Can Cuba’s bond with Venezuela survive Trump’s ousting of Maduro? | Cuba

On Havana’s Fifth Avenue, where the trees and lawns remain elegantly groomed even as the rest of Cuba wilts, a billboard outside the Venezuelan embassy reads: “Hasta Siempre Comandante” (Until For Ever, Commander) next to a vast picture of a smiling Hugo Chávez.

It is a staunch declaration that the two nations are bound together “for ever”. But this week, after the US operation to grab Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, those ties are in danger of unravelling.

In Cuba, every discussion revolves around the implications. Can the island, already in financial crisis, survive the withdrawal of Venezuelan support? Does the US administration have a plan for Cuba? Are there people in the Cuban government willing to deal with the US? At the forefront, many Cubans are asking themselves: could it happen here?

“Anything seems possible after these events,” said Michael Bustamante, the chair of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. “But there are key differences between Venezuela and Cuba.”

In its attempts to oust the Venezuelan leadership, the US had already found itself in confrontation with Cuba. Havana has traditionally been shy about admitting its security and intelligence support of the Maduro regime, but it has had to acknowledge 32 Cubans died in the US military attack on Venezuela.

Family members of the dead mourned their relatives on social media. Many of the posts swiftly disappeared and have not been authenticated, but an example is the aunt of a 26-year-old interior ministry security officer named Fernando Báez Hidalgo, who evoked the heroes of Cuba’s 19th-century wars of independence from Spain, known as mambís: “He had a cause, he believed in it, he defended it, and like a mambí, he fell,” she wrote.

For Maduro, this support was paid for in oil. He could trust the Cubans, and rely on their hard-earned knowledge of combating US intelligence. An attempt to oust him from power in 2019, during the first Trump administration, failed – it is believed – because it was foiled by Cuban agents.

After that, Trump strengthened US sanctions against Cuba, yet, unlike his secretary of state, Marco Rubio – the son of Cuban exiles – he has always seemed less interested in tackling the island. Despite sound and fury, little direct action has been taken against Havana, a policy that seems to be summed up in the president’s statement this week that no intervention would be necessary because “Cuba is ready to fall”.

One of the prices Venezuela looks set to pay for peace is turning off its support for Cuba. It is unclear what level of support there has been. According to one expert, “both economies are destroyed and there is little information”, but there were certainly oil shipments. Terrible blackouts once again spread over the island on Monday, but that has been the case for several years.

Another positive sign for US hawks is Cuba’s communist government’s vaunted unity is showing signs of fatigue. At the beginning of December, Alejandro Gil, a former Cuban minister of the economy, was sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption and, more startlingly, espionage. But there is still no obvious figure in Havana for the US to do business with.

Meanwhile, the government’s five-year party conference, set to take place this year, has been delayed. Several key figures would have been expected to retire had it gone ahead. The move to delay was due to a “letter” from the now 94-year-old Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother, who remains a talismanic figure in the regime four years after he resigned as head of the Communist party. The economic climate was not conducive, he said.

There are continuing discussions about what will happen in the event of his death.

Yet few would bet against the Cuban government’s will to survive, despite the suffering of its people. “We’ve been there before in the 1990s [after the Soviet Union collapsed] and I don’t necessarily believe further rapid deterioration of the Cuban economy leads to regime change,” said Bustamante.

Only one certainty remains. Despite the blackouts, shortages and repression, any appearance of US helicopters over Cuba would be bitterly resented.

The fractious history between the two neighbours is long – and well remembered on the island. Cuba found itself bankrupt and exhausted once before, after the three-decade war for Spain’s independence in the 19th century. Then US troops, led by Theodore Roosevelt – a hero of the current US president – moved in, pushing the Cuban independence leaders aside. The subsequent commercial takeover of the island eventually led to Castro’s 1959 revolution.

When they are not advertising Cuban and Venezuelan solidarity, billboards in Cuba attack US bullying. The 60-year US embargo remains the best argument the Cuban government has for every hardship – even those that are clearly due to its own mismanagement.

There is a hope among Cubans that the authorities use this moment to adjust policy – something they have been traditionally wary to do. Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban ambassador to the EU, said: “The Cuban government has to finally do what everybody here thinks they should do, which is open up the economy.”

That is a long way from supporting intervention. “I went to the demonstration of support for Venezuela,” added Alzugaray. “It was the first time in many years that I returned to the Tribuna [a plaza in front of the US embassy where such demonstrations occur]. But I wanted to make a point that I reject the American intervention.”

Still, Cuba is weaker than ever, while the Trump administration revels in its newfound muscular approach. “This is our hemisphere,” Rubio tweeted on Monday.

Anything remains possible.