President Trump’s blunt assessment that “Cuba is going down” after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro wasn’t bluster — it was a sober prediction rooted in hard facts about Havana’s lifelines being snapped. The president told reporters aboard Air Force One that Cuba, long propped up by Venezuelan oil and security ties, now faces a reckoning it can’t magically avoid.
What unfolded in Caracas was nothing short of historic: a precision U.S. operation that took Maduro into custody and sent shock waves through the region, proving American resolve when it counts. Officials and multiple outlets reported the transfer of Maduro to U.S. custody and confirmed the operation’s dramatic impact across Venezuela’s power structure.
Havana’s complicity was exposed in the hardest possible terms — Cuba acknowledged that dozens of its personnel were killed while embedded with Maduro’s forces, a human cost that underscores how deeply entangled the Castro regime became in Caracas. Those losses aren’t abstract; they reveal a Castro apparatus that threw its people into harm’s way to prop up a corrupt dictator.
The economic logic is simple and merciless: Cuba’s economy has depended for years on subsidized Venezuelan oil, and with that lifeline cut off and international pressure rising, collapse becomes far more likely without reforms. This is not cruelty; it is the predictable outcome of decades of socialist mismanagement and kleptocratic alliances that robbed ordinary Cubans of prosperity.
Patriots should applaud a president who reasserts American power and makes clear that tyranny in our hemisphere will no longer be tolerated, reviving a practical Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century. Critics will howl about precedent and legality, but hardworking Americans know the alternative — appeasement and safe havens for narco-regimes — is far worse for our borders and our security.
Now is the moment for the U.S. to stand firm: keep economic pressure on the dictators, offer a genuine pathway to support the Cuban people, and avoid endless nation-building that drains our resources. If the regime truly crumbles, Washington should prioritize liberty and free markets — not globalist handouts — so Cubans can rebuild without the same failed ideologies that brought them to ruin.
