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WASHINGTON, Feb 26 (Reuters) – Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro asked a judge on Thursday to throw out his U.S. drug trafficking case, alleging the U.S. government is interfering with his defense by blocking the Venezuelan government from paying his legal fees.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Chris Reese)
Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.
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By WILL WEISSERT
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump will use Tuesday’s State of the Union address to champion his immigration crackdowns, his slashing of the federal government, his push to preserve widespread tariffs that the Supreme Court just struck down and his ability to direct quick-hit military actions around the world, including in Iran and Venezuela.
The Republican hopes he can convince increasingly wary Americans that his policies have improved their lives while ensuring that the U.S. economy is stronger than many believe — and that they should vote for more of the same in November.
The balancing act of celebrating his whirlwind first year back in the White House while making a convincing case for his party in midterm races in which he personally won’t be on the ballot is a tall order for any president. But it could prove especially delicate for Trump, given how happy he is to veer off script and ignore carefully crafted messaging.
A main theme will be that the country is booming with a rise in domestic manufacturing and new jobs, despite many Americans not feeling that way. “It’s going to be a long speech because we have so much to talk about,” said Trump, who promised a heavy dose of talk about the economy.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump will argue that Republicans are best suited to continue tackling the public’s concerns about the cost of living.
“The president’s going to make the case that three more years with him in the White House and with Republicans on Capitol Hill we can finally achieve the American dream in this country again that we had in his first term but was lost because of Joe Biden and the Democrats over the past four years,” Leavitt told reporters at the White House.
The speech will also be a “celebration” of 250 years of America’s independence, she said.
Trump is also expected to decry the Supreme Court ruling against his signature tariff policies and talk about his attempts to maneuver around that decision without depending on Congress or spooking financial markets. He’s also likely to urge lawmakers to increase military funding and tighten voter identification requirements, while defending immigration operations that have drawn bipartisan criticism following the shooting deaths of two American citizens.
Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for Democratic President Bill Clinton, said Trump has typically used State of the Union addresses to offer more conventional tones than his usual bombast — but he’s still apt to exaggerate repeatedly.
“His job, for the sake of his party, is to show the silver lining,” Shesol said. “But if he’s going to insist that the silver lining is gold, no one’s buying it. And it will be a very difficult position on the campaign trail for Republicans to defend.”
Michael Waldman, Clinton’s former chief speechwriter, said second-term presidents “have a tough job because what they all want to say is, ‘Hey, look what a great job I’ve been doing — why don’t you love me?’”
Shown is the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026, ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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Shown is the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026, ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
No matter what his prepared remarks say, Trump relishes deviating into personal grievances, meaning Tuesday will probably feature topics like denying that he lost the 2020 presidential election.
His lack of messaging discipline has been on display after concerns about high costs of living helped propel Democratic wins around the country on Election Day last November. The White House subsequently promised that the president would travel the country nearly every week to reassure Americans he was taking affordability seriously. But Trump has spent more time blaming Democrats and scoffing at the notion that kitchen table issues demand attention.
Trump instead boasts of having tamed inflation and says he has the economy humming given that the Dow Jones Industrial Average recently exceeded 50,000 points for the first time.
Such gains don’t feel tangible to those without stock portfolios, however. There also are persistent fears that tariffs stoked higher prices, which could eventually hurt the economy and job creation. Economic growth slowed the last three months of last year.
Waldman, now president of the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for democracy, civil liberties and fair elections, said previous presidents faced similar instances of “economic disquiet.”
That created a question of “how much do you sell vs. feeling the pain of the electorate,” he said.
Shesol noted that Trump has “always believed — going back to his real estate days — that he can sell anyone on anything.”
“He’s still doing that. But the problem is, you can’t tell somebody who has lost their job and can’t get a new one that things are going great,” Shesol said. “He can’t sell people on a reality that for them, and frankly for most Americans, does not exist.”
It is potentially politically perilous ahead of November elections that could deliver congressional wins to Democrats, just as 2018’s blue wave created a strong check to his administration during his first term.
Democrats’ response to Trump’s speech will be delivered by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, whose affordability-focused message helped her flip a Republican-held office last November.
Several Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, plan to skip Trump’s speech in protest, instead attending a rally known as the “People’s State of the Union” on Washington’s National Mall.
Trump’s address comes as two U.S. aircraft carriers have been dispatched to the Middle East amid tensions with Iran.
The president will recount how U.S. airstrikes last summer pounded Tehran’s nuclear capabilities, and laud the raid that ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Nicolás Maduro, as well as his administration’s brokering of a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
But he also strained U.S. military alliances with NATO, thanks to his push to seize Greenland from Denmark and his failure to take a harder line with Russian President Vladimir Putin in seeking an end to its war in Ukraine. Tuesday was the fourth anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Making any foreign policy feel relevant to Americans back home is never easy.
Jennifer Anju Grossman, a former speechwriter for Republican President George H.W. Bush and current CEO of the Atlas Society, which promotes the ideas of author and philosopher Ayn Rand, said Trump can make clear that Maduro’s socialist policies wrecked Venezuela’s economy to the point where one of the world’s richest oil countries struggled to meet its own energy needs.
Now, oil from that country will help lower American gas prices.
Still, when it comes to overseas developments, she said, “I think it’s going to be a bit of a challenge to make clear why this is relevant to the domestic situation.”
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Feb 23 (Reuters) – Canada said on Monday it plans to provide assistance to Cuba while the island grapples with fuel shortages after Washington moved to choke off Cuba’s oil supplies.
Washington has escalated a pressure campaign against the Communist-run island and long-time U.S. foe in recent weeks.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to block all oil from reaching Cuba, including that from ally Venezuela, pushing up prices for food and transportation and prompting severe fuel shortages and hours of blackouts.
“We are preparing a plan to assist. We are not prepared at this point to provide any further details of an announcement,” Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand said on Monday, without giving details on what such an assistance will include.
The U.N. has warned that if Cuba’s energy needs are not met, it could cause a humanitarian crisis. Canada said last week it was monitoring the situation in Cuba and was concerned about “the increasing risk of a humanitarian crisis” there.
Emboldened by the U.S. military’s seizure of ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a deadly raid in January, Trump has repeatedly talked of acting against Cuba and pressuring its leadership.
Washington and Ottawa have also had tensions under Trump over issues like trade tariffs, Trump’s rhetoric towards Greenland, Ottawa’s attempt to warm ties with Beijing and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks that “middle powers” should act together to avoid being victimized by U.S. hegemony.
Trump has said “Cuba will be failing pretty soon,” adding that Venezuela, once the island’s top supplier, has not recently sent oil or money to Cuba.
The U.N. human rights office has said the U.S. raid in which Maduro was seized was a violation of international law. Human rights experts cast Trump’s foreign policy and his focus on exploiting Venezuelan oil and squeezing Cuba as echoing an imperialist approach.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Michael Perry)
Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.
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President Donald Trump has cited dramatic results from U.S. strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, saying they’ve nearly stopped the flow of drugs trafficked to the U.S. by water.
Since September 2025, the U.S. has struck at least 40 alleged drug vessels, killing 149 people.
“With our action in the Gulf of America, that sounds so nice when I hear the Gulf of America, drugs entering our country by sea are down 97%,” Trump said at a Jan. 29 White House event. “So when you see the boats being hit, those boats kill on average 25,000 people a boat.” We’ve rated the statement about 25,000 deaths Pants on Fire.
Even though Trump mentioned the Gulf of America, his comments appeared to reference the Caribbean and Pacific strikes.
When asked for evidence about the 97% claim, the White House pointed us to Customs and Border Protection statistics from July 2025 to November 2025. Those numbers show a 98% drop in the pounds of drugs seized by CBP air and marine operations.
But drug seizures tell us only how many drugs are stopped from entering the U.S. There isn’t data to show how many drugs are being sent to the U.S. or how many are making it in. Drug experts also say changes in drug seizure data aren’t sufficient to make definitive statements about policy outcomes.
“No one knows how much doesn’t get caught, so no one can cite a precise percentage change,” Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University drug policy researcher, said. “Trump is making a claim about something that is unknowable.”
The White House didn’t explain why it chose those months. There has been a drop in CBP drug seizures since September 2025 when the vessel strikes began, but the percentage drop fluctuates depending on the months compared.
Additionally, the Coast Guard — not CBP — oversees most drug seizures on water, especially in international waters, an agency spokesperson told PolitiFact. Its data shows a spike in annual cocaine seizures — 200% in fiscal year 2025 compared with its yearly average. (The Coast Guard generally focuses on cocaine seizures, while CBP’s 98% decline is mainly related to marijuana.)
While the White House cites a drop in CBP drug seizures as a success, the Coast Guard cites an increase in seizures as a sign of strong enforcement.
This image from video provided by U.S. South Command, shows a vessel accused of trafficking drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean shortly before it was destroyed by the U.S. military, killing two and injuring one, Jan. 23, 2026. (U.S. Southern Command via AP)
The White House’s calculation starts in July 2025, which was an outlier with an uncharacteristically high number of marijuana seizures. In July, CBP seized 224,000 pounds of drugs, including 203,000 pounds of marijuana. CBP seizes about 20,000 pounds of all types of drugs in a month.
From August 2025, the last month before the vessel strikes began, to January, the latest available data, CBP drug seizures dropped 79%.
For the Coast Guard, drug seizures are up.
In the 2025 fiscal year which ended in September, the Coast Guard seized 510,000 pounds of cocaine, a 200% increase from a typical fiscal year when the Coast Guard seizes about 167,000 pounds of cocaine.
In August 2025, the Coast Guard launched an operation to target cartels and criminal organizations. From August 2025 to February 2026, the Coast Guard seized 200,000 pounds of cocaine more than it seizes in a typical year, according to agency press releases.
The Coast Guard has hailed the increase in seizures as a success in “preventing the flow of dangerous drugs into American communities.”
Regardless of the data point, it’s unknown how many drugs enter the U.S. each year. Drug seizures show only how many pounds of a drug were stopped from getting into the U.S.
“It’s a black market. And so by definition, we do not have good market data,” Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy program director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit that researches global crises.
The decrease in CBP seizures could point to less enforcement or fewer drugs moving on a specific route, Dickinson said. “There’s really not a good way to understand that data,” she said.
Dickinson said the Trump administration’s drug enforcement efforts, such as the vessel strikes, have “scared some traffickers away from using specific routes.”
Rather than stop trafficking, they might have rerouted.
“Drug trafficking is a very old and mature business, in many ways, these organizations have been in a cat and mouse game with law enforcement, not just for years, but really for decades,” Dickinson said. They “are expert at reconfiguring routes, finding new ways to ship things, and innovating in a way to avoid enforcement.”
Trump said, after U.S. vessel strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, “drugs entering our country by sea are down 97%.”
The administration hasn’t provided any evidence that the vessels it has struck were carrying drugs.
There has been a drop in CBP drug seizures since the strikes began. But the Coast Guard — not CBP — oversees most drug seizures on water, especially in international waters. And that agency has seen a steep increase in drug seizures.
The White House cites a drop in CBP drug seizures as a success at the same time the Coast Guard cites an increase in drug interdictions as a success, too.
However, neither an increase nor a decrease in drug seizures shows how many drugs are entering the U.S. That number is unknowable, according to drug experts. Drug seizures tell us only how many drugs are stopped from entering the U.S.
Trump’s statement is unsubstantiated. We rate it False.
