In the hours after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, President Trump already seemed to be setting his sights on another authoritarian regime in Latin America: the communist island of Cuba.

“Cuba looks like it is ready to fall,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday.

The president has issued warnings to several other countries and territories since Friday’s overnight operation in Venezuela — including Colombia, Mexico, Iran and Greenland. But Maduro’s downfall is most likely to directly affect Cuba, which has long staked its survival on massive aid packages from its oil-rich South American ally.

“I don’t know if they’re going to hold out, but Cuba now has no income,” Trump said Sunday. “They got all their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil.”

Here’s everything you need to know to understand the latest developments in Cuba — and how the Trump administration might be looking to tip the scales there.

What Trump and administration officials have said about Cuba

Pressed on Sunday about the prospect of the U.S. military intervening in Cuba, Trump said he didn’t think that was necessary because “it looks like it’s going down.”

“I don’t think we need any action,” the president insisted.

The top lawmaker on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, Republican Rick Crawford of Arkansas, echoed Trump’s domino effect theory Sunday on Fox News, calling Maduro’s capture “the beginning of the end” for Cuba.

“Cuba and Venezuela have had a symbiotic relationship for a long, long time. Cuba needs Venezuelan oil. They no longer have the resources that will be provided by Venezuela,” Crawford said. “You may very well see a popular uprising there.”

But Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a Cuban American whose parents left the island before Fidel Castro seized control in 1959 and who is known for his longstanding antipathy toward Havana — signaled on Saturday that the U.S. may not be entirely passive in its approach to Castro’s successor, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel.

“If I lived in Havana and I worked in the government, I’d be concerned — at least a little bit,” Rubio said.

Appearing the following day on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rubio warned that Cuba’s leaders are “in a lot of trouble.”

“I’m not going to talk to you about what our future steps are going to be and our policies are going to be right now,” Rubio said. “But I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime.”

Why Cuba and Venezuela are connected

The U.S. and Cuba — which is located just 90 miles from Florida’s coastline — have been at odds since Castro came to power. For decades, the Soviet Union was Cuba’s main benefactor. But then the USSR collapsed and Hugo Chávez ushered in a socialist revolution in Venezuela, much as Castro had done in Cuba.

A new alliance was born.

Over the last quarter of a century, Chávez and then Maduro have saved Cuba — geographically isolated and lacking in natural resources — from “total economic ruin” by sending “billions of dollars’ worth of oil … in exchange for a seemingly never-ending stream of Cuban intelligence and economic advisers and health care professionals,” as CNN’s Havana bureau chief Patrick Oppmann recently explained.

Castro personally intervened to protect Chávez during a 2002 coup attempt, according to former U.S. diplomats. Before his death from cancer in 2013 — following months of treatment in Cuban hospitals — Chávez described Cuba and Venezuela as la gran patria: the one homeland. In the fourth quarter of 2025, Cuba received an average of 35,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela, which it used to keep lights on and sold internationally in order to buy staples like medicine and food. And nearly three dozen Cubans were killed on Saturday when U.S. forces invaded Caracas — many of them members of Maduro’s inner circle of bodyguards.

“Over the years as I traveled regularly between Cuba and Venezuela, it was hard to tell where one nation began and another ended,” Oppmann wrote.

What’s next

With Cuba now more isolated than it’s been in decades — and Trump’s ongoing blockade of Venezuelan oil cutting off its economic lifeblood — anti-Havana hawks in the administration likely see an opportunity to eliminate the United States’ nearest foe.

But it’s unclear how actively the Trump administration will pursue that goal in a one-party state where the U.S. lacks any natural partners for reform — and where the people deeply resent American intervention.

Experts expect more of a “wait and see” approach. Prolonged blackouts already plague the island. Food shortages threaten to push millions of Cubans closer to malnutrition. “In December, a government commentator on state-run TV raised hackles from many on the island when he advised Cubans to give up eating rice,” CNN’s Oppmann has reported.

Meanwhile, Cuba’s “medical system — a gold lining of the revolution — is now barely able to provide the most basic care,” according to the New York Times. “Patients and their families report shortages of medicine and people are now expected to bring their own sheets to the hospital.”

As a result, Cuba has lost 10 percent of its population — roughly 1 million people — to mass migration since 2021.

The question now, according to Ricardo Zúñiga, a former U.S. official who served under Trump and former President Barack Obama, is “how bad the situation can get” before Cubans revolt.

“There’s a belief among Republicans like Rubio that once Venezuelan oil is cut off, the Cuban economy will collapse and trigger a popular uprising,” Zúñiga told the Times.

Crawford, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed Zúñiga’s assessment Sunday on Fox News. “You may very well see a popular uprising there,“ Crawford said. “We can play an outsize role there in influencing those folks and helping them to organically rise up and help overcome that oppressive regime.”

For his part, Trump said on Saturday that “I think Cuba is going to be something we’ll end up talking about, because Cuba is a failing nation right now, a very badly failing nation, and we want to help the people.

“It’s very similar [to Venezuela] in the sense that we want to help the people in Cuba,” the president added.

How has Cuba responded?

At a rally Saturday in front of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Díaz-Canel vowed to fight for his country’s alliance with Venezuela.

“For Venezuela, of course for Cuba, we are willing to give even our own life, but at a heavy cost,” Díaz-Canel declared.

Posting the same day on X, the Cuban president characterized the capture of Maduro as an act of “state terrorism.”

“Our #ZonaDePaz [Zone of Peace] is being brutally assaulted,” he wrote.

Maduro’s overthrow “places us in a critical existential dilemma for our survival as nation states and independent, sovereign nations,” Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuba’s foreign minister, added Sunday at an emergency meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a bloc of regional nations.

And an official statement from the Cuban government described the U.S. operation in Venezuela as “a dangerous escalation of the sustained campaign of war waged for years by the United States against that sister nation.”

“In Cuba, our determination to struggle is firm and unwavering,” the statement continued. “The decision is one and only one: Homeland or Death.”