Following the U.S. military’s overnight mission in Caracas to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a direct warning to the leaders of Cuba.
Rubio called Cuba’s leaders “incompetent, senile men” during a Dec. 3 press conference, adding that if he worked in the regime in Havana he’d “be concerned, at least a little bit.”
President Donald Trump, flanked by Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at Saturday’s briefing, called Cuba a “failing nation right now, a very badly failing nation.”
Trump said Cuban people need help—both inside the country and those who were forced out and are now living in the United States.
“Cuba is a disaster,” Rubio said, agreeing with Trump. “It has no economy. It’s in total collapse, and by the way, all the guards that protect Maduro—this is well known—their whole spy agency is Cubans.”
Cuban officials condemned the U.S. operation to detain Maduro, calling it an act of state terrorism.
“We demand the immediate release by the United States authorities of President Nicolás Maduro Moros and comrade Cilia Flores,” Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez said on X.
Nuestro Gobierno Revolucionario condena en los términos más enérgicos la agresión militar de #EEUU contra #Venezuela. Reiteramos de forma categórica el absoluto respaldo y solidaridad de #Cuba con la hermana República Bolivariana y su gobierno.https://t.co/WFskEiougD
— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) January 3, 2026
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Bermúdez also called on other countries to not allow the United States to conduct missions of this “nature and gravity” against a member nation of the United Nations without consequences.
In the news conference Saturday, Rubio said Congress wasn’t notified in advance of the attack because it “was not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on.”
“It was a trigger-based mission in which conditions had to be met night after night,” Rubio said. “We watched and monitored that for a number of days, so it’s just simply not the kind of mission you can call people and say, ‘Hey, we may do this at some point in the next 15 days.’”
If congressional members had been notified, it would have endangered the mission, Rubio said.
Trump said, “Congress has a tendency to leak.”
“This would not be good if they leaked … Congress will leak, and we don’t want leakers,” he added.
At its core, the secretary of state said, the mission was to apprehend and arrest two indicted fugitives of American justice.
Trump said in the news conference Saturday that the United States will now take control of Venezuela until a peaceful transition of power can be completed. He said Rubio and Hegseth were designated as part of the team overseeing the South American country.
Venezuelans that The Epoch Times spoke to, both abroad and in the United States, expressed extreme gratitude for the U.S. military actions against their home country to remove a leader they described as a brutal, murdering dictator.
“They kill us. They kill us every day in Venezuela. They kill innocent people,” Andrea Rangel Jimenez, from Venezuela, said. “We have been waiting for this moment my whole life.”
Jimenez lived in Colombia after Maduro ordered the mass expulsion of Colombians in 2015. Her mother—part Colombian—made the decision for her family to leave Venezuela. Currently, she resides in North Florida.
“I’m so happy. I have been crying the whole day. This is something that we never expected to happen,” Jimenez said. “I feel the freedom again … My dad—I haven’t seen him in a long, long, long time, so I want to be back in my country. I want to see my country happy like it was even before I was born.”
One anonymous source, who did not wish to reveal his name out of fear of retaliation against himself and his family by the Maduro regime, explained that removing the Venezuelan dictator doesn’t mean his influence is gone.
“The Venezuelan regime has copied every criminal procedure to disappear people, to kill people like Russia and Cuba,” he said. “It’s a copy.”
Maduro and his wife are facing charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine-guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine-guns and destructive devices against the United States.
The pair was taken by U.S. military forces from Caracas in the early morning hours of Saturday, transported on the USS Iwo Jima before boarding a plane to New York City to stand trial. Maduro and Flores arrived Saturday night at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Orange County, New York.
They could be arraigned as soon as Monday.
By Troy Myers
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