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Feb 19 (Reuters) – Venezuela’s ruling party-controlled legislature on Thursday approved a limited amnesty bill that human rights organizations say falls short of offering relief for hundreds of political prisoners in the country, as some family members of detainees completed a fifth day on hunger strike.
Interim President Delcy Rodriguez, who took power last month after the U.S. ouster of President Nicolas Maduro, has bowed to Trump administration demands on oil sales and released hundreds of people who human rights groups class as political prisoners, as part of a normalization in relations between the two countries.
The government has always denied holding political prisoners and says those jailed have committed crimes.
The law was approved after a second debate in the legislature, headed by Rodriguez’s brother Jorge Rodriguez.
The approved law provides amnesty for involvement in political protests and “violent actions” which took place during a brief coup in 2002 and demonstrations or elections in certain months of 2004, 2007, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2019, 2023, 2024 and 2025. People convicted of “military rebellion” for involvement in events in 2019 are excluded.
The law does not detail the exact crimes which would be eligible for amnesty, though a previous draft laid out several – including instigation of illegal activity, resistance to authorities, rebellion and treason.
It also does not return assets of those detained, revoke public office bans given for political reasons or cancel sanctions against media outlets, as at least one previous draft would have.
Many members of the opposition and dissident former officials live in other countries to escape arrest warrants they say are politically motivated.
Though the law allows people abroad to appoint a lawyer to present an amnesty request on their behalf, they would have to appear in person in Venezuela to have it granted and the law will only cover “people who have ceased the execution of the actions which constitute crimes,” a specification which may leave out many who have continued their activism from other countries. The law removes international arrest warrants for those granted amnesty.
Tribunals must decide on amnesty requests within 15 days, according to the law.
Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.
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CABIMAS, Venezuela — The pumps that brought prosperity from deep in the Earth’s crust are now mostly rusted relics of a storied past.
The buildings that housed a prideful labor force are vandalized, colonized by squatters or boarded up.
The schools, clinics, the manicured golf course — onetime amenities from an industry awash in petrodollars — gone or overgrown with weeds.
“Our biggest problem is depression and anxiety,” says Manuel Polanco, 74, a former petroleum engineer whose recollections of the good times only highlight a dystopian present. “We barely survive. We have just enough to feed ourselves, to get by.”
This is the dismal tableau today in Venezuela’s Maracaibo Basin, which, for much of the last century, was one of the globe’s leading sources of petroleum.
A monument to oil workers stands in a square in Cabimas, a once-thriving oil town in Venezuela.
(Marcelo Pérez del Carpio/For The Times)
Since the U.S. attack last month and arrest of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, President Trump has vowed to rebuild the country’s moribund oil sector — while also providing resources and cash for the United States. East of Maracaibo lies the Orinoco Belt, home to the world’s largest proven deposits, estimated at more than 300 billion barrels.
But a recent swing through the Maracaibo region in northwestern Venezuela dramatized the many obstacles. Greeting visitors is a dire panorama of nonfunctioning wells, battered pipelines and empty storage tanks, among other markers of decline.
The U.S. plans have generated considerable skepticism in a place not accustomed to good news. But some oil-field veterans envision a return to the glory days.
“I see myself flourishing again,” said José Celestino García Petro, 66 and a father of eight, who said he never found steady work after his well-servicing firm was expropriated by the government years ago. “Rising from the ashes!”
Deteriorated oil rigs and gas flow stations are seen on Lake Maracaibo, near the city of Cabimas.
At its peak in the 1970s, Venezuela was daily pumping some 3.5 million barrels. A charter member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the nation exuded affluence and excess — though the wealth was mostly channeled to domestic elites and foreign oil companies, not the impoverished majority.
But slumping crude prices, government mismanagement and U.S. sanctions have left Venezuela’s industry a hollowed-out shell of its former, grandiose self.
Last year, Venezuela managed to pump about 1 million barrels a day, less than 1% of global production. Even so, petroleum was still a lifeline for a nation mired in more than a decade of economic, political and social tumult marked by mass emigration, hyperinflation and a near-ubiquitous sense of despair.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, left, and Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodriguez hold a news conference after their meeting at the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas on Feb. 11.
(Julio Urribarri / Anadolu via Getty Images)
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited Venezuela last week, met with the country’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, and even toured some oil fields. He boasted of “enormous progress” in reviving a business that is now effectively under U.S. management.
Dimming the upbeat declarations is a harsh reality: It will likely take at least a decade — and perhaps $200 billion or more — to restore the country’s decrepit hydrocarbon infrastructure, experts say.
A lot depends on Big Oil, but some executives are wary. At a White House meeting last month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods labeled Venezuela “uninvestable.”
Along the oil-streaked shores of Lake Maracaibo — actually a massive coastal lagoon, fed by both freshwater rivers and the Caribbean — the vestiges of a once-thriving enterprise stand out like totems from a past civilization.
Dotting the shoreline is a bleak expanse of detritus: timeworn pumps, tottering derricks, wayward cranes and aging pipelines. Gobs of oil mar the coast. Pollution has ravaged once-abundant stocks of fish and crab.
“I pray to God every day that things will change for the better,” said Joel José León Santo, 53, who on a recent morning was preparing his fishing boat with three colleagues. “But so far we haven’t seen any improvements. Food is more expensive. Tomorrow’s meal depends on today’s catch.”
1. Much of Venezuela’s oil industry is in disrepair, like this broken oil pipeline over Lake Maracaibo. 2. The General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge spans an outlet of Lake Maracaibo and links the region with the rest of Venezuela.
There is no official number, but industry observers estimate that fewer than 2,000 wells are functioning in a region that is home to some 12,000.
“Everything here is bad, at a standstill,” said Mari Camacho, 45, who, with her family, is among those squatting in a series of abandoned homes in the town of El Güere, flanked by mangroves along the eastern shores of Lake Maracaibo.
A brick factory that once served oil producers shuttered long ago. Her four sons left for Colombia, part of the country’s historic exodus.
Her home sits atop a sea of oil, but Camacho says there has been no electricity for six years, since a transformer blew out. No one fixed it. Alarming her and neighbors are rumors that the legal owners of their homes plan to claim their property.
“I don’t know where I would go,” she said.
About 10 miles south is the sweltering city of Cabimas, an iconic venue in Venezuela’s petroleum narrative. It is now a ramshackle, seemingly lost-in-time metropolis where residents sit on porches observing the unsteady progress of cars navigating pothole-ridden streets.
People stand near a sign reading “Maracaibo” at a park on the shore of Lake Maracaibo.
“All the great companies that used to exist were connected to the petroleum industry,” said Hollister Quintero, 32, a Cabimas native whose grandparents worked for foreign oil firms during the industry’s heady days. “Now, there is just desolation.”
Quintero, who lacked the funds to finish college, struggles as a freelance audiovisual producer. He also cares for his aging parents, whose public pensions amount to the equivalent of $2 a month.
Most young people leave town, Quintero said, while those who stay find jobs in the informal sector. A common, albeit not very lucrative, option: delivering food orders on bicycles or motorcycles.
“There just aren’t many opportunities,” he said.
A mural in Maracaibo celebrates Venezuela’s oil industry.
For centuries, Lake Maracaibo’s environs were known for natural seepage of oil rising to the surface from sedimentary rock, a phenomenon also seen in sites like Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits. Indigenous people and Spanish settlers utilized the viscous goo for medicinal purposes and waterproofing boats.
But the dawn of the oil age in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries and the allure of black gold attracted a new crowd: wildcatters and fortune-hunters from the United States and Europe, drawn to a backwater heretofore known for coffee, cacao and cattle.
It was here in Cabimas where, more than a century ago, a well-named Barroso II jump-started a boom.
On Dec. 14, 1922, the ground shook in Cabimas, but it wasn’t an earthquake. Barroso II, managed by Royal Dutch Shell, began spitting skyward some 100,000 barrels daily.
“Suddenly, with a roar, oil erupted from the well in a spout that towered 200 feet above the derrick and fanned out in the air like a titan’s umbrella,” Orlando Méndez, a Venezuelan oil historian, wrote in a 2022 article for the American Assn. of Petroleum Geologists, marking the blowout’s centennial.
“The villagers poured out of their houses,” Méndez wrote. “Oil sprayed them in a torrent of black raindrops. … Only the bravest walked hesitantly toward the well. They held out their hands and the dark, sticky fluid splattered [on] their palms. ‘¡Petróleo!’ they all shouted.”
The gusher didn’t relent for nine days.
The runaway well ushered in a bonanza. Little attention was paid to the environmental catastrophe for Lake Maracaibo, destination of much of the escaping crude.
The Petróleos de Venezuela Bajo Grande Refinery on the shore of Lake Maracaibo.
Explorers scouring the lakeside soon discovered other, even more productive fields. By the end of the 1920s, Venezuela had become the world’s largest oil exporter.
“Maracaibo was alive with eager strangers as every boat that landed there disgorged an army of oil workers,” Méndez wrote.
In subsequent decades, Venezuela rode a boom-and-bust cycle, but by the late-1990s returned to producing near-record levels of 3 million barrels a day.
With revenues soaring, the late President Hugo Chávez, a left-wing populist, lavished cash on Venezuelan masses long excluded from the petroleum windfall. An opposition-backed general strike in 2002-03 prompted Chávez to fire almost 20,000 employees of the state oil firm.
Years later, Chávez nationalized dozens of oil companies, including some U.S. firms. The expropriations, along with the firings, consolidated state control of the oil sector and, experts say, drained the country of expertise and investment, inflicting lasting damage.
Chávez died in 2013. International oil prices soon cratered — bad news for his chosen successor, Maduro. U.S. sanctions enacted during Trump’s first term exacerbated the crisis. Most fired oil workers never got their jobs back.
“We were stigmatized, our benefits were taken away, and we were denied the opportunity to work in Venezuela,” said Polanco, the petroleum engineer.
An anti-U.S. mural in Maracaibo declares, “Venezuela is not a menace, Venezuela is hope.”
After his dismissal, Polanco said he found employment in Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico, but later returned to Cabimas. He has one son in the United States, another in Mexico.
He and other former oil workers expressed guarded optimism for Trump’s ambitious revival blueprint.
“I would love to return to the oil industry and have it be the same as it was 22 years ago,” said Michelle Bello, 51, a father of five who said he and four siblings were forced out from the state oil company during the purge. “Take politics out of it.”
Quintero, the young entrepreneur, also welcomes the notion that his hometown may return to its renowned era of affluence. But he is skeptical.
“Of course I hope that Cabimas could be reborn anew as a petroleum center,” said Quintero. “This is a place with a lot of history and culture. But the sad fact is this: We are now a ghost town.”
Special correspondent Mogollón reported from Cabimas and Times staff writer McDonnell from Mexico City.
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President Donald Trump is heading to North Carolina on Friday to celebrate members of the special forces who stormed into Venezuela on the third day of the New Year and whisked away that country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, to face U.S. smuggling charges.First Lady Melania Trump will also be making the trip to Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the world by population, to spend time with military families.Trump has been hitting the road more frequently to states that could play key roles in November’s midterm congressional elections, including a stop before Christmas in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The White House has been trying to promote Trump’s economic policies, including attempts to bring down the cost of living at a time when many Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated with Trump’s efforts to improve affordability.The president spoke at Fort Bragg in June at an event meant to recognize the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. But that celebration was overshadowed by his partisan remarks describing protesters in Los Angeles as “animals” and his defense of deploying the military there.Trump has since deployed the National Guard to places like Washington and Memphis, Tennessee, as well as other federal law enforcement officials involved in his crackdown on immigration. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced Thursday that the administration is ending the operations in Minnesota that led to the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.This time, Trump’s visit is meant to toast service members involved in his administration’s dramatic ouster of Maduro, an operation he has described as requiring bravery and advanced weapons.His administration has since pushed for broad oversight of the South American country’s oil industry. Next month, he plans to convene a gathering of leaders from a number of Latin American countries in Florida, as the administration spotlights what it sees as concerning Chinese influence in the region.The March 7 gathering can give Trump a chance to further press a new and aggressive foreign policy which the president has proudly dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a reference to 19th-century President James Monroe’s belief that the U.S. should dominate its sphere of influence.
