Venezuela Is the Appetizer. Cuba Is the Main Course

Venezuela is the appetizer. Cuba is the main course. This is not a metaphor meant to provoke, but a description of how American power has long operated in the Western Hemisphere. What is unfolding in Venezuela is not an endpoint, nor merely a response to dictatorship or collapse. It is a preliminary move in a much older strategic story, one in which Cuba has always been the central obsession, the unresolved problem around which U.S. policy in the region continues to orbit.

To understand the significance of Venezuela’s fate, one must first grasp the peculiar place Cuba occupies in American political memory. Long before the Cold War, Washington treated the island less as a sovereign neighbor than as a strategic possession. Cuba was integrated into the logic of American hemispheric dominance, a logic that assumed U.S. primacy as natural and resistance as illegitimate. The Cuban Revolution shattered that assumption. When Fidel Castro aligned the island with the Soviet Union, Cuba ceased to be merely a geopolitical concern. It became something closer to an affront, proof that defiance could survive just ninety miles from Florida.

That affront was never resolved. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed Cuba’s patron but not America’s fixation. The embargo remained. Diplomatic isolation continued. Generations passed, yet the policy endured, disconnected from results and insulated from reassessment. No other country has occupied such a singular place in U.S. foreign policy for so long with so little to show for it. This persistence reveals that Cuba is not treated as a normal policy problem, but as unfinished business, an ideological remainder of the Cold War that refuses to disappear.

Venezuela enters this story not as an isolated crisis, but as a supporting character. Under Hugo Chávez and later Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela became Cuba’s most important external lifeline. Subsidized oil sustained the Cuban economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while political alignment strengthened Havana’s regional influence. Cuban advisers embedded themselves deeply within Venezuelan institutions, particularly in intelligence and security. Over time, Washington came to view the two regimes as inseparable: Venezuela as the resource base, Cuba as the nerve center.

Seen this way, Venezuela’s collapse was never just about Venezuela. It became an opportunity to weaken Cuba indirectly by severing its most critical external support. Venezuela is the appetizer because it is the most vulnerable target, oil-rich but hollowed out, diplomatically isolated, and lacking the symbolic protections that have long shielded Cuba from direct confrontation. Removing Maduro was not the culmination of a strategy; it was the opening course.

This strategy is inseparable from domestic American politics, especially the role of Cuban Americans in Miami. Over decades, exile communities transformed loss and displacement into political power. Miami became a hub of anti-Castro activism, shaping national policy far beyond its size. Opposition to engagement hardened into a political identity, one that fused anti-communism, moral absolutism, and electoral leverage. Candidates learned quickly that moderation in Cuba carried political risk, while hardline positions were rewarded.

Although Cuban American politics have diversified over time, the institutional legacy of exile politics remains deeply embedded. Advocacy networks, donors, and media ecosystems continue to frame Cuba as a moral exception, a place where compromise is betrayal and pressure is the only acceptable response. This framing has insulated Cuba policy from the pragmatism applied elsewhere, freezing it in a moral register that resists strategic adaptation.

Marco Rubio is the most visible embodiment of this legacy. His political rise reflects the normalization of exile politics within the American state itself. Rubio does not merely advocate a hardline policy toward Cuba; he personifies it. His worldview collapses distinctions between regimes, presenting Cuba, Venezuela, and other leftist governments as interchangeable expressions of the same threat. In this narrative, Havana is not simply another authoritarian state, but the organizing force behind regional instability.

As secretary of state, Rubio’s influence extends far beyond rhetoric. His framing of Venezuela as effectively controlled by Cuban intelligence recasts intervention as liberation rather than interference. Action against Caracas becomes morally urgent not only for Venezuelans but as a necessary blow against Cuban power. This logic turns Venezuela into a means rather than an end, a battlefield chosen not for its own sake, but for what it enables next.

What is striking is how familiar this logic is. Despite profound changes in the global order, Cuba continues to occupy an outsized place in American strategic thinking. While Washington pivots toward Asia and recalibrates its stance toward adversaries elsewhere, Cuba remains frozen in time, treated as if history stopped in 1962. The Caribbean, in this sense, remains America’s unresolved Cold War theater.

Venezuela’s downfall risks reinforcing this stagnation. Instead of prompting reflection, it may be read as validation, a proof that pressure works if applied decisively enough. Yet history suggests otherwise. Decades of isolation failed to dislodge the Cuban regime, while exacting a heavy toll on ordinary people and entrenching authoritarian narratives of siege and resistance. There is little reason to believe that doubling down will produce a different outcome now.

The greater danger lies not only in the human cost but also in intellectual inertia. A foreign policy driven by obsession loses the ability to distinguish between strategy and symbolism. It mistakes persistence for principle and repetition for resolve. Venezuela’s tragedy becomes instrumentalized, its collapse folded into a story that was written long before Maduro came to power.

Cuba endures as the main course because it represents something unresolved in American political identity: the refusal to accept limits, the discomfort with defiance that cannot be crushed or co-opted. It is the last visible reminder in the hemisphere that American power is not absolute. Venezuela’s fate, as grim as it is, serves to reopen that wound rather than heal it.

If Venezuela is the appetizer, it is because it prepares the ground, strategically, rhetorically, psychologically, for a renewed confrontation with Havana. Whether that confrontation will take the form of intensified sanctions, diplomatic isolation, or something more direct remains uncertain. What is clear is that the logic driving it is old, familiar, and stubbornly resistant to change.

Cuba has outlasted presidents, doctrines, and empires. It may yet outlast this moment as well. The question is not whether the obsession will finally deliver closure, but how much damage it will cause in its pursuit.

History has its own sense of irony. Che Guevara once wrote that “the revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe; you have to make it fall.” More than sixty years later, it is not Havana but Washington that seems unwilling to wait. Venezuela becomes the appetizer not because history demands it, but because impatience does. Cuba remains the main course not because it threatens American power, but because it continues to expose its limits. Whether this obsession finally delivers resolution, or merely repeats an old failure at greater cost, remains an open question.

Please check out my new book, Op-Ed: Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.