'Don't play games' with Trump: US warns Cuba's leaders after Venezuela raid

The Special Forces raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas earlier this month should make Havana take US threats seriously, Jeremy Lewin, a State Department official said

By Magdalena Del Valle

 

The US is sharpening its rhetoric toward Cuba after its successful military operation in Venezuela, signaling a tougher approach toward Havana unless the Communist-run island changes its ways. 

“The Cuban government has a choice,” Jeremy Lewin, a State Department official for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs, told reporters Thursday. If Havana continues repression and steals from recent shipments of US aid, the country will be held accountable, he said. 

 

The Special Forces raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas earlier this month should make Havana take US threats seriously, Lewin added.

 

“What’s going on in Venezuela should make clear to the Cuban regime and every other despot around the world that you don’t play games with President Trump,” Lewin said. “Weakness and disorder, strife and foreign interference in our hemisphere is done.”

 

 

Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío called “apocalyptic threats against Cuba” from the State Department “clear miscalculations” in a post on X. 

 

The State Department announced Wednesday that it was sending $3 million in “much-needed disaster relief to the Cuban people affected by Hurricane Melissa.” The shipments, which included food, water treatment kits, kitchen equipment, blankets and solar lanterns, were sent from Miami to the eastern cities of Holguin and Santiago de Cuba.

 

Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said in a post on X that while the Cuban government was open to receiving such assistance in principle, the US was taking advantage of a humanitarian issue “for opportunistic and political manipulation purposes.”

 

Cuba has long been an ally of Venezuela’s socialist regime, providing medical, security and intelligence personnel in exchange for subsidized oil. Nearly three dozen Cuban agents guarding Maduro were killed during the US mission and their bodies were repatriated to the island Thursday during a ceremony attended by 94-year-old former President Raul Castro and current President Miguel Diaz-Canel. 

 

Amid a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis marked by shortages of food, fuel and medicine, Cuba has also maintained close ties with US adversaries such as Russia and Iran — relationships that have heightened concern in Washington.

 

Speculation that Cuba might be next on President Donald Trump’s target list started to rise after Maduro’s ouster, though he said the day of the attack that the regime was so weak it might soon fall on its own.

 

Trump’s top diplomat, however, had a sharper message. “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said alongside the president. For Rubio, whose parents fled Cuba before Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, upending the Cuban regime would be a personal win and could help a future presidential bid.