The US captured Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro in January. Cuba, whose 32 soldiers died protecting him, is now watching American ships patrol its maritime approaches and listening to its secretary of state say that if he lived in Havana, he would be “concerned — at least a little bit.” That is diplomatic language for something very alarming.
By our Americas Correspondent | Global Echos | May 3, 2026
HAVANA. The question that Cubans have been asking one another since January 3 is blunt and simple: Are we next? On that morning, US Delta Force operators and CIA assets conducted Operation Absolute Resolve, striking Venezuelan military bases in Caracas, capturing President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and transporting them to New York, where they were arraigned on charges of narco-terrorism and cocaine importation conspiracy. The operation was over in hours. The geopolitical consequences are still unfolding.
For Cuba, the implications were immediate and personal. Thirty-two Cuban nationals, members of the island’s armed forces and intelligence services who had been providing security for Maduro and his government, were killed during or in the aftermath of the operation. Cuba declared two days of national mourning. President Miguel Diaz-Canel appeared on state television holding a Venezuelan flag. And a question that had hovered over the Caribbean for decades, the question of what Washington would do once it ran out of patience with the governments it regarded as adversaries in its own hemisphere, moved from the theoretical to the uncomfortably concrete.
The relationship between Venezuela and Cuba had been the scaffolding of Cuban economic survival for more than two decades. Venezuela supplied Cuba with subsidised oil, tens of thousands of barrels daily, in exchange for Cuban medical workers and security personnel. That arrangement has now collapsed. The knock-on effects on the Cuban economy, already severely damaged by rolling blackouts, food shortages and the disintegration of the Soviet-era rationing system, are being described by analysts as potentially catastrophic. Cuba currently operates without reliable power for significant parts of most days. The fuel shortfall caused by Venezuela’s political implosion threatens to deepen an already acute humanitarian situation.
Into this precarious context comes the most aggressive US posture toward Cuba in decades. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents emigrated from Cuba and who has described the elimination of the Cuban government as a personal and political priority, has been explicit where diplomatic convention normally demands restraint. “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned — at least a little bit,” he said at a news conference in the weeks following Maduro’s capture. The message, stripped of its studied understatement, is clear.
The US approach, as articulated by analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and elsewhere, has two main tracks. The first is economic strangulation: allowing the collapse of Venezuela’s oil lifeline to deepen Cuba’s energy and food crisis, in the hope that domestic unrest will eventually force political change without requiring direct military intervention. The second track, which the administration has notably declined to rule out, is the application of the same logic that produced Operation Absolute Resolve: that a threat to Western Hemisphere stability that has resisted economic and diplomatic pressure for sixty years may ultimately require a different kind of response.
Cuba has signed a defence cooperation treaty with Russia, a fact that figures prominently in Washington’s threat calculus and that the administration has cited as evidence of a continuing European strategic foothold in the Americas. Geopolitical Futures has noted that the US military footprint in the region is calibrated not merely to interdict drug trafficking, as it is publicly described, but to place Cuba in what one analyst characterised as a “pincer position,” with US assets positioned both north and south of the island. The Monroe Doctrine, the nineteenth-century foreign policy principle that declared European powers unwelcome in the Western Hemisphere, has been explicitly invoked by Trump in connection with Venezuela. Cuba is ninety miles from Florida. The doctrine’s application to the island requires no great analytical leap.
What makes the situation genuinely dangerous is the combination of Cuba’s vulnerability and its history. The Cuban government, for all its economic failures and human rights abuses, has survived more than six decades of US pressure, embargo, attempted invasion, covert operations and isolation. It has built its national identity substantially around that survival. A Cuban official recently told NPR, with a stone-faced solemnity that was not wholly rhetorical: “There has never been a time when we have not faced the possibility of invasion.” That defiance is real. So is the fact that the government now faces the possibility of economic collapse without its primary external patron, confronting military pressure it is structurally less equipped to resist than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The US is simultaneously conducting high-level diplomatic negotiations in Havana, a seemingly paradoxical development that reflects the administration’s characteristic combination of military pressure and diplomatic engagement. The negotiations have not been described publicly in detail. Cuban officials have not confirmed their scope or content.
What is certain is that the Caribbean’s most enduring geopolitical standoff has entered a new and more dangerous phase. Maduro is in a New York courtroom. Venezuelan oil no longer flows to Havana. Russian ships patrol waters that US military assets also occupy. The US secretary of state is the son of Cuban immigrants who has made Cuba’s transformation a defining political goal. And in the corridors of Cuban government, the question that has been asked since January 3 has not been answered.
Are they next? Nobody in Havana, or Washington, is currently saying no.
