Cuba<\/a> is unlikely because the country appears to be ready to fall on its own.<\/p>\n\u201cCuba is ready to fall. Cuba looks like it\u2019s ready to fall. I don\u2019t know how they, if they, can hold that, but Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re not getting any of it. Cuba literally is ready to fall. And you have a lot of great Cuban Americans that are going to be very happy about this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s comments come a day after US forces abducted and detained Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in a surprise attack on Caracas. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are due to appear in court on drug-related charges in New York on Monday.<\/p>\n
Warnings to Venezuela, Mexico<\/p>\n
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump also insisted that the US was \u201cin charge\u201d of Venezuela, even though the country\u2019s Supreme Court has appointed Vice President Delcy Rodriguez as interim leader.<\/p>\n
He also reiterated a threat to send the US military back to Venezuela if it \u201cdoesn\u2019t behave\u201d.<\/p>\n
Trump went on to warn neighbouring Mexico, saying the country \u201chas to get their act together because they\u2019re [drugs] pouring through Mexico and we\u2019re going to have to do something\u201d.<\/p>\n
He described Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as a \u201cterrific person\u201d and said he has offered to send US troops to Mexico every time he spoke to her. The Mexican government is capable of addressing the issue, \u201cbut unfortunately the cartels are very strong in Mexico,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cartels are running Mexico whether you like it or not,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Al Jazeera\u2019s John Holman, reporting from Cucuta on the Colombia-Venezuela border, said the comments came amid a \u201cbigger pattern\u201d of Trump targeting left-leaning countries in Latin America and trying to assert US dominance in the region.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s saying that Latin America is our area and we need to be dominate there and after what\u2019s happened with Nicolas Maduro, those threats and comments are going to be taken a bit more seriously,\u201d Holman said.<\/p>\n
\u2018Don-roe Doctrine\u2019<\/p>\n
Trump has made no secret of his ambitions to expand the US presence in the Western Hemisphere and revive the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, which states that Latin America falls under the US sphere of influence.<\/p>\n
Trump has called his 21st century version the \u201cDon-roe Doctrine\u201d.<\/p>\n
The US president\u2019s comments on Sunday were not his first threats against Colombia and Cuba.<\/p>\n
Following the US actions over the weekend, Trump said that Petro has to \u201cwatch his a**\u201d and that the political situation in Cuba was \u201csomething we\u2019ll end up talking about, because Cuba is a failing nation\u201d.<\/p>\n
Experts told Al Jazeera it was too soon to tell whether Trump would make good on his threats to Cuba and Colombia, or whether he was aiming to coerce them into cooperating with Washington<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very hard to predict. If you look at the way Trump operates, what he always hopes is other countries will do what he wants them to do without him having to use very much force.\u00a0These short, spectacular displays of force like the bombing in Iran, this operation in Venezuela scare other countries into doing what Trump wants them to do,\u201d said David Smith, an associate professor of the University of Sydney\u2019s US Studies Centre.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaduro seems to have tried to call his bluff in this case, and it turned out it wasn\u2019t a bluff,\u201d Smith told Al Jazeera. \u201cThey don\u2019t know whether he\u2019s bluffing now when he makes threats towards other countries, or renewed threats towards Venezuela.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US president says a military operation in Colombia \u2018sounds good\u2019 to him and warns Mexico \u2018to get their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388854,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13423,43,799,44,41,39,42,40,772,1690,20147],"class_list":["post-388853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-cuba","tag-headlines","tag-latin-america","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-united-states","tag-us-canada","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}