Name: Could Cuba's government fall under Trump? | The Global Story
Uploaded: 2026-02-10T17:02:26.000Z
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President Trump has his sights set on another country in the United States backyard, Cuba.

I don't know how everything can hold out.

It's one of the US Closest neighbors and one of Venezuela's closest allies.

American presidents have long criticized the Cuban government.

But now some say the Trump administration is emboldened to go further than before.

I think Cuba will not be able to survive.

From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.

and today on the global story after Venezuela is Cuba next.

I'm the BBC correspondent in Mexico for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

You've spent a lot of time reporting from there.

From your vantage point, what is the crux of the problem that the Trump administration has with Cuba?

At the heart of the Trump administration's issue with Cuba is really the heart of Washington's ongoing issue with Cuba.

Basically, they don't like a communist run government 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

They've never liked a communist run government 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

They've tried to remove a communist run government 90 miles off the coast of Florida many, many times in different guises through c planned attempts on Fidel Castro's life.

Hundreds of those were planned and several were attempted to squeezing the island through the US Economic embargo for six and a half decades, putting punitive measures on everything from companies that might want to send food and medicines to Cuba to even British and European tourists who visit Cuba.

So there's a whole series of things that Washington has done since 1959 essentially to force regime change in Cuba.

Of course, Donald Trump in his second administration with Marco Rubio as his secretary of state.

It looks like they really do intend to see some form of regime change, some kind of permanent shift in Cuba off the back of what's happened in Venezuela.

It does seem, at least here in Washington that we are hearing a lot more about Cuba and, and

We've heard President Trump refer to Cubans as being the protectors, the thugs behind the Venezuelan government.

And one thing that caught my eye when the United States captured Venezuela's leader Nicolas Maduro was that there were a number of Cuban soldiers who were killed in that operation.

And we'll have a lot of questions here, but why Would there have been Cubans protecting Maduro?

Part of the relationship, the bilateral relationship between Cuba and Venezuela is built on intelligence officers and soldiers, military support.

They said that basically the arrangement was that crude oil would come to Cuba and prop up the Cuban revolution and doctors would go back in the other direction.

So crude oil would go from Venezuela to Cuba and in return they would pay for that with human capital in the form of doctors and medics and healthcare workers who would work in the shanty towns and in the remote regions of Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan leader, and

Fidel Castro, the late Cuban revolutionary leader, the two of them came up with that idea.

And it was basically the mainstay of the economic relationship between the two socialist allies until this point.

There was a third dimension to that, though, of course, which was intelligence officers support, particularly in the wake of an attempted coup on Hugo Charis in 2002.

I think from there on there was more of a role for Cuba because basically Cuba's know how in terms of what Venezuela wanted to achieve or the Venezuelan government wanted to achieve was in terms of how to stay in power, how to remain in power for six and a half decades.

And so part of that intelligence sharing involved actual physical bodyguards on the ground protecting Nicolas Maduro.

So he, as a disciple of Fidel Castro, of the Castro brothers, was very much part of the same equation that Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez created.

It was rumored that he actually trusted Cubans more than his own countrymen.

As somebody who himself was trained in Cuba, he bought into the Cuban vision of a socialist nation.

The other things they did was advise on Russian dissent.

Quite frankly, there's reports from people who were held in detention, dissidents and journalists, that when they were held in a very notorious detention centre in the centre of Caracas called Del Elikoy there, that they were interrogated by people with Cuban accents throughout this entire period against those sorts of allegations and against the allegations that Cuban soldiers were infiltrated in the Venezuelan military at absolutely every, every level, the Cuban government denied them, said that they weren't there, that it was an invention by Washington, that it simply wasn't true.

Well, considering that 32 of the hundred or so people who were killed in the US operation in Venezuela were Cubans, they simply had to acknowledge them.

They had to acknowledge that they were there and it sort of exposed that it was true, that they had people on the ground in Venezuela and had done for years.

So, Will, you were in Havana the Capital of Cuba recently as those soldiers remains were brought back and put on display, essentially lying in state.

They were honored by the Cuban government.

What was the scene like there in Cuba, as you were there reporting?

I mean, Raul Castro, who makes very few public appearances now was there to receive them at the airport, age 94.

Standing next to him, President Miguel Diaz Canel.

The boxes were taken from the plane and loaded into a funeral procession that then drove into Havana to the Ministry of the Armed Forces.

The vast majority of the route towards from the airport to this ministry would have had people along the way way.

Cuba hasn't lost this number of combatants in a one on one battle with the US military as far as I can see, since the start of the Cuban Revolution.

The only point that we can compare it to is the Bay of pigs in 1961.

But that was Cuban exiles who were trained by the CIA and brought to the coast of Cuba to basically try and take back the island.

There were that there were fatalities on either side and certainly the US military was involved.

But in a direct fight like this with 32 combatants killed and none on the other side, it was a very sobering moment, a very almost humiliating moment in a sense for the Cuban revolution.

Except they certainly didn't paint it like that as you'd expect.

It was a moment of pride, a moment of honor.

The words next to each of these boxes with the photo of the respective soldier with the words honor and glory next to them.

How much oil has Cuba been getting from Venezuela?

Well, it was much higher when Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro struck up their relationship.

It was in the region of 100,000 barrels of oil a day with which Cuba could sell the excess beyond its domestic consumption to other nations.

In the Petro Caribe, a Caribbean agreement, you know, in that sense we talk about, you know, Venezuelan oil, basically uplifting, upholding the Cuban revolution.

It was through steps like that, gradually over time and with the fall of the, of the oil price, the global oil price, Venezuela hasn't been able to provide that kind of, those kind of numbers and it's reduced to more like the accepted number is somewhere around 35, maybe 40,000 barrels of oil a day, much, much less.

But when combined with what Cuba gets from Mexico and from Russia, enough traditionally to be able to keep the lights on, but

So if in this relationship Cuba has been getting oil, you say in return they send doctors and soldiers to Venezuela how many doctors and soldiers are you speaking of?

We don't, or at least I don't currently know how big it is.

We just know that it has been in the past to the tune of thousands, many thousands.

And the benefit is that those doctors would be paid much better than they would be paid in Cuba.

But the argument in terms of those in Florida, that it was exploitative, that they were still being paid a fraction of what the Venezuelan government was getting per medic, and

that people are basically obliged to go to very dangerous shanty towns in Caracas or remote communities because they're not paid a dignified wage back in Cuba.

So will you say, prior to Maduro's ouster, the Cuban government had not, in an official capacity, really recognized that they were providing this intelligence protection service.

Now, at this moment, what's happened to the rest of the Cuban security intelligence operation in Venezuela?

Well, we don't know exactly in terms of numbers, but

here's an anecdote that tells us quite a lot about where we are now.

The next day, after these remains have returned the boxes of cremated ashes, there is a protest outside the US Embassy led by President Miguel Diaz Canel.

then a whole slew of people walk past the US Embassy waving Venezuelan and Cuban flags and chanting about solidarity and cooperation to the death and so on.

Now, as that was happening, we received on our phones confirmation that Delsey Rodriguez, the interim president in Venezuela, had met with John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA in Caracas.

That ASMA is for Cuba watchers, Venezuela watchers is extraordinary.

She didn't meet on the head of Latin American affairs or the Western hemispheric affairs from the State Department.

She didn't meet with an emissary from the White House or she met with the director of the CIA less than two weeks after her boss has been removed by U.S.

And I showed the information to a Cuban government official.

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