Recognizing its integral role in sustaining Nicolas Maduro’s despotic regime, the U.S. should sanction the Cuban government.
There is one key element worth considering here: the fact that Cuba’s highly capable DI intelligence service remains instrumental sustaining Maduro’s authoritarianism.
This concern begins with the DI’s role in supporting Maduro’s domestic intelligence service, the SEBIN. Training SEBIN officers in intelligence collection, counterintelligence, interrogation, and direct action, the DI has given Maduro the means to keep his democratic adversaries under tight control. At the same time, Cuba provides its own intelligence and special forces personnel to supplement Maduro’s efforts. The Cuban role here is felt most significantly in persuading Venezuela’s armed forces to remain loyal to Maduro. Identifying and threatening military officers who are seen as sympathetic to the rightful interim president, Juan Guaido, the Cubans restrain Venezuela’s better future.
In Venezuela, we see a Cuban government that supposedly serves popular power under communist utopia, actually helping to keep a population imprisoned in destitution and starvation.
The U.S. should not stand for this. As it rightly supports Guaido’s increasingly threatened government, the Trump administration should expel Cuba’s ambassador and ban visiting Americans from importing Cuban cigars, which account for nearly 20 percent of Cuba’s export economy. The U.S. should also order U.S. companies to freeze their investments in Cuban foreign capital generating businesses such as hotels. Hopefully, Cuba will get the message and decrease its support for Maduro.
If not, new U.S. action should follow.
