The economist and former Venezuelan politician Henrique Salas Römer issued a devastating diagnosis regarding the situation in Venezuela: the strategy employed by Washington has failed to achieve its fundamental goals and can no longer be resolved with partial adjustments. He stated this in an interview with CiberCuba conducted by Tania Costa, published this Friday.
"I believe that in Venezuela, the United States, Marco Rubio, and all others who may have deciphered some hope, have realized that the guitar is broken. That it is not about tuning the strings but rather changing the guitar," stated Salas Römer, 90 years old, a Yale graduate and former presidential candidate in 1998 where he finished second behind Hugo Chávez.
The metaphor directly responds to the argument that Marco Rubio has maintained in the Senate, where he has called for patience, arguing that "only five or six months have passed" since the capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026. For Salas Römer, patience is pointless if the instrument is beyond repair: "What has actually been done in Venezuela is like tuning a broken guitar. You can tune it properly, but it doesn’t sound, it doesn’t sound."
The analyst believes, however, that the Trump administration is already considering a radical change in direction. "I think so [they are weighing that option]. But I don’t have information, I don’t have the privilege of having information," he clarified, before adding that any reasonably intelligent person in the White House would have come to the same conclusion.
Salas Römer highlighted two figures within the U.S. administration who have a genuine focus on Latin America. Regarding Rubio, he said: "I don’t know him, but I’ve followed his career and I know he is a very bold and very intelligent man." About Christopher Landau, the Assistant Secretary of State, he noted that his father was the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela and that Landau himself grew up in the country: "He cut his teeth; his adolescence was in Venezuela... he speaks Spanish fluently." For Salas Römer, "the interest in Cuba and in Latin America in general, I believe, is real."
The context in which this interview takes place is one of great turbulence. Just days before, on June 24, 2026, Venezuela was shaken by a double seismic event with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5 centered in Yaracuy and Carabobo —the home state of Salas Römer himself— resulting in at least 2,295 official deaths. NASA estimated that nearly 59,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed, and the United States Geological Survey issued a Red Alert with an estimate that the final number of victims could range between 10,000 and 100,000 fatalities. The "earthquakes" referred to by Salas Römer are thus both literal and metaphorical.
This natural catastrophe is compounded by a political transition that is not progressing as promised: nearly 700 political prisoners remain detained, and María Corina Machado has warned that any solution that preserves the structures of chavismo is doomed to fail.
Salas Römer also identified a political factor that complicates any substantial actions from Washington: the proximity of the midterm elections in the United States. "It's a challenging situation as the midterm elections approach... And the president is faced with a series of circumstances that are rather complicated, and he is the one with the final say," he noted.
His final forecast suggests that Cuba could move ahead of Venezuela on the path to change: "I believe that 2027 is the year when Cuba will emerge from this," he stated, while projecting that Venezuela would not return to a certain level of normalcy until early 2028.
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