President Donald Trump is heading to North Carolina on Friday to celebrate members of the special forces who stormed into Venezuela on the third day of the New Year and whisked away that country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, to face U.S. smuggling charges.
First Lady Melania Trump will also be making the trip to Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the world by population, to spend time with military families.
Trump has been hitting the road more frequently to states that could play key roles in November’s midterm congressional elections, including a stop before Christmas in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The White House has been trying to promote Trump’s economic policies, including attempts to bring down the cost of living at a time when many Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated with Trump’s efforts to improve affordability.
The president spoke at Fort Bragg in June at an event meant to recognize the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. But that celebration was overshadowed by his partisan remarks describing protesters in Los Angeles as “animals” and his defense of deploying the military there.
Trump has since deployed the National Guard to places like Washington and Memphis, Tennessee, as well as other federal law enforcement officials involved in his crackdown on immigration. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced Thursday that the administration is ending the operations in Minnesota that led to the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.
This time, Trump’s visit is meant to toast service members involved in his administration’s dramatic ouster of Maduro, an operation he has described as requiring bravery and advanced weapons.
His administration has since pushed for broad oversight of the South American country’s oil industry. Next month, he plans to convene a gathering of leaders from a number of Latin American countries in Florida, as the administration spotlights what it sees as concerning Chinese influence in the region.
The March 7 gathering can give Trump a chance to further press a new and aggressive foreign policy which the president has proudly dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a reference to 19th-century President James Monroe’s belief that the U.S. should dominate its sphere of influence.
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After Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998, net emigration from Venezuela began to increase. It was a relative trickle at first. The people leaving were, broadly speaking, the well-off, the business class, those who wanted to protect their investments and properties. Next, as the economic outlook worsened, came the middle class, looking for better opportunities, and many of those who went to Colombia could be more accurately described as returnees: the children and grandchildren of Colombians who’d emigrated a generation or two earlier, now claiming their citizenship in order to start over. Both of these groups included dissidents, victims of the ever-tightening repression. Each disappointing election lost by the opposition (or, more recently, stolen by Maduro) prompted many who no longer believed that change was possible to leave.
Still, no one was really prepared for 2017, when Venezuela’s hyperinflation made daily life unsustainable. That year, the official inflation rate rose to eight hundred and sixty-three per cent; the following year, it went even higher, to an astonishing annual rate of more than a hundred and thirty thousand per cent. Faced with this untenable situation, ordinary people from across the country simply picked up their belongings and began walking, eventually crossing the Simón Bolívar bridge into Cúcuta, and then heading farther, into Colombia, and beyond. What was initially a local concern for Cúcuta—which woke to find its streets and byways lined with refugees—soon became a national, and then regional, crisis. It was unprecedented, and if you talk to Cucuteños today, many still shudder as they recall those scenes. Mention los caminantes, the walkers, and everyone here knows what you’re talking about.
Keila Vilchez, a Venezuelan journalist writing for Cúcuta’s main paper, La Opinión, told me that those people weren’t migrating so much as fleeing. “That’s all you can call it,” she said. “Because anyone who decides to walk for twenty days, thirty days, forty days to leave their country is doing it because there is no hope.” The walkers whom Vilchez met in those days while reporting from Cúcuta, and along the roads of the Colombian state of Norte de Santander, were mostly headed to Bogotá, or to the coast, or to the coffee-growing region of Colombia, having heard rumors that there might be work there. They carried their entire lives with them, rolling their bulging suitcases along the sides of roads, children in their arms. They wore sandals or were barefoot. They were desperate: no papers, no money, perhaps a phone number of a relative or an address somewhere in Bogotá. Unprepared for the altitude or for the elements, many died along the way. In 2018 alone, more than 1.3 million Venezuelans left the country. “As a Venezuelan, I couldn’t help but think how lucky I’d been,” Vilchez said.
All told, more than seven million Venezuelans—around twenty per cent of the population—have left since 2015. It’s no exaggeration to say that this unprecedented exodus has affected every country in the region: straining diplomatic relations, testing social safety nets, sparking xenophobic backlash, polarizing public opinion, and transforming politics. The humanitarian emergency arguably transformed the political debate on immigration in the U.S., as well. How many Americans had heard of Tren de Aragua before it became a shorthand for the kinds of immigrants Trump was promising to deport en masse? I was living in New York when Republican governors began sending busloads of migrants to blue-state cities like mine. In the winter of 2022 to 2023, I volunteered to meet new arrivals at the Port Authority, most of whom were Venezuelans. They were young men and women, families; I remember them as dazed and bewildered and excited, scarcely able to believe that they were in midtown Manhattan. They needed winter coats and hats and underwear and shoelaces. And more—a place to rest, a job, a school for their kids. Many had crossed the Simón Bolívar bridge, and all one could do was offer a welcome, and stand in awe of how far they’d come, every journey a kind of miracle.
One morning in Cúcuta, I went to Las Delicias, a neighborhood of roughly four hundred families on the outskirts of town, where dirt roads snake up and down green hills, turning to mud in the rains, and more than half the residents are Venezuelan. There had been gunfire the previous afternoon, the victims a pair of young men on a motorcycle, one of whom had been shot in the back and died. The other remained hospitalized. Neither garnered much sympathy from the residents I spoke to; they were thieves, or so it was said, and life was too difficult to spend much time feeling sorry for criminals. Las Delicias officially became part of Cúcuta in 2015, a bureaucratic change that many hoped would bring much needed services and infrastructure improvements to the neighborhood, but not much has materialized yet.
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Daniel Alarcón
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Feb 3 (Reuters) – NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has arrived in Kyiv and will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a Financial Times correspondent said in a post on X.
Rutte’s reported visit comes after Russia attacked Ukraine with 450 drones and over 60 missiles overnight.
Russia and Ukraine said last week they halted strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure, but disagreed on the timeframe for the truce.
(Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.
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Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez on Friday announced an amnesty bill that could lead to the release of hundreds of prisoners, including opposition leaders, journalists and human rights activists detained for political reasons.
The measure had long been sought by the United States-backed opposition. It is the latest concession Rodríguez has made since taking the reins of the country on Jan. 3 after the brazen seizure of then-President Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military attack in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.
Rodríguez told a gathering of justices, magistrates, ministers, military brass and other government leaders that the ruling party-controlled National Assembly would take up the bill with urgency.
“May this law serve to heal the wounds left by the political confrontation fueled by violence and extremism,” she added in the pretaped televised event. “May it serve to redirect justice in our country, and may it serve to redirect coexistence among Venezuelans.”
This comes as the U.S. Embassy for Venezuela also announced Friday that all American citizens detained in Venezuela have been released.
“We are pleased to confirm the release by the interim authorities of all known U.S. citizens held in Venezuela,” the embassy said in a social media post. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted the news on his personal X account.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many people were released. CBS News has reached out to the State Department.
Earlier this month, a hostage advocate familiar with the situation had told CBS News that at least four Americans were still detained in Venezuela.
In July, 10 Americans were freed from Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap involving the U.S. and El Salvador. The Americans were freed in exchange for El Salvador returning 252 Venezuelans who were deported from the U.S. to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
The U.S. does not physically operate an embassy in Venezuela, after it shuttered its embassy in Caracas in 2019 amid mass protests and political unrest. Since then, it has operated its consular services out of Bogota, Colombia. In the wake of the U.S. capture of Maduro in early January, the Trump administration this week notified Congress that it would begin steps to eventually reopen its embassy in Venezuela.
Laura Dogu, the chief U.S. diplomat to Venezuela, traveled to Caracas Saturday to meet with Venezuelan officials, Yvan Gil, Venezuela’s foreign affairs minister, posted on social media. Gil said their meeting is “aimed at charting a roadmap for work on matters of bilateral interest, as well as addressing and resolving existing differences through diplomatic dialogue and on the basis of mutual respect and International Law.”
Rodríguez, meanwhile also announced the shutdown of Helicoide, a prison in Caracas where torture and other human rights abuses have been repeatedly documented by independent organizations. The facility, she said, will be transformed into a sports, social and cultural center for police and surrounding neighborhoods.
Javier Campos/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Rodríguez made her announcement before some of the officials that former prisoners and human rights watchdogs have accused of ordering the abuses committed at Helicoide and other detention facilities.
Relatives of some prisoners livestreamed Rodríguez’s speech on a phone as they gathered outside Helicoide. Some cried. Many chanted “Freedom! Freedom!”
“God is good. God heard us,” Johana Chirinos, a prisoner’s aunt, said as tears rolled down her face.
Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado in a statement said the announced actions were not taken “voluntarily, but rather in response to pressure from the U.S. government.” She also noted that people have been detained for their political activities from anywhere between a month and 23 years.
“The regime’s repressive apparatus is brutal and has responded to the numerous criminal forces that answer to this regime, and it is all that remains,” Machado said. “When repression disappears and fear is lost, it will be the end of tyranny.”
The Venezuelan-based prisoners’ rights group Foro Penal estimates that 711 people are in detention facilities across the South American country for their political activities. Of those, 183 have been sentenced.
Among the prominent members of the political opposition who were detained after the 2024 presidential election and remain in prison are former lawmaker Freddy Superlano, Machado’s lawyer Perkins Rocha, as well as Juan Pablo Guanipa, a former governor and one of Machado’s closest allies.
The government did not release the text of the bill on Friday, leaving unclear the specific criteria that will be used to determine who qualifies for amnesty.
Rodríguez said the “general amnesty law” will cover the “entire period of political violence from 1999 to the present.” She also explained that people convicted of murder, drug trafficking, corruption or human rights violations will not qualify for relief.
Rodríguez’s government earlier this month announced plans to release a significant number of prisoners in a goodwill gesture, but relatives of those detained have condemned the slow pace of the releases.
“A general amnesty is welcome as long as its elements and conditions include all of civil society, without discrimination, that it does not become a cloak of impunity, and that it contributes to dismantling the repressive apparatus of political persecution,” Alfredo Romero, president of Foro Penal, said on social media.
The organization has tallied 302 releases since the Jan. 8 announcement.
The human rights group Provea in a statement called out the lack of transparency and “trickle” pace of prisoner releases. It also underscored that while the freeing of those still detained “is urgent, the announcement of an amnesty should not be conceived, under any circumstances, as a pardon or act of clemency on the part of the State.”
“We recall that these people were arbitrarily imprisoned for exercising rights protected by international human rights instruments, the National Constitution, and Venezuelan laws,” the organization said.
Outside another detention facility in Caracas, Edward Ocariz, who was detained for more than five months after the 2024 election, joined prisoners’ relatives in demanding their loved ones’ swift release.
“We, Venezuelans, have all endured so much, all unjust, merciless and trampling on our dignity. No one deserves this,” Ocariz said. “And today, the guilty continue to govern Venezuela.”
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President Donald Trump gives a speech at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2026 in Davos, Switzerland.
