The American Mind

The article is kind of long. But its a solid breakdown of what has happened in Latin America the past 60 years, and why taking down Maduro was an important step in securing the Western Hemisphere. It also spends a good bid of time explaining how all the communist takeovers are all tied to Cuba.

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For this new South American Right, there is one regime that represents the source of the region’s woes. All roads, at last, lead back to Havana.

For 65 years, the Castro regime has survived by finding patrons. First, the Soviets subsidized the island to the tune of $4 billion a year until 1991. Then, Venezuela’s oil kept the lights on in Havana while Cuban intelligence kept Chávez in power. The arrangement was elegant in its simplicity: Caracas shipped 100,000 barrels a day to Cuba at preferential rates, while Havana embedded thousands of intelligence officers, doctors, and military advisors in Venezuela’s state apparatus. Payment for the services of a 60-year-old revolutionary infrastructure that knows how to control populations, neutralize the opposition, and rig elections.

Now, thanks to the most audacious American military operation in Latin America since the invasion of Panama in 1989, this arrangement has been disrupted. After years of empty threats from Washington, President Trump and his national security team and America’s soldiers demonstrated that American words still mean something. The men who planned and executed Operation Absolute Resolve delivered the most wanted narcoterrorist in the Western Hemisphere to a federal courtroom in Manhattan—alive, unharmed, and facing justice.

At Mar-a-Lago, Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles, stood before the cameras. “This is our hemisphere,” he said, “and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.” Maduro’s guards, he noted, had been “full of Cubans.” So had Venezuela’s entire spy agency. “One of the biggest problems Venezuelans have is they have to declare independence from Cuba,” Rubio said. “They tried to basically colonize it from a security standpoint.” And then, the warning: “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned—at least a little bit.”

Without Venezuelan oil, Cuba cannot survive. The island’s electrical grid already fails for hours each day. Food shortages have driven hundreds of thousands to flee. The regime’s answer has been repression—mass arrests after the 2021 protests, long prison sentences for anyone who films a blackout or posts about empty shelves. But repression requires resources, and resources require Venezuela.

This is why Venezuela matters—it is the last life support system for a regime that built an entire hemispheric network of subversion. The Foro de São Paulo, the Grupo de Puebla, the Bolivarian intelligence apparatus, the funding pipelines to sympathetic movements from Mexico City to Buenos Aires—all of it traces back to Havana. Cuba is the brain, but Venezuela is the heart pumping the blood. Sever the artery from the heart, and the brain dies.

Cuba declared two days of mourning for the 32 agents who died defending the tyrant in Caracas. The gerontocracy in Havana has no Castro to rally around, no Soviet patron to call, no Chávez to write checks, and now no Maduro to keep the oil flowing. What follows could be the largest political transformation in the Western Hemisphere since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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Sixty-six years ago, Fidel Castro rode into Havana and announced that history had arrived. His revolution was supposed to be the future—the vanguard of a global movement that would sweep away the old order from the Andes to the Río Grande. For a time, it looked like he was right. The guerrillas multiplied. The dominoes fell. The empire in the north, distracted by deserts on the other side of the world, lost its grip on its own backyard.

Now the empire has remembered where its backyard is. Maduro sits in a cell in New York. His protectors are dead or scattered. His successors are scrambling to hold power in a country the United States has announced it will run until a transition occurs. And the men who inherited Castro’s project are discovering what the Soviets learned in 1989: that an entire world built on a single premise can collapse faster than anyone thought possible.

The revolution has not ended. But its future is no longer in its own hands. And for the first time since 1959, the end is not merely imaginable. It is underway.