{"id":354539,"date":"2026-01-06T04:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T04:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/354539\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T04:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T04:14:09","slug":"cuba-defiant-as-it-braces-for-post-maduro-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/354539\/","title":{"rendered":"Cuba defiant as it braces for post-Maduro era"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Venezuela, there is no nation in the Americas more affected by the events in Caracas than Cuba.<\/p>\n

The two nations have shared a political vision of state-led socialism since a fresh-faced Venezuelan presidential candidate, Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, met the aged leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, on the tarmac at Havana airport in 1999. <\/p>\n

For years, their mutual ties only deepened, as Venezuelan crude oil flowed to the communist-run island in exchange for Cuban doctors and medics travelling in the other direction.<\/p>\n

After the deaths of the two men, it was Nicol\u00e1s Maduro – trained and instructed in Cuba – who became Ch\u00e1vez’s handpicked successor, chosen partly because he was acceptable to the Castro brothers. He represented continuity for the Cuban revolution as much as the Venezuelan one.<\/p>\n

Now he, too, is gone from the seat of power in Caracas, forcibly removed by the US’s elite Delta Force team. The prospects for Cuba in his absence are bleak.<\/p>\n

For now, the Cuban government has robustly denounced the attack as illegal and declared two days of national mourning for 32 Cuban nationals killed in the US military operation. <\/a><\/p>\n

Their deaths revealed a key fact long-known about Cuban influence over the Venezuelan presidency and military: Maduro’s security detail was almost entirely made up of Cuban bodyguards. Cuban nationals are in place in numerous positions in Venezuela’s intelligence services and military too.<\/p>\n

Cuba had long denied having active soldiers or security agents inside Venezuela, but freed political prisoners have often claimed they were interrogated by men with Cuban accents while in custody.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, despite endless public proclamations of solidarity between the two nations, in truth the Cuban influence behind the scenes of the Venezuelan state is believed to have driven a wedge between ministers most-closely aligned with Havana and those who feel that the relationship first established by Ch\u00e1vez and Castro has become fundamentally unbalanced.<\/p>\n

In essence, that faction considers that these days Venezuela gets little in return for its oil.<\/p>\n

Venezuela is believed to send around 35,000 barrels of oil a day to Cuba – none of the island’s other main energy partners, Russia and Mexico, even come close.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Venezuela, there is no nation in the Americas more affected by the events in Caracas than Cuba.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-354539","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}