Getty Images
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he will reopen Venezuela’s airspace to commercial flights, clearing the way for airlines to resume service to the South American country following the apprehension earlier this month of former strongman Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces in a predawn raid in Caracas.
Speaking at the White House, Trump said he had spoken directly with Maduro’s successor, interim president Delcy Rodríguez, to inform her that all commercial airspace over Venezuela would be reopened.
“I just spoke to the President of Venezuela and informed her that there will be opening up all commercial airspace over Venezuela,” Trump said. “American citizens will be very shortly able to go to Venezuela and they’ll be safe there. It’s under very strong control.”
Trump said the move would allow Venezuelans living abroad to return home, either permanently or for visits, restoring travel links that have been largely frozen for nearly seven years.
He said he had instructed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and other agencies, including the military, to complete the reopening by the end of the day.
“I’ve instructed Sean Duffy and everybody else concerned, including the military, that by the end of today I’d like to have the airspace over Venezuela opened up so planes can go to Venezuela,” Trump said, stressing the urgency of the directive.
Last November, ahead of the military operation that captured Maduro, Trump issued a message warning that the South American country’s airspace would “remain completely closed.”
One day after the arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on Jan. 4, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a new notice about the “potentially dangerous” situation in the Maiquetía region near Caracas “at all altitudes due to military activity in or around Venezuela.
“The threats could pose a potential risk to aircraft at all altitudes, including overflight, arrival, and departure,” the notice said. It remains in effect through Feb. 2, according to the FAA’s website.
While making the announcement, Trump said his decision was good news for the Venezuelan community in Doral — home to the largest concentration of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States.
“U.S. citizens will be able to travel to Venezuela very soon, and they will be safe there, because it will be under very strict control. And people who used to live in Venezuela—some want to return, and others want to visit—and they will be able to do so,” the president said.
The White House did not immediately provide details on how the reopening would be implemented or whether additional security or regulatory reviews would be required before flights resume.
Diplomatic relations between Washington and Caracas collapsed in 2019, when the U.S. State Department raised its travel advisory for Venezuela to its highest level and warned Americans not to travel to the country.
As of Thursday, the State Department continued to list Venezuela under a “Do Not Travel” advisory, citing risks including wrongful detention, torture, kidnapping and violent crime.
The announcement comes as Venezuelan carrier Línea Aérea de Servicio Ejecutivo Regional, C.A., known as Laser Airlines, has renewed its request for authorization from the U.S. Department of Transportation to operate flights between Miami and Venezuela.
Laser submitted an amendment to an application originally filed in October 2011, seeking a foreign air carrier permit and a two-year exemption to operate scheduled and charter passenger, cargo and mail flights between Miami and the Venezuelan cities of Caracas, Valencia and Maracaibo.
If approved, Laser said it could begin nonstop service within 90 to 180 days, offering up to two daily flights using Boeing 737, MD-80 or MD-90 aircraft configured with about 150 seats. The airline said it could later deploy higher-capacity Boeing 767 aircraft.
Laser estimated it would transport approximately 172,800 passengers in its first year of direct service, while noting that demand forecasts remain uncertain.
The last U.S. carrier to operate routes between the United States and Venezuela was American Airlines, which suspended all its commercial air links in 2019, when the two countries finally severed their already fragile diplomatic relations.
This article was complemented with el Nuevo Herald’s wire services.
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Antonio María Delgado
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As the U.S. military began launching strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean last year, a young Trinidadian man who was in Venezuela for work was searching for a way home, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.Chad Joseph, 26, had been in Venezuela for months fishing and doing farm work when he began looking for a boat to hitch a ride back to Las Cuevas in Trinidad and Tobago, where his wife and three children lived. But as the U.S. began targeting vessels officials said were carrying drugs destined for American streets, Joseph “became increasingly fearful” of making the journey, court documents say. The concerns became so real that in early September, his wife recalled, he called to assure her that he had not been aboard a vessel just hit by the U.S., pledging to be home soon.The last call home was on Oct. 12, when Joseph told his wife he’d found a boat to bring him back to Trinidad, and he would be seeing her in a matter of days, according to court documents. Two days later, however, on Oct. 14, the U.S. struck another target — a boat Joseph’s family believes he was in.“Mr. Joseph’s wife repeatedly called Mr. Joseph’s cellphone, but the line was dead,” a lawsuit filed Tuesday against the U.S. government says. “The line remains dead to this day.”Joseph’s family, and the family of another Trinidadian man, 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo, who had been working with Joseph in Venezuela and who is also believed to have been on the boat, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government on Tuesday for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing of the two men. The complaint calls the strikes “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful,” and says they have carried out “premeditated and intentional killings” with no legal justification.CNN asked the Justice Department for comment but did not immediately receive a response before publication. The Defense Department declined to comment on ongoing litigation.The complaint says that, despite claims by President Donald Trump and other administration officials that all the men killed on board were “narcoterrorists,” neither Joseph nor Samaroo had any affiliation to drug cartels.The lawsuit marks the first opportunity for a judge to rule on the legality of the strikes which are part of the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific — dubbed Operation Southern Spear — that has killed at least 117 people. The most recent strike was carried out last week in the eastern Pacific, killing two and leaving one survivor who was being searched for by the Coast Guard.The lawsuit points specifically to the Death on the High Seas Act, which allows family members to sue over wrongful deaths on the high seas, and the Alien Tort Statute, which lets foreign nationals sue in federal courts over violations of international law.The families are suing for compensatory and punitive damages and they are being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Jonathan Hafetz with the Seton Hall Law School.The administration has publicly presented little evidence that those killed in the ongoing campaign are affiliates of drug cartels, or that each of the vessels had drugs on them. When pressed by lawmakers during congressional briefings, military officials have acknowledged they do not know the identities of everyone on board the boats they have destroyed.The legality of the strikes has come under intense scrutiny in Congress since the operations began in September, including particular interest in the very first strike, when the military carried out a second strike that killed two survivors of an initial attack. Multiple current and former military lawyers previously told CNN the strikes do not appear lawful.But the administration has maintained that the operation is a necessary step against drugs heading for US shores that will ultimately harm Americans.Trump announced the Oct. 14 strike in a social media post, saying “six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed” and that intelligence had confirmed the vessel was “trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known DTO route.”‘They must be held accountable’Similar to Joseph, Samaroo had communicated with his family just days before the Oct. 14 strike. Having served 15 years in prison for “participation in a homicide” in Trinidad, and released early on parole, Samaroo moved to Las Cuevas, Trinidad, and in August 2025 he went to Venezuela to work on a farm, the lawsuit says.He frequently shared photos and videos with his family of his time on the farm, “where he cared for cows and goats and made cheese.” During one video call, he introduced Joseph, a friend from home who he said he was working with in Venezuela.On Oct. 12, Samaroo sent his sister, Sallycar Korasingh, a photo in a lifejacket, telling her he had found a boat to bring him back to Trinidad and he would see her in a few days.“That call was the last time Ms. Korasingh, or anyone else in his family, heard from Mr. Samaroo,” the complaint says.In a statement issued by the ACLU, Korasingh said her brother was a “hardworking man who paid his debt to society and was just trying to get back on his feet again.”“If the US government believed Rishi had done anything wrong, it should have arrested, charged, and detained him,” she said. “Not murdered him. They must be held accountable.”Members of the administration have repeatedly insisted that those killed in the strikes are “narcoterrorists” — in November, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media that “every trafficker killed is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.”The lawsuit, however, says neither Joseph nor Samaroo were “members of, or affiliated with, drug cartels.”“The Trinidadian government has publicly stated that ‘the government has no information linking Joseph or Samaroo to illegal activities,’ and that it had ‘no information of the victims of US strikes being in possession of illegal drugs, guns, or small arms,’” the complaint says.The complaint calls into question one of the primary claims made by Trump administration officials throughout the course of the campaign, that the boats — and the drugs allegedly aboard them — were headed for the U.S. and required urgent military action. The lawsuit says, however, that Joseph and Samaroo were headed home to Trinidad on the vessel targeted by the US.In the wake of the first strike in September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially said that boat was headed toward Trinidad or elsewhere in the Caribbean.Last year, the Trump administration justified the operation with a classified legal opinion produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The opinion argues that the president is allowed to authorize deadly force against a broad range of cartels because they pose an imminent threat to Americans.The opinion appears to justify an open-ended war against a secret list of groups, legal experts have said, giving the president power to designate drug traffickers as enemy combatants and have them killed without legal review. Historically, those involved in drug trafficking were considered criminals with due process rights, with the Coast Guard interdicting drug-trafficking vessels and arresting smugglers.The lawsuit, however, offers the first opportunity for those who believe the strikes amount to extrajudicial killings to present their case before a judge.“Whatever that secret memorandum states, it cannot render the patently illegal killings lawful,” the court filing says.
As the U.S. military began launching strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean last year, a young Trinidadian man who was in Venezuela for work was searching for a way home, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.
Chad Joseph, 26, had been in Venezuela for months fishing and doing farm work when he began looking for a boat to hitch a ride back to Las Cuevas in Trinidad and Tobago, where his wife and three children lived. But as the U.S. began targeting vessels officials said were carrying drugs destined for American streets, Joseph “became increasingly fearful” of making the journey, court documents say. The concerns became so real that in early September, his wife recalled, he called to assure her that he had not been aboard a vessel just hit by the U.S., pledging to be home soon.
The last call home was on Oct. 12, when Joseph told his wife he’d found a boat to bring him back to Trinidad, and he would be seeing her in a matter of days, according to court documents. Two days later, however, on Oct. 14, the U.S. struck another target — a boat Joseph’s family believes he was in.
“Mr. Joseph’s wife repeatedly called Mr. Joseph’s cellphone, but the line was dead,” a lawsuit filed Tuesday against the U.S. government says. “The line remains dead to this day.”
Joseph’s family, and the family of another Trinidadian man, 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo, who had been working with Joseph in Venezuela and who is also believed to have been on the boat, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government on Tuesday for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing of the two men. The complaint calls the strikes “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful,” and says they have carried out “premeditated and intentional killings” with no legal justification.
CNN asked the Justice Department for comment but did not immediately receive a response before publication. The Defense Department declined to comment on ongoing litigation.
The complaint says that, despite claims by President Donald Trump and other administration officials that all the men killed on board were “narcoterrorists,” neither Joseph nor Samaroo had any affiliation to drug cartels.
The lawsuit marks the first opportunity for a judge to rule on the legality of the strikes which are part of the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific — dubbed Operation Southern Spear — that has killed at least 117 people. The most recent strike was carried out last week in the eastern Pacific, killing two and leaving one survivor who was being searched for by the Coast Guard.
The lawsuit points specifically to the Death on the High Seas Act, which allows family members to sue over wrongful deaths on the high seas, and the Alien Tort Statute, which lets foreign nationals sue in federal courts over violations of international law.
The families are suing for compensatory and punitive damages and they are being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Jonathan Hafetz with the Seton Hall Law School.
The administration has publicly presented little evidence that those killed in the ongoing campaign are affiliates of drug cartels, or that each of the vessels had drugs on them. When pressed by lawmakers during congressional briefings, military officials have acknowledged they do not know the identities of everyone on board the boats they have destroyed.
The legality of the strikes has come under intense scrutiny in Congress since the operations began in September, including particular interest in the very first strike, when the military carried out a second strike that killed two survivors of an initial attack. Multiple current and former military lawyers previously told CNN the strikes do not appear lawful.
