In the months since the U.S. military has been preparing to attack Venezuela, many Cubans have asked me disconcertingly simple questions. “Are we next?”
Cuba appears to be on the Trump administration’s radar following the devastating attack on a Venezuelan military base and the surgical arrest of leader Nicolas Maduro by US special forces.
Maduro’s capture is a dramatic reversal of fortune for Cuba’s communist-run government, which for decades has relied on massive aid from its oil-rich South American allies for the island’s very survival.
At a protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Havana on Saturday, defiant Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel vowed not to let the Cuba-Venezuelan alliance collapse without a fight.
“We are willing to give even our lives for Venezuela, and of course for Cuba, but the price is high,” Díaz-Canel declared.
But if anything, Cubans I’ve talked to since the airstrike seemed shocked at how easy it was for the U.S. military to usurp President Maduro without losing any U.S. personnel.
“For decades, first[former Venezuelan leader Hugo]Chávez and then Maduro warned of U.S. intervention,” said one Havana resident who did not want his name used. “But when it finally happened, no one was ready for it. The Venezuelans had billions of dollars to equip their army. But we don’t.”
The attack on Venezuela already appears to have 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. That was not a good move.”
Cuba’s government said in a Facebook post on Sunday that 32 of its citizens were killed in “an act of hostilities carried out on behalf of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior at the request of South American countries.” The government declared two days of mourning.
It appears to be the first time in decades that the former Cold War adversaries will be involved in combat.
And this seems to confirm what has long been suspected: Maduro’s inner circle bodyguards were Cuban. Diplomats in Caracas have reported to me for years that Maduro’s personal guards spoke Spanish with a Cuban accent, and that the president, who had studied in Havana as a young man, was more likely to trust Cuban advisers than his own citizens.
Mr. Maduro’s detention now jeopardizes the decades-long alliance that saved Cuba from complete economic ruin following the collapse of its former economic benefactor, the Soviet Union.
For years, first Chávez and then Maduro have propped up the Cuban government by sending billions of dollars worth of oil in exchange for a steady stream of Cuban intelligence, economic advisers and medical experts.
Before dying of cancer in 2013 after months of treatment in a Cuban hospital, Chávez declared that Cuba and Venezuela were not two countries, but La Gran Patria, or one homeland.
I have been traveling regularly between Cuba and Venezuela for years, and it has been difficult to tell where one country begins and another ends. I once met a detachment of Venezuelan soldiers building a bridge in Guantanamo state, Cuba. When I asked them how long they had been there, the Venezuelan official in charge, frustrated by the lack of supplies, barked at me, “Too long!”
When I visited clinics in Caracas’s poorest slums, I often encountered Cuban doctors working there. Once, while reporting on the political upheaval in Venezuela, my cameraman and I were held captive in the hot sun for four hours by Sevin, Venezuela’s feared secret police.
They threatened to interrogate and abuse us as American spies, but suddenly released us after they found my Cuban resident ID card.
After Chávez’s death, formal mourning was declared across Cuba, and singing was banned from his then-two-year-old daughter’s Havana kindergarten that day.
Cuba subsequently declared Chavez its staunchest ally since the Cuban Revolution and granted him Cuban citizenship, making him the only foreigner to receive such recognition since Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
But the symbiotic Venezuela-Cuba partnership is facing unprecedented pressure under the second Trump administration and could soon reach a breaking point. President Trump has invoked the new Monroe Doctrine, vowing not to tolerate countries in the Western Hemisphere that are contrary to America’s interests and objectives.
“The swift success of the U.S. military operation to overthrow Maduro only empowers the Trump administration’s regime changers to set their sights on Cuba and other Latin American countries,” Peter Kornbluh, co-author of the book “Back to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” told CNN.
The rise in militancy could not have come at a worse time for Cubans.
Already, large parts of the island are experiencing prolonged power outages most days due to fuel shortages and increasing failures of aging power plants. On government-run TV news programs, officials seem to discuss the prospects for worsening power conditions, as if predicting the weather. Food shortages, once guaranteed by government rationing, threaten to push millions of Cubans closer to malnutrition.
In December, a government commentator on state television advised Cubans to stop eating rice, sparking a backlash from many on the island.
“We live in a state of war without war,” a Cuban friend told me a few weeks ago.
But a real threat of military intervention may soon come, as the end of the alliance with Venezuela leaves Cuba at its most isolated since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
For regime change hawks in the Trump administration, the opportunity to finally eliminate an enemy just 90 miles from the United States may prove irresistible.
It is unclear whether threats will be enough to force the city of Havana to bow to U.S. pressure and release political prisoners or hold multiparty elections.
“There has never been a time when we did not face the possibility of invasion,” one hard-faced Cuban official told me recently.
