When US forces moved in on Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, it looked like a dramatic end to a long-running crisis. Venezuela’s strongman was gone, his regime hollowed out, and Donald Trump had his biggest foreign policy victory since returning to the White House. But the real story did not begin in Caracas. It began decades earlier, in South Florida, among a community that never stopped believing history owed it a reckoning. To understand why Venezuela became the target of a full-blown American extraction operation, you have to understand Cuba. And to understand why Cuba still looms so large in US strategy, you have to understand Marco Rubio.
The exile lens
Cuban exile politics in Florida is not simply about one country. It is about a revolution that never ended. Families who fled Fidel Castro’s takeover carried with them a sense of unfinished business. In Miami, the fall of Havana remained a living, emotional project.That mindset shaped an entire political culture. Anti-communism was not a policy preference. It was a moral identity. Every Latin American leftist government was read through the same story: this is how it starts, this is how it ends.Marco Rubio grew up inside that world. His political formation was not shaped by textbooks or diplomatic theory but by stories of a lost homeland, a stolen future and a US that, in exile memory, had failed to finish the job in 1961. Cuba was not history. It was a wound.That wound shaped his worldview.
When Venezuela stopped being Venezuela
FILE – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, left, talks to then Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro in Montevideo, Uruguay, Dec. 18, 2007. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico, File)
When Hugo Chávez came to power in 1998, Cuban exiles saw something they recognised immediately. A populist leader rewriting institutions. A political movement built around class struggle. A rapid alignment with Havana.The details were different, but the pattern was familiar.As Venezuela slid into authoritarianism and economic collapse under Chávez and later Maduro, millions fled. Hundreds of thousands ended up in Florida, folding their own trauma into Miami’s existing exile culture. The Cuban and Venezuelan stories fused into one.To that community, Venezuela was not a separate tragedy. It was Cuba replayed on the mainland.Rubio absorbed this shift as he rose through Florida politics and into the US Senate. Over time, Venezuela became central to his political identity. Maduro was not just another dictator. He was a strategic extension of Havana.That framing turned Venezuela into something larger than itself. It became a front in a long-running ideological war.
From sanctions to strategy
During Trump’s first term, Rubio pushed relentlessly for a hard line against Maduro. Sanctions were tightened. Opposition figures were elevated. But the regime held. The international effort to remove Maduro stalled. What changed in Trump’s second term was not Rubio’s objective. It was his argument.The language of democracy and human rights no longer carried weight in Trump’s White House. So Rubio reframed Venezuela as a security threat. Drug trafficking. Russian influence. Chinese penetration. Criminal networks. The message was simple: this was not about nation-building. This was about protecting US power in its own hemisphere.That logic resonated. Maduro’s removal in 2026 was the result of that shift. It was not presented as a democratic rescue mission. It was presented as a strategic extraction.
The Cuba shadow
In Havana, the message was immediately understood.Venezuela had long been Cuba’s economic lifeline, especially through subsidised oil and security cooperation. Maduro’s fall was not just a blow to Caracas. It was a warning shot at Havana.Trump made the threat explicit, telling Cuba to make a deal or face consequences. Rubio did not need to say much at all. His entire political life had been aimed at that moment.For Cuban exiles, Venezuela’s collapse revived an old belief: if Caracas can fall, Havana must be next.
Policy or personal history
Supporters argue that Rubio’s hard line finally brought clarity to a region that had been left to rot under authoritarian rule. They say Venezuela was not a victim of US ambition but of its own corruption and mismanagement, and that decisive action was long overdue. Critics see something else: a foreign policy shaped less by cold strategy than by inherited memory. In their view, Rubio’s exile lens turns complex societies into symbols, and living nations into stand-ins for a trauma that began in 1959. What is undeniable is that Trump’s Venezuela policy is not just about oil, migration or geopolitics. It is also about history, identity and a political culture forged in loss.Maduro was not removed simply because Venezuela failed. He was removed because, in Marco Rubio’s worldview, Venezuela had become Cuba. And for half a century, that has been the one story he has never stopped trying to finish.
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