But the administration has maintained that the operation is a necessary step against drugs heading for US shores that will ultimately harm Americans.
Trump announced the Oct. 14 strike in a social media post, saying “six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed” and that intelligence had confirmed the vessel was “trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known DTO route.”
Similar to Joseph, Samaroo had communicated with his family just days before the Oct. 14 strike. Having served 15 years in prison for “participation in a homicide” in Trinidad, and released early on parole, Samaroo moved to Las Cuevas, Trinidad, and in August 2025 he went to Venezuela to work on a farm, the lawsuit says.
He frequently shared photos and videos with his family of his time on the farm, “where he cared for cows and goats and made cheese.” During one video call, he introduced Joseph, a friend from home who he said he was working with in Venezuela.
On Oct. 12, Samaroo sent his sister, Sallycar Korasingh, a photo in a lifejacket, telling her he had found a boat to bring him back to Trinidad and he would see her in a few days.
“That call was the last time Ms. Korasingh, or anyone else in his family, heard from Mr. Samaroo,” the complaint says.
In a statement issued by the ACLU, Korasingh said her brother was a “hardworking man who paid his debt to society and was just trying to get back on his feet again.”
“If the US government believed Rishi had done anything wrong, it should have arrested, charged, and detained him,” she said. “Not murdered him. They must be held accountable.”
Members of the administration have repeatedly insisted that those killed in the strikes are “narcoterrorists” — in November, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media that “every trafficker killed is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.”
The lawsuit, however, says neither Joseph nor Samaroo were “members of, or affiliated with, drug cartels.”
“The Trinidadian government has publicly stated that ‘the government has no information linking Joseph or Samaroo to illegal activities,’ and that it had ‘no information of the victims of US strikes being in possession of illegal drugs, guns, or small arms,’” the complaint says.
The complaint calls into question one of the primary claims made by Trump administration officials throughout the course of the campaign, that the boats — and the drugs allegedly aboard them — were headed for the U.S. and required urgent military action. The lawsuit says, however, that Joseph and Samaroo were headed home to Trinidad on the vessel targeted by the US.
In the wake of the first strike in September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially said that boat was headed toward Trinidad or elsewhere in the Caribbean.
Last year, the Trump administration justified the operation with a classified legal opinion produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The opinion argues that the president is allowed to authorize deadly force against a broad range of cartels because they pose an imminent threat to Americans.
The opinion appears to justify an open-ended war against a secret list of groups, legal experts have said, giving the president power to designate drug traffickers as enemy combatants and have them killed without legal review. Historically, those involved in drug trafficking were considered criminals with due process rights, with the Coast Guard interdicting drug-trafficking vessels and arresting smugglers.
The lawsuit, however, offers the first opportunity for those who believe the strikes amount to extrajudicial killings to present their case before a judge.
“Whatever that secret memorandum states, it cannot render the patently illegal killings lawful,” the court filing says.
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A man watches two crude oil tankers remaining anchored on Lake Maracaibo, near Maracaibo, Zulia state, Venezuela on December 17, 2025. US President Donald Trump ordered on December 16, 2025, a “total and complete blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers Venezuela has been using to bypass a six-year-old US oil embargo. (Photo by Alejandro Paredes / AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Despite the daily hour-long blackouts and gasoline rationing in Cuba, the island’s government sold most the subsidized oil it received from Venezuela last year, a senior U.S. government official told the Miami Herald.
Venezuela provided Cuba with about 70,000 barrels per day of crude oil and refined products worth as much as $1.3 billion from approximately late 2024 through late 2025, the official said, citing information from a previously undisclosed analysis by the U.S. government.
Cuba then sent about 40,000 barrels each day — about 60% — to Asia for resale, the official said.
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum is under increasing pressure over oil shipments to Cuba, which she said involve both paid contracts and humanitarian donations.
The reselling of the oil while the Cuban population endures daily electricity cuts is “further proof that the illegitimate Cuban regime only prioritizes enriching itself all while the Cuban people suffer the consequences of their corrupt nature and incompetence,” a State Department official told the Miami Herald.
“Everyday Cubans deserve the truth as to why the regime hides billions in overseas bank accounts instead of investing in electricity, infrastructure, health, and the daily needs of its people,” the State Department official said.
Previously, a Herald investigation based on leaked secret accounting documents revealed that GAESA, a Cuban military conglomerate, reported about $18 billion in current assets, of which $14.5 billion were deposited in unknown bank accounts as of March 2024.
Experts long suspected that Cuba was reselling some of the oil from Venezuela for hard currency. In December, U.S. forces off the Venezuelan coast seized a shadow fleet tanker, the Skipper, that had transferred a portion of oil cargo to a smaller tanker bound for Cuba and continued its route to Asia, likely to China.
The 70,000 barrels figure is more than double what Reuters and other experts estimated the Venezuelan government was sending to Cuba.
Based on public tanker tracking data, Jorge Piñón, a senior research fellow at the Energy Center at the University of Texas who closely tracks oil shipments to Cuba, estimated that Venezuela exported an average of 30,000 barrels of oil per day to the island during 2025, filling about 50% of Cuba’s oil deficit. Reuters also reported a similar figure, 27,000 barrels per day, based on PDVSA data.
Much of the sanctioned vessels transporting oil from Venezuela to Cuba are part of the so-called “dark fleet” that turn off transponders and spoof location signals to avoid being detected. It is also possible that some of the oil destined to Cuba was not recorded on PDVSA records.
Since the 2000s, Cuba has received subsidized oil from Venezuela thanks to an agreement between Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, and continued under Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan strongman who was captured in a U.S. military raid earlier this month.
In exchange for the oil, Cuba provided Venezuela with doctors. It also helped Chavez and Maduro hold on to power by infiltrating several Cuban advisers into the Venezuelan army and security agencies and providing software and telecommunications services to the Venezuelan police and several other government agencies and companies, including the state oil company PDVSA. Albet, a Cuban company linked to Cuba’s University of Information Sciences, was involved in the creation of the system that issues the IDs Venezuelans need to vote, Venezuelan investigative outlet Armando Info reported at the time.
The Cuban government confirmed that Cuban officers were providing personal security to Maduro on the day the U.S. special operations Delta Forces raided Fort Tiuna in Caracas and apprehended the couple. Thirty-two died, according to Cuban authorities. Cuban state media also reported the return of additional officers who were injured during the raid but did not say how many.
The relationship amounted to colonization, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said soon after the military operation to capture Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.
That alliance seems to have been upended after President Donald Trump said Cuba won’t be receiving more oil from the South American nation. The Trump administration has also pressed the Venezuelan interim government led by Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, to cut ties with U.S. adversaries, including Cuba.
The administration is also looking at how to exert further pressure on Cuba, which is going through its worst economic crisis in many decades, to hasten regime change. Among the options being considered is a complete naval blockade to stop oil shipments to Cuba, Politico reported.
Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel said on X that in a phone call last week with Rodriguez — the first publicly disclosed since Maduro’s ouster — he “expressed our support and solidarity with the homeland of Bolívar and Chávez, its people, and the Bolivarian government; as well as our decision to continue strengthening our historical relations of brotherhood and cooperation.”
He did not mention the oil shipments nor the fate of the thousands of doctors and Cuban “collaborators” in the South American country, two issues likely high on the call’s agenda.
Rodriguez did not provide details of what was discussed other than thanking Díaz-Canel for a call that she said “strengthens our self-esteem as Venezuelans, and it encourages us to continue together in this process, which is unavoidable and inevitable: the unity of our peoples.”
The halt of oil shipments from Venezuela has already caused an islandwide gasoline shortage and daily blackouts that in places like Perico, Matanzas have lasted up to 32 hours, Cubans in a WhatsApp group sharing their hours without electricity said.
Cuba’s electricity company said that nine units inside the island’s power plants are out of service or receiving maintenance and that the country’s distributed generation of power, through small-scale units connected to the grid, was null due to the lack of diesel. Cubans reported widespread blackouts lasting several hours during the weekend, including in Havana. On Monday, over 60% of the island was expected to be in the dark at peak demand at night.
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Nora Gámez Torres
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Susie Wiles, left, the White House chief of staff in the Trump administration, may be a key witness for the defense in the upcoming trial in Miami of ex-GOP congressman David Rivera. Rivera, who represented a district in Miami-Dade, is accused of being an unregistered agent for Venezuela. When Wiles was a lobbyist, she represented a Venezuelan media company trying to expand into the U.S. market.
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Soon after Susie Wiles ran Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign in Florida, she moved to Washington to join Brian Ballard’s lobbying firm, which was mainly known for its political clout and connections to Florida’s GOP governors.
With her ties to Trump, Wiles brought an instant cachet to Ballard Partners. Among the firm’s new stable of D.C. clients was an improbable, though wealthy, Venezuelan businessman, Raul Gorrin, who was close to President Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, the leader of Venezuela’s socialist revolution.
Gorrin, a lawyer who owned a TV station in Caracas, retained Ballard’s firm in June 2017 to help him expand Globovision as a Spanish-speaking television affiliate in the United States — a challenge given that the city of Miami had declared him persona non grata because of his ties to Maduro. The Federal Communications Commission also has strict limits on foreign ownership of U.S. TV and radio stations.
Gorrin was also hoping to gain access to the new Trump administration, which was threatening economic sanctions against the Maduro regime and Venezuela’s oil industry.
Wiles, whom Trump picked as his White House chief of staff after he won a second presidential term in 2024, may soon have to face questions about her and her former lobbying firm’s relationship with Gorrin. An upcoming federal trial in Miami focuses on criminal charges against former Miami-Dade Republican Congressman David Rivera and political consultant Esther Nuhfer, who are accused of secretly lobbying for the Venezuelan government in 2017 and 2018. Wiles could not be reached for comment this week.
The defense team’s effort to seek the testimony of Wiles, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Florida’s former U.S. senator, has heightened the stakes of the high-profile case, which is headed for trial a few months after Trump sent the U.S. military to Venezuela in early January to seize Maduro. He and his wife, Cilia Flores, are being held at a federal lockup on drug-trafficking charges in New York.
Lawyers for Rivera and Nuhfer are seeking Wiles’ testimony at the trial starting in mid-March. Rivera and Nuhfer are accused of being unregistered foreign agents for the Venezuelan government. They’re also accused of trying to “normalize” relations between the Maduro regime and the United States while Rivera’s consulting firm landed a head-turning $50-million lobbying contract with the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.
The two defendants have strongly denied the allegations, and hope to undercut the government’s case by showing they were not doing Maduro’s bidding but rather were attempting to get him removed from power. They also want to show that Wiles’ former lobbying firm was attempting to lobby Trump, on behalf of Gorrin, to bring about a regime change in Venezuela.
The lead federal prosecutor, Harold Schimkat, said at a Miami federal court hearing last week that the government will try to quash Wiles’ subpoena, saying: “We don’t see her connection to this case at all.”
But defense attorneys for Rivera and Nuhfer wrote a letter to the White House seeking Wiles as a witness, saying they want to question the former Ballard lobbyist about her “extensive communications” regarding the firm’s $50,000-a-month representation of Gorrin in 2017 and 2018.
The lawyers plan to question her and other Ballard lobbyists about their work to expand Gorrin’s Venezuelan TV station onto AT&T and Comcast broadcast platforms in the United States. But they also want to ask her about what they view as the Ballard firm’s discreet effort to help Gorrin gain access to Trump and other high-ranking officials to broker a regime change in Venezuela — a critical message that they say would help Rivera and Nuhfer’s defense.
