Cuban leaders should be concerned following the U.S. military operation in Venezuela and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Saturday, as President Donald Trump signaled that his administration could shift its focus to the Caribbean island.
Cuba has long maintained a presence in Venezuela, with intelligence agents and security personnel embedded amid close relations between Havana and Caracas.
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, said Venezuela’s spy agency was ‘basically full of Cubans,’ as was Maduro’s security detail.
‘One of the biggest problems Venezuelans have is they have to declare independence from Cuba,’ he said during a news conference in which officials revealed details of the military operation. ‘They tried to basically colonize it from a security standpoint.’
He added that the communist island was ‘a disaster. It’s run by incompetent, senile men — and in some cases, not senile, but incompetent nonetheless.’
The secretary has repeatedly denounced Cuba and its leadership as a dictatorship and a failed state.
‘If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned — at least a little bit,’ Rubio said.
Trump said Cuba was something his administration would ‘end up talking about because Cuba is a failing nation right now — a very badly failing nation.’
‘And we want to help the people,’ he added. ‘It’s very similar in the sense that we want to help the people in Cuba, but we also want to help the people who were forced out of Cuba and are living in this country.’
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken by U.S. forces and brought aboard the USS Iwo Jima. They were expected to be transported to the U.S. to face federal charges.
The couple, along with other Venezuelan officials, face ‘drug trafficking and narco-terrorism conspiracies,’ according to an unsealed indictment posted on social media Saturday by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
They are accused of partnering with drug cartels to traffic drugs into the U.S.
Maduro and his wife ‘will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,’ Bondi wrote.
They are charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the U.S.