The Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel stated that a Cuban military officer managed to fire an anti-aircraft weapon at a United States Army helicopter during the operation to capture Nicolás Maduro.
During the tribute to the 32 fallen officers in Caracas, he praised a lieutenant colonel who -he stated- managed to hit the aircraft, despite being seriously injured.
At the event held at the Anti-Imperialist Tribune, the leader boasted about the soldiers who "came to be on the front lines" and returned to Havana "with their bodies filled with shrapnel."
"Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Márquez was the one who struck a helicopter and who knows how many of its crew members. He did so by firing his anti-aircraft weapon, despite being wounded and bleeding profusely from his leg," Díaz-Canel detailed.
"Courage is the word everyone uses to describe the confrontation..." he added.
Jorge Márquez did not die in action; he survived and returned to Cuba this week, along with the other injured.
The ruler boasted about the "bravery" and "heroism" of the fighters, whom he described as men who resisted "until the last bullet."
In his speech, he directly accused President Donald Trump of ordering a "sneaky attack" against Venezuela while the population was asleep, and maintained that the Cubans acted with honor and loyalty to their mission.
A few days ago, Trump spoke publicly about the "Operation Absolute Resolution" and presented it as a flawless action from a military standpoint.
He stated that there were no U.S. casualties, although he acknowledged that there were seven injuries, including a helicopter pilot with severe injuries who, he said, was recovering well.
He also detailed the air entry, the descent by ropes, the assault on a fortified residence, and the exit with Maduro captured in just a few minutes.
Beyond the contrast between the epic narrative crafted by Havana and the technical-military language used by Washington, the facts reveal an uncomfortable reality for the Cuban regime: the 32 dead were not fighting for a humanitarian cause, nor defending Cuba or its population.
They were part of the personal security ring of the Venezuelan ruler. In other words, they acted as a direct component of the apparatus that supported a dictator.
The operation not only ended with Maduro and his wife detained, but it also starkly exposed the true extent of Cuban involvement in Venezuela.
For years, Havana denied or minimized the presence of officials in sensitive military roles. However, the official discourse has now had to acknowledge that there were Cuban personnel carrying out tasks directly related to the protection of the Venezuelan political power.
The testimony that 32 Cubans died alongside Maduro's security officials reveals that they were not merely "collaborators," not in defense of Cuba or a humanitarian cause, but operatives integrated into the defense structure of the Chavista regime.
The heroic narrative seeks to transform a mission to safeguard a foreign government into a revolutionary feat, but the facts point to something else: a profound, silent, and costly intervention in Cuban lives.
According to data from the Pentagon, the incursion involved about 200 U.S. military personnel and over 150 aircraft. Twenty-four Venezuelan security officials and thirty-two Cubans who were part of the former president's protective detail were killed. A helicopter was hit, although it was able to remain in flight, and a cyberattack was also carried out that left a large part of Caracas without communications.
Díaz-Canel insisted that the fighters "fought to the death" and that one of them shouted "Long live Cuba!" before being hit by a drone. However, the scene he describes—Cuban soldiers fighting in defense of Maduro's power—confirms precisely what has been denied for years: that Havana had officers operating at the very heart of Venezuela's presidential security.
Maduro's capture not only disrupted the regional political balance but also exposed the extent of the alliance between both regimes and the toll it took in Cuban lives for a strategy that was never publicly debated on the Island.
Behind the epic rhetoric lie grieving families and a truth that becomes increasingly difficult to conceal: those soldiers died defending a foreign ruler, not their homeland.
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