The lawyers plan to zero in on a Ballard-drafted letter obtained by the Miami Herald that underscored Gorrin’s goal to ease out Maduro as Venezuela’s president and replace him with an opposition leader aligned with the U.S. government. Their bold bid to subpoena Wiles also parallels their effort to seek similar testimony from Rubio, who as Florida’s senator privately met with Rivera, Nuhfer and Gorrin at a hotel in Washington in 2017.
“I happen to know that my government wants a way out, a way to save their skins and fortunes,” says the June 24, 2017, draft letter, which Gorrin had hoped to deliver to Trump at a presidential victory event in Washington four days later. “The opposition, on the other hand, wants a way in but is not unified in how to achieve its goals.
“The domestic violence and poverty and failure of our economic infrastructure is killing my beautiful country,” the letter, signed by Gorrin, goes on to say. “Please tell me who I can work with in your administration to bring about the change we desperately need.”
Gorrin had wanted to deliver the letter to the president at a Trump victory event at the Trump International Hotel on June 28, 2017, but was unable to do so because of restrictions imposed by the Secret Service. While he attended the event, Gorrin never met Trump.
Later that year, el Nuevo Herald reported that Gorrin met then-Vice President Mike Pence at an event in Doral where he gave a speech to Venezuelan supporters. Brian Ballard set up the meeting between Gorrin and Pence after his lobbying firm retained Gorrin as a client in June 2017, according to lawyers for Rivera and Nuhfer.
At the time, Ballard Partners denied any knowledge of Gorrín’s efforts to influence the Trump administration’s approach to Venezuela or shape a transition of power, el Nuevo Herald reported.
“We’re trying to serve Globovision’s needs in U.S. markets and in various other regulatory things that come up,” Brian Ballard, the firm’s founder and a former lobbyist for Trump’s Florida business dealings, said back then.
Ballard, who authorized taking on Gorrin as a client, is expected to be called as a witness at the trial of Rivera and Nuhfer. He declined an interview request from the Herald.
In a statement issued this week by his lobbying firm’s lawyer, Curt Miner, Brian Ballard stressed that it “had no involvement in Mr. Rivera’s consulting contract with PDVSA,” Venezuela’s national oil company. The state-owned company’s U.S. subsidiary, PDV USA, hired Rivera’s consulting company in March 2017.
“Ballard Partners’ work for Globovision involved Globovision’s efforts to expand its TV network into the U.S. market,” Ballard said in the statement to the Herald. “We fully complied with all legal and regulatory requirements in our work for Globovision. Ballard Partners, if needed, stands ready to be a witness at the trial.”
Technically, Ballard Partners registered as a lobbyist for Gorrin’s company, Globovision, not the businessman himself. But the Washington lobbying firm did not have to register with the government as a foreign agent because of an exemption for representing a nonpolitical, commercial client.
Trump’s presidency has been good for Ballard’s business. The Tallahassee-based firm reported $88.3 million in federal lobbying revenue in 2025. Ballard, which quadrupled its revenue over 2024 and now ranks as the top lobbying firm in Washington, also recently announced an expansion of its consulting services focusing on Venezuela, Latin America, Mexico, Canada and Greenland — in the aftermath of Maduro’s ouster as president.
Ballard’s statement to the Herald, however, did not address his lobbying firm’s draft letter for Gorrin. The letter begins with Gorrin complimenting Trump about his “patriotism” and agenda “to make America great again,” saying he has “no doubt” that the president “will succeed.”
“I too am a businessman from Venezuela and love my country,” the letter said. “I want for my country exactly what you are doing for America. I want to make Venezuela great again. We need change and dialogue and peace and progress and democracy.”
“I believe in my heart and soul that if you could direct me to someone in your administration to work with, I will devote every waking minute to a successful resolution of the crisis in Venezuela,” the letter continued. “Like you, I am a businessman who also understands how to negotiate through complicated problems.”
The draft letter for Gorrin was a project handled by another partner in Ballard’s lobbying firm, Sylvester Lukis, according to emails between Lukis and others, including a Miami businessman, Hugo Perera, who also communicated with Gorrin about the letter.
It is unclear if Wiles knew about the draft letter. Other emails show that she was focused on promoting Gorrin’s TV station, Globovision, and corresponded by email with one of the network’s executives as well as Gorrin, Lukis, Ballard, Perera and others, records show.
In 2017, Nuhfer introduced Rivera to Perera, who then put them together with Gorrin, who was Perera’s neighbor on exclusive Fisher Island. In turn, Gorrin helped Rivera land his $50-million contract with Venezuela’s oil subsidiary, PDV USA, known as Citgo, which is based in Houston.
Court records show that PDV USA paid Rivera $20 million over a few months in 2017 for “international strategic consulting services,” but then cut him off, saying in a 2020 lawsuit that he did not perform much work to help the company expand its refining business in the United States.
For making the introductions to Gorrin, Rivera paid Perera about $5 million, but has since had a falling out with him. Perera was not charged in the government’s case against Rivera and Nuhfer. Instead, he is cooperating as a witness against them, which has led to Rivera suing him.
Separately, as part of his PDV USA contract, Rivera also paid about $4 million each to Nuhfer and Gorrin. During this same period in 2017, Nuhfer also had a separate consulting contract with Gorrin to push the expansion of his TV station, Globovision, into the U.S. market. Gorrin paid $3.75 million to Nuhfer, Rivera and Perera, according to court records.
This was separate from the $50,000-a-month retainer Globovision had with Ballard Partners to lobby on its behalf.
“The actual reason for the payment, as Ms. Wiles’ similar and concurrent Globovision efforts can corroborate, was likewise to expand Globovision onto ATT and Comcast broadcast platforms and had nothing to do whatever with the normalization of relations for the Venezuelan government of President Maduro,” according to a Dec. 22, 2025, letter sent by lawyers for Rivera and Nuhfer to the White House seeking Wiles’ testimony at their trial.
However, according to their indictment, Rivera and Nuhfer arranged meetings with an unidentified U.S. senator in Washington — Rubio —on two occasions at a private residence and a hotel in the nation’s capital to discuss the U.S.-Venezuelan normalization plan in 2017.
Rivera told Rubio at the residence that Gorrin had persuaded Maduro to accept a deal whereby he would hold free and fair elections, the indictment says. Then, Rivera, Nuhfer and Gorrin met with Rubio at the hotel, with a Venezuelan opposition leader participating by phone, to discuss Venezuela’s issues.
But Gorrin ultimately informed Rivera and Nuhfer that Maduro “refused to agree to hold free and fair elections in Venezuela in exchange for reconciliation with the United States,” according to the indictment.
In a statement, Rivera, who served as a Miami-Dade congressman for one term from 2011 to 2013, has defended his actions by saying he was really working for the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company — not directly as a consultant for the Venezuelan government in the United States — and therefore he didn’t need to register as a foreign agent.
Rivera has also said that his work for PDVSA’s subsidiary in the United States had nothing to do with his separate lobbying efforts that aimed to remove Maduro from power and replace him with an opposition leader.
“Every leader of the Venezuelan opposition I worked with in 2017 — Julio Borges, Lilian Tintori, Henry Ramos Allup — was all done through Raul Gorrin,” Rivera told the Miami Herald. “I met them all through Gorrin.
“When Brian Ballard asked me if Gorrin would help the White House get opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez of prison, Gorrin immediately said yes and helped get Lopez released days later,” Rivera said.
Ballard did not address this or other related matters with the Herald.
Lopez was released from a Venezuelan military prison to house arrest in July 2017, after serving over three years of a nearly 14-year sentence for leading anti-government protests against Maduro. Lopez fled to Spain in 2020.
Ultimately, Gorrin’s efforts on multiple lobbying fronts failed to pan out in the United States. Instead, the first Trump administration imposed sanctions on the Maduro government, Venezuela’s oil industry, government officials and others, including Gorrin.
Gorrin, who is still in Venezuela, was charged in 2018 and again in 2024 with foreign corruption and money laundering in Miami federal court. Ballard stopped representing Gorrin in August 2018, citing a Miami Herald story that had revealed Gorrin was under criminal investigation.
In late 2024, Rivera was charged separately in Washington, with being an unregistered agent for Gorrin. He was accused of trying to lobby a Trump administration official between 2019 and 2020 on behalf of the Venezuelan businessman, whom federal authorities say paid the former congressman $5.5 million while trying to get himself removed from the government’s sanctions list.
Gorrin, who is considered a fugitive by federal prosecutors, provided the Herald with a brief statement through Rivera.
“Susie Wiles was always very professional and very capable,” Gorrin said. “President Trump is fortunate to have her by his side.”
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Jay Weaver
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BUENOS AIRES, Jan 23 (Reuters) – The families of two Argentines detained in Venezuela on Friday appealed to the Vatican to intervene, urging it to help speed the release of their loved ones as Caracas has begun freeing some detainees.
The wife of Nahuel Agustín Gallo, a national security officer arrested on Dec 8, 2024, and the wife of German Giuliani, a lawyer imprisoned since May 2025, delivered a formal petition to the Catholic Church in Buenos Aires, calling for urgent action by the Holy See.
“There are still many innocent people missing, many who need to be released,” said Alexandra Gomez, Gallo’s wife. “These piecemeal releases only wear down the families,” she added.
Gomez said her husband had been “forcibly disappeared in Venezuela for 411 days.”
In a letter seen by Reuters, addressed to Pope Leo and Cardinal Pietro Parolin, relatives appealed to “the humanitarian sensitivity and the permanent commitment of the Holy See to the defense of human dignity, freedom and fundamental rights.”
The families also demanded immediate steps to safeguard the physical and psychological well-being of the detainees.
The women were joined by relatives and friends of Venezuelan political prisoners who demonstrated outside with photographs of the detained, national flags and placards reading “They took them alive, we want them back alive” and “Political prisoners are not bargaining chips.
“We were glad they received us,” said Virginia Rivero, wife of Giuliani. “But it felt a bit lukewarm. There were things they perhaps didn’t know.”
Venezuela’s interim authorities have begun releasing political prisoners and other detainees, though many still remain behind bars amid ongoing political tension.
The wave of releases comes as Caracas seeks to ease domestic pressure and signal a possible thaw with Washington following heightened U.S.–Venezuela confrontations.
(Report by Horacio Soria and Lucila Sigal; editing by Cassandra Garrison and Nick Zieminski)
Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.
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Cuba’s ruler, Raúl Castro (front left), and the country’s handpicked president, Miguel Díaz-Canel (front right), during a tribute ceremony for 32 Cuban security officers who were protecting Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and were killed in the Jan. 3 U.S. operation to capture him.
Office of the Cuban Presidency.
Following the capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in an operation in which several Cuban security officers died protecting him, Donald Trump joined a long line of U.S. presidents who over the decades anticipated the collapse of Cuba’s communist government.
“Cuba gives protection to Venezuela, and Venezuela gives Cuba money through oil — and it’s been that way for a long time — but it doesn’t work that way anymore, so I don’t know what Cuba’s going to do,” Trump told Fox News. “I think Cuba’s going to fail. I don’t think there are alternatives for Cuba.”
Trump warned Cuban leaders to “make a deal before it’s too late.” He then said his administration was already in talks with Cuban authorities, a claim the island’s handpicked president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, promptly denied.
In Miami last week, the head of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Mike Hammer, told reporters not to pay attention to Havana’s denial, but declined to comment on any negotiations. The pressure on the Cuban government “is intensifying,” he said. “What is happening is creating an opportunity, and of course, we want to be able to have the Cuban people benefit from this opportunity.”
