The U.S. Abducted Maduro. What Does it Mean for Cuba?
January 5, 2026
Hours after the news broke of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s abduction by U.S. special forces in Caracas, thousands of Cubans gathered in front of the U.S. embassy in Havana in protest.
Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández was on the ground covering the demonstration. Watch what Cubans told her in our new video.
It’s all about the oil
Although the U.S. government has invoked drug trafficking as the justification for its military escalation in the Caribbean and abduction of Maduro, Trump made clear in his Saturday press conference that the primary motivation was oil.
“We’re going to take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago,” Trump said. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure and start making money for the country.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS News on Sunday that the U.S. “quarantine” on sanctioned oil tankers will remain in place as leverage until the Venezuelan government opens the doors to U.S. oil companies.
Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s new interim president, struck a defiant tone on Saturday.
“We are ready to defend our natural resources,” Rodríguez said in her first public statement after Maduro's ouster. “We’re never going to be a colony of any empire.”
But both Trump and Rubio have expressed confidence that Rodríguez would accede to U.S. demands.
“We’ve spoken to her numerous times, and she understands, she understands," Trump told the New York Post.
For now, that confidence rests less on persuasion than on gunboat diplomacy.
"If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” Trump told The Atlantic this morning.
Meanwhile, Trump snubbed Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado to the apparent consternation of Rubio’s hardliner friends in Miami.
"I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader," Trump said. "She doesn't have the support or the respect within the country."
Beyond Venezuela, the brazen kidnapping of an elected head of state signals the administration's willingness to impose power in the region by force — a stark reassertion of U.S. imperialism that is in line with what Trump has framed as a return to the Monroe Doctrine (or as he now calls it, the "Don-roe Doctrine").
“The message is clear to any progressive forces in Latin America,” Miguel Tinker Salas, emeritus professor of history at Pomona College and author of “Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know,” told Democracy Now!. “The message is clear to Brazil. The message is clear to Mexico and Claudia Sheinbaum. The message is clear to Cuba, that it will be in the crosshairs next. This is about reimposing U.S. military and economic dominance in Latin America, starting in the Caribbean, starting with Venezuela.”
What does this mean for Cuba?
Cuba and Venezuela have been close allies since former President Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999. Venezuela became one of Cuba’s main sources of oil, and tens of thousands of Cubans, mainly doctors and nurses, have served on medical and educational missions to Venezuela.
For more on this relationship, watch Episode 2 of our award-winning documentary series The War on Cuba.
Venezuelan oil shipments have sharply reduced in recent years as the U.S. has pounded both countries with sanctions, including measures aimed at blocking the flow of petroleum to the island.
In 2025, Venezuela was shipping around 30,000 barrels a day to the island, about 70% less than what it was sending a decade earlier. This fuel lifeline has been further cut in recent weeks as the Trump administration ordered “a total and complete blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers. U.S. forces have already seized two tankers after they left Venezuela.
Since the U.S. began its “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba and Venezuela in 2019, Cuba has been ravaged by a fuel crisis that has resulted in daily blackouts. This policy, which has remained in place throughout the Biden administration and into Trump’s second term, is designed to cause so much hardship and suffering in Cuba that the government will collapse or be overthrown from within.
This strategy apparently remains unchanged — 65 years after it was created under the Eisenhower administration (see former Vice President Richard Nixon articulate the U.S. government's regime change plans in 1960 in the documentary we produced for Al Jazeera, Health Under Sanction).
“Cuba is gonna be something we'll end up talking about because Cuba is a failing nation right now, a very badly failing nation,” said Trump, who claims he is not considering military action against the island. "Cuba is going to fall of its own volition."
Rubio sent the Cuban government a more ominous message in yesterday's press conference: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I'd be concerned.”