The idea that Cuba could be next after a regime collapse in Venezuela used to sound like wishful exile rhetoric, something said loudly in Miami cafés and quietly dismissed elsewhere. Lately it feels different, heavier somehow, less like a slogan and more like an uncomfortable analytical possibility. Venezuela has not just been an ally to Cuba; it has been a lifeline, an energy artery, a political mirror that allowed Havana to keep pretending the 1990s never truly ended. When that mirror cracks, the reflection becomes brutal. Oil shipments shrink, preferential trade collapses, and suddenly the Cuban system is forced to stand on its own legs again, which, frankly, have been wobbling for years.
Cuba’s economic model has survived not because it works, but because it has always been plugged into something larger: Soviet subsidies, then Venezuelan petro-dollars, and in between a mix of remittances, tourism, and improvisation that Cubans have mastered out of sheer necessity. Strip out Caracas, and the improvisation turns from a survival skill into a structural weakness. Rolling blackouts, food shortages, and mass emigration are not abstract forecasts; they are already daily reality on the island, and without Venezuela cushioning the fall, those pressures intensify fast. Political systems don’t usually collapse because people read dissident essays; they collapse because the fridge is empty and the power is out again, and again, and again.
The political dimension matters just as much. For decades, Havana has functioned as an ideological exporter and a strategic brain trust for leftist regimes in Latin America. Venezuela flipped that relationship by becoming the economic sponsor while Cuba provided security know-how, intelligence cooperation, and political continuity. If Caracas truly falls away as a functioning authoritarian partner, Cuba loses not only money but relevance. A regime that cannot project influence outward while failing to provide inward stability starts to look fragile even to its own elites, and elite confidence, more than street protests, is often what determines whether a system snaps or merely bends.
This doesn’t mean Cuba is destined for a dramatic, televised collapse. It could just as easily be a slow, grinding unravelling: more people leaving, more informal markets replacing official ones, more quiet disobedience, more young Cubans treating the state as background noise rather than a source of legitimacy. But the direction matters. Venezuela’s fall would remove the last illusion that regional authoritarian solidarity can indefinitely compensate for economic incompetence. Once that illusion is gone, Cuba is forced into a corner where reforms threaten the system and repression accelerates its decay. Neither path looks stable.
What feels new is that talking about Cuba “after” Venezuela no longer sounds premature. It sounds like analysts connecting dots that were always there but politically inconvenient to acknowledge. The Cuban regime has survived many things, including the collapse of the USSR, so betting against it has always been risky. Still, survival by habit is not the same as resilience by design. If Venezuela goes, the Cuban system doesn’t automatically fall—but it loses its last external crutch. And regimes without crutches, when already limping, tend not to run very far.
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