro’s security team consisted almost entirely of Cuban bodyguards. Cuban citizens also hold many positions in Venezuela’s intelligence services and military.

Cuba has long denied that there were active military or security forces in Venezuela, but released political prisoners often claimed they were interrogated by men with Cuban accents while in custody.

Moreover, despite endless declarations of solidarity between the two countries, in reality Cuban influence behind the scenes of the Venezuelan state is believed to have led to a schism between the ministers closest to Havana and those who felt that the relationship first established by Chavez and Castro had become fundamentally unbalanced.

In fact, this group thinks Venezuela gets too little in return for its oil.

Venezuela is believed to ship approximately 35,000 barrels of oil per day to Cuba; None of the island’s other main energy partners, Russia and Mexico, come close to this figure.

The Trump administration’s tactic of seizing sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers has begun to worsen Cuba’s fuel and electricity crisis and has the potential to become very severe very quickly.

At best, the future looks increasingly complicated for the beleaguered Caribbean island without Maduro in Caracas. Cuba was already in the grip of the worst economic crisis since the Cold War.

There have been power outages from one end of the island to the other for months. And the impact on ordinary Cubans is devastating: weeks without reliable electricity, food rotting in refrigerators, fans and air conditioners not working, mosquitoes swarming in the heat, and uncollected garbage festering.

The island has experienced a widespread outbreak of mosquito-borne diseases in recent weeks, with many people affected by dengue fever and chikungunya. Once the jewel in the revolution’s crown, Cuba’s health system is struggling to cope.

It’s not a pretty picture. But for most Cubans, this is a daily reality.

The idea that the flow of Venezuelan oil to Cuba could be stopped by Delcy Rodríguez fills Cubans with fear; especially if Delcy Rodríguez is trying to appease the Trump administration and eliminate the possibility of further violence following the US crackdown on his predecessor.

President Trump insists Washington now calls the shots in Venezuela.

Although these comments were pushed back to some extent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, there is no doubt that the Trump administration expects less than complete obedience from Rodríguez as acting president.

Trump threatened that if he did not “act,” as he put it, even worse consequences could occur.

Such language — not to mention the U.S. operation in Venezuela — shocked and angered Washington’s critics, who say the White House is guilty of the worst form of U.S. imperialism and interventionism seen in Latin America since the Cold War.

Critics argue that removing Maduro from power amounts to kidnapping and that the case against him should be dismissed at his final hearing in New York.

Unsurprisingly, Trump seems unimpressed by such arguments, warning that he could do so again against the Colombian president if necessary.

He called the alarming new conditions in Latin America the “Donroe Doctrine”, a reference to the Monroe Doctrine, a 19th-century colonial foreign policy principle that warned European powers against meddling in the US sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere.

Put simply, Latin America is the United States’ “backyard” and Washington has the inalienable right to determine what happens there. Rubio used the term in reference to the region — the backyard — when justifying actions against Venezuela on U.S. talk shows on Sunday.

It also remains the key to what happens next for Cuba. The US economic embargo has been in place for more than six decades and has failed to remove the Castro brothers or their political project from power.

Rubio, a Cuban-American former Florida senator and son of Cuban exiles, would want nothing more than to be the man, or the man behind the man, who ended 60 years of communist rule in his family’s hometown.

He sees the strategy of removing Maduro and imposing strict conditions on a more obedient Rodríguez government in Caracas as key to achieving the goal clearly declared in Havana.

Cuba has fallen on hard times in the past, and the government remains defiant in the face of this latest U.S. military intervention in the region.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said the 32 “brave Cuban warriors” who died in Venezuela would be honored to “fight terrorists wearing imperial uniforms.”

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