The release of the 2025 National Security Strategy that declared a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, along with the early January U.S. military action in Venezuela, is altering political calculations across the Western Hemisphere, with deep implications for Cuba. The January 3, 2026, military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro and bring him to the United States to face narco-terrorism charges, and the subsequent coercive management of the remaining Chavista regime, is a signal to the region that challenges long-standing assumptions about U.S. restraint, regime durability, change, and the use of external pressure in Latin America. Rather than pursuing traditional regime change centered on rapid democratization or wholesale dismantling of authoritarian systems, the United States has demonstrated a willingness to employ coercive power to manage regimes—controlling their behavior, extracting concessions, and preserving sufficient institutional continuity to avoid collapse. The shock from the Venezuelan precedent, along with the Trump administration’s recent statement to Cuba to “make a deal, before it is too late,” comes at a time when the pillars that historically sustained the Cuban regime are simultaneously eroding. The evaporation of Venezuelan support, the complete lack of internal legitimacy and social exhaustion, and the changing perception of strategic immunity all point to a rapidly approaching inflection point for Cuba.

Venezuela as a Strategic Shock

The U.S. operation in Venezuela was a brilliant tactical military success, but more importantly, it was a strategic demonstration and signal to the region. For years, analysts, regional elites, and authoritarian regimes alike assumed that Washington had lost both the political appetite and operational willingness to employ coercive force in the hemisphere; after all, the last time it was employed was during Operation Just Cause in Panama 37 years ago. President Donald Trump’s aversion to “endless wars” during his first administration further strengthened this viewpoint. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and rhetorical condemnation were viewed as the outer limits of U.S. engagement.

The Venezuela episode decisively disrupted this assumption. The operation was widely interpreted as precise and deliberately limited in scope, which enhanced its credibility rather than undermined it. Importantly, it avoided the hallmarks of past interventions that generated regional backlash, with over 60 percent of the citizens in most Latin American countries supporting the operation, while reinforcing the idea that U.S. force can be applied selectively to achieve specific political effects.

For Cuba, the lesson is not necessarily that a similar military operation is imminent, despite President Trump’s threats, but that the mirage of strategic immunity has evaporated. The perception that the United States would tolerate indefinitely regimes deemed hostile or destabilizing has been overturned. This shift alters elite risk calculations in Havana, particularly among security and military actors who must now reassess long-held assumptions about U.S. red lines.

Unraveling of the Cuba-Venezuela Axis

Venezuela was not simply an ally of convenience for Cuba, but an ally with which it formed a “Bolivarian brotherhood” and was key to Cuba’s external survival strategy ever since the collapse of Soviet support in the early 1990s. Since the early 2000s, the Havana-Caracas axis provided Cuba with energy security, financial flexibility, and a regionally-influential geopolitical ally flush with petrodollars in return for Cuban doctors and security personnel. Energy dependence was critical; Venezuelan oil, even at reduced volumes after Venezuela entered its own economic crisis beginning in 2014, underpinned Cuba’s faltering electricity generation and industrial output. Oil resale, primarily to China, allowed the Cuban government to generate scarce hard currency.

With the Trump administration imposing an oil quarantine, seizing sanctioned oil tankers, and controlling Venezuelan oil sales, along with the president’s announcement that “there will be no more oil or money going to Cuba—zero!” means that the regime in Havana will have even less financial capacity to absorb shocks or buy internal loyalty during periods of heightened unrest. It also means that Cuban society, already facing overwhelming hardships, will have more to endure.

Maduro received a year of ideological instruction in Cuba as a young man, his only formal education after high school. His personal, ideological, and institutional ties to Havana, particularly within intelligence and security services, exceeded those of other Venezuelan figures who remain in power in Caracas. His neutralization, therefore, constitutes not only the severance of an economic lifeline but a rupture in the Cuba-Venezuela axis.

Psychological Impact

The Venezuela operation appears to have triggered a wave of anxiety and defensive behavior within Cuba’s leadership, despite President Miguel Díaz-Canel saying after President Trump’s warning to make a deal that Cuba would fight to “the last drop of blood.” The regime has shifted into a reactive posture characterized by heightened alerts, increased surveillance, and territorial defense exercises. The destruction of Maduro’s Cuban praetorian guard during the U.S. raid, consisting of the famed elite Avizpas Negras (Black Wasps), further amplifies the psychological shock on the regime and on the Cuban military. After categorically denying for years that it had any military presence in Venezuela, the Cuban government was suddenly forced to acknowledge it, along with the fact that 32 of its elite soldiers were killed. For the Cuban armed forces, this was a defeat the likes of which they had not experienced since firefights with U.S. forces during the U.S. invasion of Grenada, when 24 Cuban soldiers were killed, over two generations ago. This is likely having a deeply demoralizing effect within the Cuban armed forces and also demystifies the strength of Cuba’s defense and intelligence systems.

Legitimacy Collapse and Social Exhaustion

The Cuban regime is facing a legitimacy crisis. Power outages, the food crisis, the rising cost of living, low wages, and an ineffective public health system are battering millions of Cubans, producing severe and measurable social consequences. A report and survey from the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights outlines the scale of the crisis: 89 percent of Cuban families live in extreme poverty; 7 out of 10 Cubans must forgo at least one daily meal; only 3 percent can obtain medicines at pharmacies; 12 percent of the working-age population is unemployed. Because of this, 78 percent of Cubans surveyed by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights want to leave the country or know someone who does. The report also shows that an almost universal 92 percent of those surveyed disapprove of the government’s economic and social management.

