After effectively taking total control of oil-rich Venezuela, the Castro dictatorship has become very dependent on its Venezuelan colony to survive. So what would happen in Cuba if the Castro’s puppet dictator in Caracas falls?
Roberto Alvarez Quiñones explores the answer to that question in Diario de Cuba (my translation):
What would happen in Cuba if Maduro finally falls?
Is Nicolás Maduro as firmly entrenched in power as he believes and leads everyone to think? Is there really no possibility of his downfall? Has he ever been so politically weak and pressured both internally and externally? Has there ever been such open discontent among Venezuelan military officers not linked to drug trafficking as there is now?
These are the questions that Raúl Castro and the other profiteers of the Cuban dictatorial elite are asking themselves and is keeping them from sleeping peacefully. Because too much is at stake.
We are talking about “Cubazuela,” the monstrosity created by Professor Fidel, poor but a shrewd geopolitical pimp, and his Venezuelan student, mediocre but swimming in oil and millions of dollars. Today, without the “zuela,” Castro’s Cuba would hardly be able to stand.
Maduro’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the brutal repression unleashed against the people seem to confirm the axiom that dictators never peacefully relinquish power, except in rare cases, and only when offered credible guarantees that they won’t go to prison for the crimes they’ve committed.
This is precisely one of the fears spreading in Havana, as it appears that the opposition and Washington are offering Maduro and his top narco-associates such guarantees. But they also fear that despite the appearance of strong military support, the man whom Fidel Castro placed in power—by “convincing” the nearly dying Hugo Chávez not to appoint Diosdado Cabello as his successor, but instead Nicolás Maduro, a veteran Cuban intelligence agent since the 1980s—might ultimately be expelled from the Miraflores Palace.
The surveillance and informant network installed by Cuba within the Venezuelan armed forces has so far prevented military conspiracies. But “the pitcher goes to the well until it breaks.” The danger of such a rupture is greater today than ever, as circumstances have changed.
The Two Sides of the Coin: One of Fear and the Other Even Worse
Let’s look at both sides of the coin. On one side, there is Maduro and his cronies’ fear of being tried and imprisoned, which leads them to dig in and reject any negotiation for a planned transition that would even grant them an amnesty guaranteed by the future Venezuelan government and Washington. They believe that with the support of the high military command, they can remain in power by force indefinitely.
On the other side, for the first time, Maduro is facing the “sandwich” strategy: maximum internal and external pressure simultaneously.
The best expression of internal pressure was the electoral beating on July 28, when the opposition garnered four million more votes than Maduro. Not only that, according to a survey by Cati Meganálisis, 93.4% of respondents said the winner was Edmundo González Urrutia. In other words, even those who voted for Maduro admit that he lost.
Externally, the UN, the OAS, the European Union, Washington, and dozens of nations worldwide are demanding that Maduro show the election results or acknowledge his defeat. Even the main leftist leaders in Latin America, Maduro’s staunch allies, have had to distance themselves a bit from the tyrant, likely telling him: “My friend Nicolás, you overdid it; such a clumsy fraud couldn’t succeed.”
Today, Maduro has military support but is politically weaker than ever, more internationally besieged, and the people are no longer afraid to take to the streets to protest. All of this is accompanied by rumors on the street of discontent within the armed forces.
And there is something very important: if Maduro and his cronies don’t negotiate an exit from power with the amnesty that seems to have been offered to them before January 2025, and they are later ousted from power, there will be no forgiveness. They would go to prison, and Maduro would end up in a U.S. prison for having flooded that country with drugs for years. He would pay the same price as Manuel Antonio Noriega.
That’s why Maduro, Cabello, Padrino, Jorge Rodríguez, Amoroso, Saab, and their cronies are privately asking themselves: Do we leave with the millions of dollars we’ve stolen, or do we stay, and if we get thrown out, do we all go to jail? They have until January 10, 2025, to decide what to do.
The problem is that if they don’t accept a pact to leave power now, by February 2025, Venezuela will face more economic, diplomatic, and political sanctions. There will be another stampede of millions of migrants, worsening the labor shortage, the crisis, and the scarcity of everything in the country. All of this will affect the civilian population and the military, including lower-ranking officers with command over troops, tanks, artillery, and combat aircraft.
Ah, and another detail, the most forceful: an indefinite general strike called by the opposition, paralyzing most of the country’s activities, combined with the aforementioned factors, could precipitate military intervention to remove Maduro from the Miraflores Palace and facilitate González Urrutia’s inauguration on January 10, 2025.
Without Maduro in Miraflores, Castroism Would Barely Survive
Let’s return to Cuba. Raúl “the Cruel” and his cronies are not concerned about the “family” mediation of Lula, Petro, and López Obrador, who only aim to dress the dictatorship in a light suit. They would never facilitate the installation of a non-leftist, non-member government of the São Paulo Forum or the Puebla Group in Caracas.
What gives Raúl and his gang nightmares is that, despite how secure Maduro seems, in the end, the pitcher might break. They wonder how they would survive if that happens, where they would get the billions of dollars they currently steal from the salaries of approximately 10,000 Cuban doctors and healthcare workers and at least another 2,000 Cuban “collaborators” embedded in the Venezuelan dictatorship, many of whom have blood on their hands.
They also have no way to secure the $1.2 billion needed to import the oil and gasoline that Maduro currently gifts to Cuba, which, according to experts, covers between 35% and 40% of the Island’s consumption.
In Algeria, an oil-rich country, according to Cuban Prisoners Defenders (CPD), the Algerian government pays $6,700 monthly for each Cuban doctor, but each doctor receives only $450 a month. Assuming that in Venezuela the scale of Castro’s theft is similar to that in Algeria, the Castro regime pockets about $900 million annually, stolen from the doctors and other Cubans stationed there.
Moreover, the Cuban state is bankrupt. The country suffers from suffocating inflation, decreasing agricultural and industrial production, an abysmal fiscal deficit, and a shocking shortage of absolutely everything. In certain segments of the Cuban population, there is already famine similar to that in sub-Saharan Africa. 90% of Cuba’s population lives in poverty, lacking medicines, enduring increasingly frequent blackouts. The education and public health systems are practically collapsed.
The Island produces fewer exportable goods than ever to earn foreign currency and import food, medicine, and everything else it needs. In 2023, Cuba exported $2.155 billion worth of goods. Compare that to the $13.235 billion exported by the Dominican Republic, which before 1959 exported six or seven times less than Cuba.
The fall of Maduro would be the final blow to what remains of the Cuban economy. And, pay close attention, not just that. If Nicolás Maduro is removed from power, whether peacefully or by force, the devastating effects on Cuba would not only be economic, financial, and commercial but also political, psychological, social, and strategic. Together, they would constitute a tsunami with a colossal impact on civil society and non-corrupt military members.
Conclusion: Without Cuba’s Man in Power at the Miraflores Palace, Castro’s Totalitarianism Would Hardly Stand for Long.