Can Trump succeed where others have failed?
There are several elements that make this moment distinct from other crises the Cuban leadership has weathered over the years.
On the U.S. side, there’s Trump’s unpredictability and his willingness to use military force to achieve foreign policy goals, as the raid to capture Maduro showed.
“I think that’s what the Cubans now learned, that Trump is like no president we’ve had since 1959, so everything they thought they knew is out the window,” said Chris Simmons, a former U.S. counterintelligence official who has helped identify Cuban spies operating in the United States.
“That’s got to make them very nervous,’ added Simmons, who also mentioned the role of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuba hardliner. “When you’ve got Rubio talking about they may be next, they’re going to take that very seriously. I mean, they’d be fools not to.”
Trump said that ousting the regime in Havana might take military action, though he has ruled that out for the moment.
“I don’t think we can have much more pressure other than going in and blasting the hell out of the place,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “I think that Cuba is really in a lot of trouble. But you know, people have been saying that for many years.”
At the same time, Trump’s transactional style and tendency to view international conflicts as opportunities for deal-making might help kickstart a negotiated transition — if Cuban leaders take the off-ramp.
“We are talking to Cuba, and you’ll find out pretty soon,” he said. “One of the groups I want taken care of is the people who came from Cuba who were forced out or left under duress, and they are great citizens of the United States right now.”
Cuba watchers say perhaps Trump is talking about negotiating compensation for Cuban Americans who were forced to flee the island and lost their properties after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. But many other issues could be discussed, including the repatriation of Cubans, allowing private investment and the lifting of some sanctions, said Joe García, a former Democratic member of Congress who has advocated for negotiations with Havana and the release of political prisoners.
After years of dragging its feet on reforms, the Cuban government may not have much time left to act, Hugo Cancio, a Cuban American businessman who owns an online supermarket that delivers food on the island, told the Miami Herald.
“In light of recent developments in Venezuela, Cuba today faces a clearer choice than ever: to open itself in a gradual and credible manner to economic reform, institutional modernization, and broader civic participation, with the constructive engagement of its diaspora, or to continue down a path of managed decline,” Cancio said. “The real risk is not change; the real risk is postponing it until the cost becomes irreversible.”
The Cuba Study Group, an influential Cuban-American organization that has focused on supporting the island’s private sector, also urged the Cuban government to engage in talks with the U.S.
“Today, no external power will bail the island out,” the group said in a statement. “Old formulas will not avert catastrophe. To prevent greater disaster, Cuban authorities must take steps they have never taken before,” including a wide political dialogue that includes the Cuban diaspora.
The group advised Cuban leaders to “propose a bold restructuring that advances the rule of law, democratic norms, and a market economy while preserving a social safety net. And they should make unmistakable gestures—such as unconditionally freeing political prisoners—that demonstrate genuine commitment to turning the page.”
In the past, many Cuban exiles and Cuban American hardliners have strongly opposed negotiations with the Cuban government. But this time, they are likely to back up president Trump’s efforts, largely because Rubio, a Cuban American from Miami, is the one steering U.S. policy on Cuba.
“Marco Rubio is the most trustworthy representative the exile community has had in 67 years,” said Marcel Felipe, the chairman of the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora and a Miami Dade College trustee. He said he trusted Rubio to get the best possible outcome in negotiations to push for regime change in Cuba, one that Cuban exiles could live with.
García, the former congressman, said that even though he is a Democrat and Rubio is a Republican, “Marco represents me and many Cubans who want to see change in Cuba.”
State Department officials have been reaching out to members of the Cuban American community for their input about how a transition in Cuba would look like.
“The Cuban exile community has been preparing for this for a long time,” said Felipe, who’s also the chairman of Inspire America, a pro-democracy organization. He said his organization and others have been sharing plans with U.S. officials for “day one” and the country’s reconstruction.
Trump has also commented on the role Cuban Americans will likely play in economically rebuilding Cuba.
“You have a lot of people in this country that want to go back to Cuba and help Cuba,” he said in a meeting last week with the CEOs of several oil companies to discuss investments in Venezuela. “They didn’t have anything, and they became very rich people in our country, and they want to very much go back and help Cuba. That’s something that Cuba has that a lot of other places don’t have.”
In Cuba, “a Revolution running on empty is finally out of gas,” the Cuba Study Group said.
For decades, Fidel Castro ruled Cubans with a combination of repression, propaganda and populism. Many Cubans still fear opposing the government, but ideological support has eroded, and the state can no longer meet the most basic needs of the population.
The new chapter of confrontation with the United States finds the island at its worst time economically, already on the verge of collapse.
Cuba’s GDP fell another 5% last year, after several years of recession. A botched monetary reform has triggered skyrocketing inflation. The electrical grid collapses regularly, leaving the entire country in the dark. Oil shortages and obsolete power stations constantly breaking down have made daily hours-long blackouts the new normal. Garbage covers streets in the capital, fueling mosquito-borne diseases. Old buildings in Havana frequently collapse after years of neglect.
A sociologist living on the island, Mayra Espina, estimates that more than 40% of the population lives in poverty, a figure that could actually be much higher, over 80%, according to surveys done by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, a Spain-based organization.
Unlike the times Fidel Castro maneuvered his way out of crises, Cuba’s current leadership has proved less skillful, more prone to inaction, and notoriously less popular than the late Cuban dictator. A frail Raúl Castro reappeared Thursday to pay homage to the 32 Cuban officers who died during the U.S. raid to capture Maduro. He is the country’s ultimate authority, but he is 94, and behind the scenes power struggles for succession are already likely taking place.
For the time being, Cuban leaders appeared unified and defiant in public. On Friday, Díaz-Canel rejected Trump’s deal offer.
“There is no possibility of surrender or capitulation, nor any kind of understanding based on coercion or intimidation,” he said before shouting Castro’s old slogan, “Patria o Muerte,” Fatherland or Death, during a massive protest rally in Havana organized by the government to show it has broad support.
“Cuba does not have to make any political concessions, and this will never be on the table in negotiations for an understanding between Cuba and the United States,” Díaz-Canel added.
Cuban state media has shown images of military exercises that purport to convey a sense of readiness against a U.S. military attack. The images, however, highlight the vast gulf between the United States’ advanced military armament and Cuba’s old Soviet technology.
Beyond the rhetoric, however, mid-level Cuban officials, economic advisers, academics and others who interact with foreigners share many of the population’s frustration with Díaz-Canel’s leadership and would welcome reforms, Herald sources who travel to Cuba and asked for anonymity to describe their interactions said.
“Ten years ago, you would hear Cuban officials defending Marxism. Now they tell you stuff about Díaz-Canel that makes me look around to see if anyone is listening. They are ready for change,” one of the sources said.
A conspicuous sign of the erosion of support for the Cuban socialist system: Several children and close relatives of former and current Cuban officials, as well as members of the Castro family, live abroad, including Díaz-Canel’s stepson and three grandchildren of Fidel Castro, who live in Spain.
Even Interior Minister Humberto Alfonso Roca Sánchez, who Díaz-Canel said was the one in charge of the Cubans who died protecting Maduro, has two daughters who live in the United States, according to the U.S. government outlet Martí Noticias.
Socialist policies and government repression are behind the largest cumulative exodus in Cuban history. An estimated 2.5 million Cubans left the country between 2021 and 2024, almost a quarter of the island’s population, according to estimates by Juan C. Albizu-Campos, a Cuban economist and demographer, at a conference in Miami of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy in October.
The discontent extends even among Interior Ministry officers who guard Cuban prisons, says José Daniel Ferrer, a former political prisoner and prominent dissident who now lives in exile in Miami. He said some of the guards would mention to him privately they face the same scarcities as the population.
Despite new harsh laws to punish dissent, many Cubans have voiced criticism of the government in public, on social media and in comments left on Cuban state news websites. Asked by a reporter from Cubanet, a Miami-based outlet, what would happen if U.S. forces captured Díaz-Canel, some residents in Havana declined to answer, but others were surprisingly candid.
“How happy that would make me. Get them all the f–k out of here, to see if we can be happy, to see if we can see the fruit of our work,” a man answered.
However different Cuba’s currently economic and political scenario is, any regime change efforts by the Trump administration will face an old dilemma, experts say: Calibrating how much pressure to put on a country that is just 90 miles from the United States and has a sizable amount of its population and their descendants living in South Florida.
Rubio has long been laser-focused on targeting the Cuban military, and the administration is likely to ratchet up pressure on GAESA, the armed forces’ conglomerate that controls at least 40% of the country’s economy. GAESA had been redirecting the country’s foreign revenue into hotels and had $18 billion stashed away last year, while the population faces deprivation, the Herald previously reported.
At the same time, Rubio has spoken carefully, telling the Cuban government it has a choice to make and stressing the administration has no interest in a destabilized Cuba.
“If you put too much pressure on Cuba and really turn the screws on it, you’ve got the makings of a Spanish-speaking Haiti,” said John Kavulich, a longtime Cuba watcher and president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council that tracks trade with Cuba. He believes Rubio will push back against demands by some Cuban American lawmakers to exert maximum economic pressure, “because he’s going to be thinking about the day after, what does this look like?”
The Trump administration has significant leverage, as economists predict the end of Venezuelan oil subsidies could have devastating consequences for the island.
Jorge Piñón, a senior research fellow at the Energy Center at the University of Texas who closely tracks oil shipments to the island, said he did not believe Mexico or Russia will step up to fill the gap left by the halt of Venezuelan oil, which he said covered around 50% of Cuba’s oil import needs.
Still, it is uncertain whether economic pressure alone would make Cuba “fail” on its own, as Trump has predicted.
“It’s not failing on its own; its failure being hastened,” said Kavulich. “But we have seen this movie before. Does this mean that the government of Cuba will collapse? I think not.”
Kavulich believes Cuban leaders will try to make concessions to the Trump administration in order to survive, not unlike what the remaining members of the Maduro regime are currently doing in Venezuela.
“They will start looking in the survival manual and say, okay, what’s the first thing we can do?,” he said. “ We can release political prisoners. What’s the second thing we can do? We can further open up the economy. That’s their playbook. It’s not going to be, ‘we’re going to hold free and fair elections,’ but it’s going to be, ‘what can we do to forestall doing stuff that we really don’t want to do?’”
“The unknown is how much pressure the Trump administration wants to exert,” Kavulich said.
Central to the Trump administration’s efforts to negotiate a future transition with Havana, experts say, is finding Cuba’s equivalent to Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice-president who is now leading an interim government and has so far conceded to key Trump demands.
Power in Cuba is more fragmented than under Fidel Castro’s rule. His brother, Raul, is not in charge of day-to-day decisions. His handpicked successor, Díaz-Canel, is seen as a figurehead atop a civilian government that has little real power, even if he is officially the first secretary of the Communist Party. Few believe he could be the lead negotiator with the Americans.
Real power lies with the military. The generals have seats at the National Assembly, the Party, and the government’s top decision-making bodies. The country’s prime Minister Manuel Marrero, also comes from the military.
Members of the Castro family remain influential. That includes Raúl Castro’s son, Col. Alejandro Castro Espín, who negotiated with U.S. officials during the Obama administration, and grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, who is in charge of Raúl’s personal security and is involved in GAESA’s obscure finances. In less than two years, another family member, Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, a grandnephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro, has been climbing the ladder to become minister of foreign trade and investment and vice prime minister.
