After the capture of the then Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in a United States military operation on Saturday (3), the Cuban dictatorship reported that 32 Cubans who were part of the Chavista’s security team had been killed in the American offensive.
Although the partnership between the two regimes has been known for decades, the size of the contingent from the Havana dictatorship that protected Maduro drew attention.
In an article published in 2024 on several websites, such as the Argentine Perfil, historian Jorge G. Castañeda, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, recalled that Cuba began sending “thousands of doctors, nurses, sports instructors, security advisors and intelligence agents” to Venezuela in exchange for subsidized oil after the failed attempt by a sector of the Army to overthrow Hugo Chávez in 2002.
More recent estimates indicate that there are around 15 thousand Cubans working in various areas in Venezuela, a number that reached 30 thousand in the past.
Although over the last two decades the Chavista regime managed to co-opt most of the Venezuelan military (purging the “disloyal” along the way), distrust was never overcome, which led to the decision to use Cuban agents as personal security for the two dictators and to “closely monitor the Venezuelan armed forces at all levels”, highlighted Castañeda.
The researcher highlighted that the Cubans’ reputation for efficiency attracted Chávez and Maduro, as security agents in Havana prevented several US attempts to kill Fidel Castro and also discovered “a series of conspiracies — some real, others imaginary — against the communist regime” on the island.
In November, Venezuelan military analyst José García told the British newspaper Financial Times that Maduro’s personal security team had become “even more Cuban” as the dictator feared that Venezuelans might “prove disloyal as salaries have been devalued by uncontrolled inflation.”
No reinforcement, however, was enough to contain the United States operation – and the story of the dictator who trusted agents from another country to take care of his security and was still deposed has already entered Latin American political folklore.
