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One of the most interesting discoveries made during the arrest of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro in the early hours of Jan. 3 was the confirmation of something we kind of already knew: His security personnel were mostly Cuban, not Venezuelan.
In fact, Cuba is a factor behind another news headline topic. Many of the groups organizing protests against Maduro’s arrest and the ICE shooting in Minneapolis also have connections to Cuba.
This Praetorian Guard around Maduro and the thugs on our streets are but the latest example of Cuba’s campaign to export Marxism-Leninism throughout the Western Hemisphere, including right here in America.
This is a tale of violence, subversion, and outright terror that began when Fidel Castro’s guerrillas took over Cuba on New Year’s Day, 1959. It lasts to this day.
Last week, I published a paper for the Heritage Foundation that details Cuba’s meddling in the lives of its neighbors. It lays out a stark reality: that while many Americans may dismiss this ideological dinosaur as toothless, thinking that no threat could come from a regime lobbing insults from a city in ruins, Havana remains a house of hatred — its crumbling architecture a testament to smoldering rage.
Cuba’s communist regime had always brazenly denied that it had troops in Venezuela. Then it had no choice but to admit it on Sunday night, when it announced that 32 members of its Revolutionary Armed Forces and Ministry of Interior had been killed by American forces executing an arrest warrant on Maduro.
Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez of Cuba routinely and earnestly lied about this. In a 2019 speech in Havana, he said, “The accusation by the president of the United States that Cuba maintains a private army in Venezuela is outrageous. I challenge him to present evidence. Our government rejects this slander in the strongest and most categorical terms.”
Well, yesterday’s slander is “honor and glory” today. Rodriguez and the regime’s other minions are now lauding on X these 32 “heroes” who fell fighting this “criminal act of aggression and state terrorism” by the U.S.
Cuba’s interference did not just lead to death and destruction but also to the military reaction we saw when coups led to military regimes throughout Latin America in the 1970s.
The corrupt and tyrannical Maduro himself became, in many ways, a prisoner of his even more sanguinary Cuban keepers. Former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda is one of many who believe that one of the reasons Maduro could not accept a deal to leave power after clearly fraudulent elections in 2024, or that he has not been overthrown by the military, is the thousands of Cuban operatives in the country.
This obviously raises the question of who was in charge in Caracas of some of the worst actions to destabilize the U.S. from within — the Venezuelans or their Cuban minders.
But the rise of Hugo Chavez, and after he died in 2012, of Maduro, was a later stage of Cuba’s involvement in the region. The first stage of Havana’s campaign to subvert elected governments in Latin America was the one that started with the victory of the revolution and ended with the military dictatorship — though, it needs to be stressed, these juntas and presidents were only temporary, lasting about a decade each, compared to the 27 years the Bolivarian experiment has lasted and Cuba’s 67 years in socialist hell, which continues.
Venezuela was, in fact, the first country that Castro visited on his campaign to spread revolution. On Jan. 23, 1959, less than a month in power, he jetted off to Caracas, where he was met by the Chilean Marxist poet Pablo Neruda and, from there, began to plot how to launch class struggle, first throughout the Caribbean, then throughout Latin America.
The first target was Panama. According to a paper by Matías Jove and John Suarez published in Spain in 2025, in early 1959, “Cuban and Panamanian guerrilla troops conducted an attempted invasion of Panama with the objective of replicating the revolution that had triumphed in Cuba a few months earlier.”
Castro took a couple of years to consolidate his revolution at home. Then, in 1961 and 1962, he intervened in New York, Hartford, and Puerto Rico, whose independence had been an idee fixe going back to the 1940s. Cuban intelligence in 1961 recruited the Puerto Rican terrorist Filiberto Ojeda Rios, who went on to help found armed guerrilla groups or join existing ones.
After that came Uruguay, the “Switzerland of Latin America,” where Castro promoted the terrorist Tupamaro group, where he began funding, training, and even creating terrorist groups, and Brazil, where he started financing terrorist groups.
In 1966, Cuba hosted the giant Tricontinental Conference, whose significance is impossible to overstate. Castro brought together the most violent revolutionary groups from Asia, Africa, and Latin America and rewrote the rules of anti-Western and anti-Yanki militancy. Even Venezuela’s “Carlos the Jackal,” the most infamous terrorist of the era, was in attendance.
From Tricontinental, Castro also reached out to U.S. student radicals. The conference’s final declaration said that armed Third World revolution would raise “the political consciousness of the people of the United States.” They expected the emergence of “class struggle” in the U.S.
Havana was the first foreign city visited by members of the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground after it was created in July 1969. Weathermen leader and founder Bernardine Dohrn led a large delegation to Cuba just one month after the group’s founding. There, she learned directly from revolutionary leaders from the communist island, and from Vietnam, Mao Zedong’s China, and North Korea, how to bring the revolution home to America.
From there, Castro went on to try to subvert Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, etc. But because Castro succeeded in installing a revolutionary government through violence in only one place, Nicaragua in 1979, he later switched tactics.
In 1990, after the Sandinistas lost an election that he had counseled against, and with the Soviet Union clearly about to fall, Castro and Brazilian Marxist leader Inacio Lula da Silva, today’s president of Brazil, established the Foro de São Paulo, a regional forum of Marxist parties and individuals that pointed the way to a second approach to power.
Rather than follow Mao’s old aphorism that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” the Foro would attempt to gain cultural ascendancy and then use the ballot box to win power.
The formula that emerged over the next three decades relied heavily on the teachings of Antonio Gramsci, who founded Italy’s Communist Party in the 1920s and was one of the ideologues who turned Marxism into a cultural movement away from its old reliance on economics.
The idea was to infiltrate and capture national institutions and then realize cultural changes. From that point on, communists and socialists in Latin America would put down their weapons and try to get elected on “reformist” and “populist” platforms, de-emphasizing their Marxism or even concealing it.
Once elected, however, these Marxists would erect constitutional assemblies, rewrite their constitutions, and implement other changes to ensure that socialist principles would be imposed on the population.
All of this was replicated in Venezuela after Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, was elected president in late 1998 and began to institute Marxism. Chavez opened his country’s ample financial spigots to finance Cuba, left without its Soviet sugar daddy, and the rest of the Foro.
Cuba and Venezuela continue to play a hand in attempts to destabilize the U.S. to this day, acting directly or through the Foro. On Oct. 8, 2023, one day after Palestinian terrorists launched an invasion of Israel and massacred 1,200 people, mostly civilians, many of them American citizens, and took hundreds of hostages, demonstrators took to Times Square in New York to hold a pro-terrorist rally.
Israel had not yet retaliated, so the demonstrators could not have been supporting the civilians of Gaza. They were marching in support of the massacre. That demonstration was organized by a Midtown Manhattan outfit called the People’s Forum, which is headed by a Cuban agent named Manolo De Los Santos, a New York-residing Dominican who has been going to Cuba for indoctrination for the past two decades.
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De Los Santos is again leading demonstrations in New York and elsewhere today against Maduro’s arrest and the ICE killing in Minneapolis. The People’s Forum hosted a rally on Wednesday, followed by a meeting with other Cuba-tied organizations, such as the ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, and others, where they planned the 1,000 rallies held in multiple cities this weekend.
The U.S. has known of Cuba’s activities inside the U.S. and the rest of the Americas for years, but it has not done much. Trump has, however, demonstrated that he is different. Now that his administration has acted decisively to arrest Maduro and extradite him to the U.S. to face justice, he has turned his gaze to the Cuban regime, the snakehead of problems in the Western Hemisphere.