Would any of these players be enticed to negotiate to avoid ending like the Venezuelan strongman?
“Part of the message that I think the administration is hoping for is, look what happened to Maduro,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “He was given options to leave peacefully. He wouldn’t have been in an orange jumpsuit now, but he is because he didn’t take the offer to go to Turkey or Qatar. And that’s a lot of leverage. But given the ideological factor in Cuba, I’m a little bit skeptical that they would take the off-ramp. I think many of them would go down with the ship rather than take a negotiated exile”.
Pinpointing precisely who might be Cuba’s reformer who would be willing to work with the United States to dismantle the communist system and rebuild the country has proved elusive.
“I don’t think that there’s really an analogy here with Venezuela,” Berg said. “Whether you agree with this theory or not, we have identified Delcy Rodríguez as the one who could take over and implement pragmatic policies that are pro U.S. What is the analogue in Cuba’s case?”
The answer to that question right now might be unsavory for Rubio and Cuban exiles, said Ric Herrero, the executive director of the Cuba Study Group.
“The only person that’s a Delcy-type in Cuba now is Raúl Castro,” he said. “Because what is Delcy? Delcy is someone from within, a senior official. She was a vice president, but who has significant clout within the party, within the bureaucracy and with the military. Someone who can keep all of those sectors in line and all the different factions playing ball.”
“Who can achieve that in Cuba without having the last name Castro?” he asked.
Felipe said it would be “extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the Cuban exile community to accept a transition model that involves someone whose last name is Castro.”
Many longtime Cuban activists who have fiercely opposed negotiations with the regime in Havana might end up disappointed if what the administration is doing in Venezuela serves as an example of how it might operate with Cuba. The Helms-Burton Act Congress passed in 1996 forbids recognizing a transitional government led by Raúl Castro but doesn’t say anything about other members of his family.
Cuban opposition members would not favor a negotiation with Raúl Castro or another member of the Castro family, said Ferrer the former political prisoner.
“But if we are pragmatic and one of them negotiates, and Trump and Rubio manage to get the transition to democracy moving as quickly as possible, then that’s better than continuing in the situation we’re in, in complete stagnation, with the people still suffering from hunger, hardship, and extreme poverty, and above all, remaining without rights, without freedom, and constantly repressed, with the prisons full of political prisoners,” Ferrer said.
“Ideally, this process would be completed as soon as possible, and the Castros would disappear from power because of all the harm they have done to Cuba,” he added.
Part of the reason the regime in Havana has been able to survive so long is that, unlike Venezuela, where several opposition parties are still legal, Fidel Castro abolished all opposition parties and dissidents like Ferrer are routinely sent to prison or exile.
Even so, the Trump administration decided to work with Rodriguez instead of María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, to manage a transition, Ferrer noted.
“We are insisting with our American friends that the Cuban opposition, both the internal opposition and the organized exile community that has been fighting for years for a transition to democracy in Cuba, cannot be ignored at any time,” Ferrer said. “We must be an active part of any process. We cannot be marginalized.”
Ultimately, there is one reality that has not changed in several decades in Cuba: the regime in Havana still keeps much of its capacity for repression, has all the guns, and tens of thousands of security and military personnel to squash dissent and instill fear. Protesting often lands people in prison.
On Friday, Cuban independent journalist José Gabriel Barrenechea Chávez was sentenced to six years in prison for participating in a peaceful protest banging pots during a blackout in Villa Clara, a province in central Cuba.
But as the economy collapses and discontent grows among Cubans, increasing U.S. pressure and the regime’s inability to address the population’s pressing needs may well trigger another chapter of mass protests, similar to those in July 2021, Ferrer said.
The regime in Havana, he bet, “won’t make it to the end of the year.”
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Nora Gámez Torres
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As Congress returns from recess this week, Sacramento Congressman Ami Bera says Republican lawmakers have privately expressed growing concern over President Donald Trump’s recent decisions.“I think they are very worried about what they’re seeing coming out of the President,” Bera said. “Even the actions with Venezuela — they weren’t consulted about any of this.”Bera, a Democrat who serves on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, returned Sunday from South America, where he met with Peru’s foreign minister. He said it was too dangerous for him to travel to Venezuela, describing the country as fragile following U.S. military action that led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro.“They’re happy Maduro is gone,” Bera said of Peruvian officials. “They want to see a stable Venezuela, but they’re cautious because you still have the Maduro regime in place, and a lot could go wrong.”He added that while Peru welcomes Maduro’s removal, leaders there are concerned that ongoing instability could lead to increased migration into neighboring countries.Back in Washington, Congress faces a potential government shutdown at the end of the month. Bera said lawmakers must address unresolved issues, including healthcare subsidies and immigration policy, after the action in Minneapolis. He also pointed to President Trump’s recent remarks about taking control of Greenland, which Trump has said is necessary for national security.“President Trump is not listening to anyone,” Bera said. “Now he’s talking about invading Greenland, and our closest allies in Europe are pissed off with us. He’s alienating everyone. I hope when I get back there tomorrow, Republicans will say enough is enough — let’s go around the president and get some of this stuff done.”Despite the challenges, Bera said he remains optimistic that a shutdown can be avoided.“I do not think the government will shut down because we saw how it hurt Americans,” he said. “We should negotiate. There’s going to be give and take. As Democrats, we’re not going to get everything we want. That’s how we’ve passed the appropriations bills so far, and I hope we get it done this week.”Bera also highlighted bipartisan support for extending health care subsidies, noting that 17 Republicans joined Democrats to back the measure, despite opposition from President Trump.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
As Congress returns from recess this week, Sacramento Congressman Ami Bera says Republican lawmakers have privately expressed growing concern over President Donald Trump’s recent decisions.
“I think they are very worried about what they’re seeing coming out of the President,” Bera said. “Even the actions with Venezuela — they weren’t consulted about any of this.”
Bera, a Democrat who serves on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, returned Sunday from South America, where he met with Peru’s foreign minister. He said it was too dangerous for him to travel to Venezuela, describing the country as fragile following U.S. military action that led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro.
“They’re happy Maduro is gone,” Bera said of Peruvian officials. “They want to see a stable Venezuela, but they’re cautious because you still have the Maduro regime in place, and a lot could go wrong.”
He added that while Peru welcomes Maduro’s removal, leaders there are concerned that ongoing instability could lead to increased migration into neighboring countries.
Back in Washington, Congress faces a potential government shutdown at the end of the month. Bera said lawmakers must address unresolved issues, including healthcare subsidies and immigration policy, after the action in Minneapolis. He also pointed to President Trump’s recent remarks about taking control of Greenland, which Trump has said is necessary for national security.
“President Trump is not listening to anyone,” Bera said. “Now he’s talking about invading Greenland, and our closest allies in Europe are pissed off with us. He’s alienating everyone. I hope when I get back there tomorrow, Republicans will say enough is enough — let’s go around the president and get some of this stuff done.”
Despite the challenges, Bera said he remains optimistic that a shutdown can be avoided.
“I do not think the government will shut down because we saw how it hurt Americans,” he said. “We should negotiate. There’s going to be give and take. As Democrats, we’re not going to get everything we want. That’s how we’ve passed the appropriations bills so far, and I hope we get it done this week.”
Bera also highlighted bipartisan support for extending health care subsidies, noting that 17 Republicans joined Democrats to back the measure, despite opposition from President Trump.
See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
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As the first explosions rocked his military base in Caracas, 18-year-old Saul Pereira Martinez sent his mother a simple message: “I love you. It has begun.”
It was the night of January 3, and U.S. forces were invading Venezuela to seize the country’s then-president, Nicolas Maduro, on the orders of President Donald Trump.
Pereira had finished his shift on guard duty at Fort Tiuna, where Maduro was sheltered that night. Nonetheless, he would not survive the assault.
Natividad Martinez, his mother, visited on Sunday the cemetery where her son’s remains are buried, recalling the night it happened, and still in shock.
The last time she spoke to Saul was at 2:00 am. He repeated that he loved her, and told her to take care of his two brothers, aged two and nine.
Pedro MATTEY /AFP via Getty Images
Mr. Trump has repeatedly touted the success of the stunning operation to seize Maduro, boasting that there were no casualties.
But at least 83 people were killed in the operation, including 47 Venezuelan soldiers and 32 Cuban security personnel, according to the defense ministry in Caracas.
“You can’t come to my country and kill people like that,” said Martinez. “Because (they say) ‘it was a clean operation.’ It wasn’t clean. Do you know how many people died?”
As the attack began, 38-year-old Martinez heard explosions and began to scream, worried for the safety of her son, her husband said.
After she got off the phone with him, she fell to the ground screaming his name, he said.
“I told her to stay calm, we don’t know what’s going on,” said Saul’s stepfather, who asked not to be identified because he works as a police officer and government security official.
He believes that Saul was killed because his unit was spending the night within the security perimeter around Maduro, which made them a target for U.S. forces.
On Sunday, Saul’s parents were joined by his girlfriend and friends at the cemetery in southern Caracas.
Saul had just completed his initial training with the Honor Guard in December and was studying at the military academy.
They brought flowers, and, to the rhythm of old salsa music, the family cried, recalled anecdotes, and toasted in honor of the young soldier whom they remember as “a brave man.”
Saul entered the military following in the footsteps of a childhood friend, who was at La Carlota air base during the U.S. attack and was wounded in the leg.
His mother had applauded the decision, having earlier worried about the trajectory her son’s life was on.
Saul, says Natividad, went from “partying, going here and there, doing nothing at home” to studying, cleaning the house during his visits, and acquiring discipline.
Despite the massive U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean, Mr. Trump’s threats against Maduro, Martinez’s family did not expect things to get this bad.
“The president didn’t always stay in the same place,” his stepfather explained, and the government maneuvered to mislead even the state security forces about Maduro’s whereabouts.
U.S. forces found Maduro because of inside informers, the stepfather said.
“(The death of) my son was a collateral effect of that infiltration,” he said.
Earlier this month, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said Maduro had no warning the U.S. was closing in until moments before American forces arrived.
“Nicolás Maduro got to meet some great Americans wearing night vision goggles three nights ago,” Hegseth said. “He didn’t know they were coming until three minutes before they arrived. In fact, his wife said, ‘I think I hear aircraft outside.’ They didn’t know. You know why? Because every single part of that chain did their job.”
Hours after the attack, Natividad brought food for Saul to Fort Tiuna, as per their weekly schedule.
She found only silence.
Hours later, when the names of the fallen began to circulate, she went to the battalion and stood there, demanding answers.
“And they had to tell me,” she said, staring at the cement tomb where mourners had spelled out Saul’s name in yellow, blue, and white flower petals.
Her son, like other soldiers, was honored by the government, which promoted him posthumously.
Natividad said that some seemed not to mourn these deaths because of the political polarization that has divided the nation under Maduro’s rule, and that of Hugo Chavez before him.
“Those who died are also human beings. They are all Venezuelans. On one side or the other, they are all human beings, they all have people who mourn them,” she said.
Shaken but still stoic, Natividad said she felt proud of her son.
“He died for his country,” she said. “Regardless of what they say, to me, my son was a patriot, and that’s what matters to me.”
Meanwhile, U.S. strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific have killed more than 100 people on boats that Washington claims were ferrying drugs from Venezuela. Legal experts and lawmakers critical of the strikes have argued that the military action targeting the suspected drug smuggling boats are legally dubious.
Last month, the family of a Colombian man who was killed in a U.S. military strike on a boat in the Caribbean lodged a complaint against the United States with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
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