DOMINOES FALLING: Trump Says Cuba Is Next After Maduro’s Capture.
President Donald Trump has declared that Cuba’s communist government is now “ready to fall,” arguing that the U.S.-led capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro has shattered Havana’s last strategic lifeline.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One late Sunday, Trump said Cuba can no longer depend on Venezuela for oil, money, or security. “I think it’s just going to fall,” he said. “I don’t think we need any action. Looks like it’s going down. It’s going down for the count.”
The remarks come less than 48 hours after U.S. forces captured Maduro and his wife in a high-risk operation that has already reshaped political calculations across Latin America. For decades, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and later Maduro functioned as Cuba’s economic oxygen tank, providing subsidized oil and financial support that helped keep the island’s system afloat.
U.S. officials now say that relationship ran even deeper. Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed that Cuban operatives were effectively embedded at the heart of Maduro’s security apparatus. “It was Cubans that guarded Maduro,” Rubio said. “He was not guarded by Venezuelan bodyguards. He had Cuban bodyguards.”
Havana has confirmed that 32 Cuban military and police personnel were killed during the U.S. operation in Venezuela, marking an extraordinary admission and underscoring how exposed Cuba had become in propping up the Caracas regime. Cuban state media announced two days of national mourning.
Trump confirmed Cuban casualties bluntly. “A lot of Cubans were killed yesterday,” he said. “There was a lot of death on the other side. No death on our side.”
The president framed Maduro’s capture as a strategic shockwave designed to break authoritarian alliances across the hemisphere. In Trump’s view, once Venezuela fell, Cuba was left isolated, weakened, and vulnerable.
Trump also widened his fire, accusing Colombia’s leadership of enabling cocaine flows into the United States and warning that Washington is prepared to escalate its campaign against narco-trafficking networks by land and sea.
Taken together, the message was unmistakable: the era of mutual protection among anti-U.S. regimes in the Americas is over. Trump cast the operation against Maduro as a modern application of the Monroe Doctrine — a signal that hostile governments can no longer rely on each other for survival.
With Maduro set to appear in federal court in New York, attention now turns to Havana. Whether Cuba “falls” as Trump predicts remains uncertain. But one thing is clear: the removal of Venezuela’s strongman has cracked the foundation of the last remaining Cold War axis in the Western Hemisphere.