Equally significant is the absence of institutional channels through which dissatisfaction can be expressed or resolved. Unlike Venezuela, which retained some semblance of electoral mechanisms and an organized opposition capable of channeling dissent, Cuba offers no such outlets. This structural closure increases the likelihood that future unrest, perhaps surpassing the massive spontaneous protests of July 11, 2021 (11J), will be sudden, decentralized, and difficult to control. Those protests marked a psychological turning point. While they did not produce political change, they shattered the myth of passive acceptance and demonstrated that large segments of the population were willing to confront the state despite the risks. Continued low-level protests and persistent repression suggest a society under extreme strain. Some, including the dissident group El4Tico, are vocally calling for an uprising of mid-level military officers to take control of the country and transition it to democracy, using social media.

Internal Pressure Alone Is Insufficient

As the 11J and subsequent protests demonstrate, internal social pressure is insufficient on its own to produce change in Cuba; even sustained protest can be contained indefinitely if elite incentives remain aligned with repression. External pressure can alter this calculus by increasing the costs of cohesion and raising the risks associated with maintaining the status quo.

The United States is the decisive external actor in Cuba’s future; Russia did nothing to help the Maduro Regime that it had previously called a key strategic partner in Latin America, and China has drawn up plans to minimize its economic losses there. Havana must have noticed. The Venezuela operation reasserted U.S. willingness to employ coercive tools, while broader strategic concerns over Cuba, migration, extra-hemispheric influence and activity, have elevated the country’s relevance. In addition, for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Cuba is and has been a long-standing personal and political priority. The implication is that Cuba will no longer be treated as a static, frozen conflict but rather an unresolved security and stability challenge within the hemisphere that is ripe for change.

To reach a Venezuela-style outcome, some form of coercively achieved agreement with part of the ruling elite will be necessary. This could be aimed at key generals who control GAESA, the powerful military-run Cuban conglomerate that controls major pillars of the country’s economy, including tourism, finance, and trade. It could also be aimed at the Castro family nucleus, the children and relatives of Fidel and Raúl Castro, who also represent an important center of power. Creating the coercive conditions will require at least a credible threat of some sort of military action, in addition to strategic restrictions on oil shipments and cutting off revenues from Cuba’s medical brigades to further strangle the economy. The United States has already announced no more Venezuelan oil for Cuba and has placed visa restrictions on African, Cuban, and Grenadian government officials involved in the Cuban regime’s medical missions, deeming them a coercive forced labor export scheme. Promises of lifting those conditions would be tied to regime compliance with key U.S. demands.

Transition Scenarios

Regime management in Cuba would focus on controlling regime behavior while preserving essential elements like the Communist Party, the armed forces, and key security institutions. Yet this may be more difficult to achieve than in Venezula where Chavismo quickly changed its stripes and is now equating doubt about the pivot toward the U.S. to treason. After 67 years in power, resisting the United States, the elites in Cuba are more ideologically committed than their erstwhile Chavista allies.

U.S. policy would prioritize concrete outputs: finally ending Cuba’s role as a platform for geopolitical adversaries, especially eliminating Chinese and Russian intelligence and security operations on the island, which would be consistent with the Trump Corollary. Other objectives would be migration control, cooperation on counter-narcotics, resolving long-standing property claims arising from post-revolution expropriations of U.S. businesses and from Cubans who later became U.S. citizens, and extraditing fugitives from U.S. justice who have been granted refuge on the island. In keeping with President Trump allowing Venezuela to use its oil revenue to purchase only U.S.-made products, another objective would be for U.S. firms to be granted preferential economic access in sectors such such as agriculture, tourism, real estate, energy, and infrastructure, positioning economic engagement as a benefit contingent on compliance with U.S. demands.

In practice, this could involve conditional economic engagement: selective sanctions relief tied to measurable actions such as expanded private-sector activity, labor mobility, or remittance access, while maintaining coercive leverage over strategic sectors like defense, intelligence, and core state enterprises. Rather than empowering the opposition in exile in Miami or pushing for elections in the short term, the U.S. would implicitly accept some elite continuity, working through reform-minded technocrats within the regime.

However, Cuban regime management, like the Venezuelan case, should have as its ultimate goal a negotiated transition away from an authoritarian system and eventually toward a more democratic model. Unlike Venezuela, Cuba lacks a unified opposition, clear national leaders, and any democratic muscle-memory. These deficiencies complicate a democratic transition that could actually take root in the country.

Cuba stands at a strategic inflection point shaped by internal decay and accelerated by external shocks emanating from Venezuela. The regime confronts simultaneous crises of legitimacy, economic viability, and external support, and while endurance remains possible, the inevitability of regime continuity has disappeared. The decisive variable is not whether Cuba will change, but under what conditions and at what cost. Without external pressure, repression can sustain the status quo. With sustained, credible pressure aligned with deep internal rejection, a negotiated, though imperfect, transition becomes conceivable. The Venezuela operation did not determine Cuba’s future, but it fundamentally altered the context in which that future will be decided.

Christopher Hernandez-Roy is a senior fellow and deputy director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.