Cuba says 32 officers assigned to protect Venezuela’s deposed strongman were killed by U.S. forces, signaling trouble for Havana’s own rulers
For decades, Cuban intelligence agents were Cold War stars, dismantling plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, recruiting senior U.S. government officials and protecting heads of state from Angola to Panama.
The capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro—one of the Cuban intelligence services’ most valuable charges—punctured its aura of invincibility. U.S. elite forces descended on Maduro’s compound at around 2 a.m. local time Saturday, grabbing him and his wife before they could escape to a safe room, said Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Cuban government said 32 officers from its Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Interior Ministry, which runs intelligence services, were killed in the line of duty as part of Maduro’s security detail.
“It’s a defeat for Cuba and denotes its weakening, highlighting vulnerabilities in its security procedures,” said María Werlau, author of a 2019 book on Cuba’s intervention in Venezuela.
Relied upon by the Soviet KGB for its extensive informant networks in Latin America and Africa, Cuban expertise to protect allies, detect unrest and suppress dissent became a lucrative export. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s security and intelligence services secured a lifeline from oil-rich Venezuela as Havana inched closer to economic collapse.
“Cuban intelligence services always punched above their weight,” said Cedric Leighton, a military-intelligence veteran and retired U.S. Air Force colonel. “In some respects, they are basically old-school trade craft.”
But Cuba’s security detail failed to defend Maduro, despite a U.S. armada threatening the Venezuelan leader for months from the Caribbean.
“What’s almost worse is that they couldn’t inflict any damage on the Americans,” said Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former foreign minister and author of several books about Cuba’s regime. “This means the Cubans weren’t where they needed to be, with the strength they needed to have.”
Such intelligence flaws are also likely to hurt Cuba’s Communist regime at home, particularly if it loses Venezuela’s economic support and subsidized oil shipments amid an unprecedented economic implosion.
“The people can go hungry, but the repressive apparatus must have privileges,” said Enrique Garcia, a former Cuban intelligence officer who defected to the U.S. “If the regime loses all economic capacity, no system can withstand it.”
President Trump told reporters Sunday on board Air Force One that Cuba was ready to fall. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the Communist island is in trouble and that one of the biggest problems Venezuelans have is that they must declare independence from Cuba.
“This poor island took over Venezuela,” Rubio said alongside Trump on Saturday.
Former intelligence agents and dissidents who monitor Cuba’s security apparatus estimate that some 140 officers were assigned to provide personal security services to Maduro. Dozens of them are thought to have been injured or suffered severe burns in the rain of missiles and shrapnel during the U.S. operation, these people said.
Cuba and Venezuela have disclosed few details about the U.S. military incursion. Vladimir Padrino, the four-star general who has led Venezuela’s military since 2014, said Sunday the U.S. killed a large part of Maduro’s security team.
The weekend raid was precise and represented the first direct, unilateral U.S. military intervention in South America. It required months of work by U.S. intelligence and included at least one informant within the Venezuelan government who helped the U.S. “understand how he moved, where he lived, where he traveled, what he ate, what he wore, what were his pets,” said Caine.
No American servicemembers were killed, and no American equipment was lost, Trump said. The U.S. force “maintained the element of surprise” as it descended on Maduro’s compound, Caine said. When U.S. helicopters came under fire, the response was overwhelming, he added.
Cuba’s intelligence and security team in Venezuela was led by senior military-intelligence veterans, including Asdrúbal de la Vega, the Cuban officer closest to Maduro who became his shadow and slept in a room next to the deposed strongman, said Carlos Cabrera Pérez, a Cuban journalist based in Spain who writes about Cuba’s security apparatus. De la Vega’s whereabouts haven’t been disclosed.
Cuba declared two days of national mourning for the officers “who fell confronting terrorists in imperial uniform,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote Sunday on X.
High-ranking Cuban military-intelligence officers also supervise Venezuela’s vast security apparatus, primarily because infiltrations or defections within military intelligence are rare, said Luis Domínguez, a Cuban who tracks security officers in the Communist island.
“They are the most reliable, they are Raúl Castro’s people,” he said, referring to the younger of the two brothers who led the Cuban revolution, defeated a Central Intelligence Agency-backed invasion force at the Bay of Pigs in the 1960s and ruled communist Cuba for more than six decades. The Castros also provided vital support to then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez during a failed 2002 coup attempt.
For a tiny and impoverished island of about 10 million people, Cuba’s security and intelligence structure is enormous—with about 100,000 officers, said García, the former Cuban intelligence agent.
“They have a presence in workplaces, schools, movie theaters and informants on every street block,” he said. “Fidel Castro’s security detail had 10,000 officers and its own counterintelligence unit.”
Cuba’s security apparatus has been effective at suffocating unrest in Cuba and Venezuela.
During the protests that rocked Cuba in 2021, the shutdown of web and telephone services made it hard for Cubans to organize across the country. More recently, student protests over price increases of mobile-phone data plans didn’t gain traction because of the fear of repression, as intelligence services surveil college activities. The security apparatus also has the tools to monitor telephone and cyber communications, and its agents are well-known for their ability to conduct house searches without detection.
In Venezuela, Cuban intelligence know-how has been crucial to quell the opposition movement. But on Saturday, it failed to mitigate risks or execute so-called actionable intelligence as the U.S. prepared its incursion on Caracas.
“Intelligence is absolutely critical to protect VIPs,” said Leighton, the former U.S. military intelligence officer. Faulty assumptions and ideology can impair judgment.
As a former KGB officer, Russian President Vladimir Putin goes to great lengths to maintain secrecy about his movements, residence details or workspaces. Patterns of life, daily habits and routines, which seem mundane, become critically important to exploit vulnerabilities of heads of state, Leighton said. Such was the case for Maduro.
“If you are really trying to avoid capture, you go to places people don’t know about,” he said. “You wonder why Maduro didn’t go to some nondescript apartment in the middle of Caracas or the countryside.”
