Cuba. Same players. Different geography.

I wrote in January that the Venezuela operation was not about oil. The consensus take in the financial press was that the United States had invaded for crude, and that take was wrong. Venezuelan heavy is sour and capital-intensive. Production had collapsed from 3.5 million barrels per day in 1998 to under 700,000 today. The majors told Trump as much at the January 9 White House meeting. Nobody was spending $100 billion to rebuild PDVSA on his timeline. Venezuela was about two things, and oil was a distant third. It was about critical minerals, the largest undeveloped iron ore body in the hemisphere, and most importantly, it was about who was operating from Venezuelan soil.

When US special forces stormed Maduro’s compound on January 3, they killed an estimated 32 Cuban security personnel in the process. That number is the entire argument in one number. The Cuban DGI was the praetorian guard for the Venezuelan regime. Iranian Quds Force advisors were embedded across the security apparatus. Russian Wagner contractors had been there since 2019. Chinese surveillance technicians had been there longer. Maduro’s government was not a sovereign Latin American state in any meaningful sense; it was a forward operating base for a coalition of US adversaries. The Venezuela operation removed that base.

Now look at Cuba. Same three players. Different geography.