From Air Force One, President Donald Trump declared this Sunday that "Cuba is ready to fall," referring to the economic crisis facing the island following the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
“Cuba no has any income anymore”, said Trump. “They relied on Venezuelan oil, and that's over. I don’t think we need to do anything: it seems to be collapsing on its own”.
The president's words—uttered just hours after the military operation in Caracas— fueled speculation about a possible move from Washington against the regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel. However, Trump ruled out direct intervention.
The relationship between Havana and Caracas has been vital for more than two decades: Venezuela supplied Cuba with up to 35,000 barrels of crude oil daily, along with financial and political support. That alliance was shattered with Maduro's fall, leaving the Cuban economy on the brink of collapse.
The energy expert Jorge Piñón described the situation as "a death sentence" for the Cuban model, while Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla stated that Maduro's capture poses "an existential dilemma" for regional sovereignty.
Trump, accompanied by Secretary of State Marco Rubio —of Cuban descent and considered a hawk towards Havana— stated that his administration "doesn't need to do anything else" to hasten the fall of the regime. Rubio had already predicted that the end of Chavismo would put Cuba on the ropes.
In statements to The New York Times, analysts such as Ricardo Zúñiga, a former advisor to the State Department, argued that Washington might limit itself to “watching the collapse” of an economy that relies on external subsidies and faces blackouts, shortages, and the migration of nearly one million people since 2021.
Despite everything, the idea of a U.S. intervention is beginning to take root more and more within a society exhausted by decades of crisis.
"We want change, but here, not imposed from outside," declared the former diplomat Carlos Alzugaray to the U.S. media, but civil society is increasingly demanding some type of intervention to put an end to the epidemiological, energy, and economic crises that make Cuba a "failed state."
The phrase by Trump —“Cuba is ready to fall”— encapsulates a shared vision within his administration: that the end of Venezuelan oil is also the beginning of the end of Castroism.
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