Excerpt
As Venezuela’s misery grows, U.S. focus shifts to Cuba’s role
March 26, 2019
Before he fled Venezuela last year, Lt. Col. Carlos Jose Montiel Lopez sometimes felt like he was serving in another country’s army.
His superiors in a military engineering unit were trained in Cuba, and a Cuban officer led his class on tunnel construction, Montiel said in an interview. The underground passages his brigade built in northern Venezuela — part of a plan to counter a possible U.S. invasion — were inspected by Cubans.
“They were dressed in civilian clothing, but we would call them by their military rank: mi comandante, mi general,” said Montiel, a stocky 43-year-old who now lives in Miami and is seeking U.S. asylum. The training manuals the Venezuelans used, he said, came from Cuba and Cubans were “our supervisors and decision-makers.”
Cuba, according to the Trump administration, is the main reason President Nicolás Maduro remains in power, two months after the United States recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president and began imposing some of the world’s harshest sanctions on Maduro’s government.
“No nation has done more to sustain the death and daily misery of ordinary Venezuelans, including Venezuela’s military and their families, than the communists in Havana,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said earlier this month.
Holding Cuba responsible for Venezuela’s misery and Maduro’s endurance has proved serendipitous for President Trump’s foreign policy and domestic political aims.
Florida, seen as a must-win state for his 2020 reelection prospects, has the largest concentration of Cuban Americans and Venezuelan expatriates in the United States, many with deep pockets and leaning Republican. Some of them sense a moment to do in Venezuela what the United States never could in Cuba: Bring down the government. At the same time, success in Venezuela could deeply weaken Cuba’s communists.
“I think it’s very difficult to understand U.S.-Venezuela policy without understanding Cuba and the half-century drive to change the regime in Havana,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. “Their calculation is that change in Venezuela will effect change in Cuba.”
Trump and his national security adviser, John Bolton, were cheered when they denounced Maduro and his Cuban backers in speeches delivered in Miami in recent months. Bolton and Cuban American Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), both longtime advocates of ridding Cuba of its communist government, have found a new avenue via Venezuela.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), also a Cuban American with a significant Cuban constituency and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, usually has little good to say about Trump’s foreign policy. Venezuela, he said, “shouldn’t be about domestic politics.”
But I think it would be naive not to recognize that bad actors are keeping Maduro on a lifeline. It’s Russia,” which has long provided cash in exchange for part ownership of Venezuela’s oil resources, “and it’s the Cuban regime,” Menendez said. “There’s no question that their security apparatus is fully engaged in Venezuela, at Maduro’s request.”
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