The forcible removal of strongman Nicolás Maduro at the hands of U.S. special forces from his bedroom somewhere in Venezuela to a courtroom in New York will cast a long shadow across the globe. Nowhere will that shadow feel darker or more ominous than among the Castro heirs who currently control Cuba’s communist regime.
Already in a state of economic free fall, largely abandoned by its old geopolitical patrons, Cuba has lost, with Maduro, its strongest ally in the Americas and, more importantly, the primary source of fuel for its power grid has been temporarily blocked. An added concern: The architect of the anti-Maduro policy is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American from Miami with fiercely anti-Castro views. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for the Cuban ruling caste to believe that Maduro was just the first domino toppled in a strategy ultimately aimed at them.
Rubio has done nothing to allay those fears. “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned at least a little bit,” he said, hours after the Caracas operation.
Even before Maduro’s departure from the scene, those attempting to manage Cuba’s affairs had a long and growing list of concerns. Under President Miguel Díaz-Canel, gross domestic product has declined 11 percent since 2020—and those are official numbers, in a country where statistics have always been more poetry than fact. The electric grid is disintegrating, ushering the island into a literal dark age. Food is always scarce and often spoils for lack of refrigeration. Clean water is increasingly unavailable. Anti-government protests erupt spontaneously on a regular basis, as can be observed on social media. But they are disorganized and harshly suppressed.
