Venezuela’s Fall, Cuba’s Courage

Eve Ottenberg

 August 14, 2026

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Photo by engin akyurt

“To the victor go the spoils,” was Donald “Nail a Commie” Trump’s recent pronouncement on Venezuela. But what kind of victor? One who conducted a glorious battle of courage and self-sacrifice like Iran and its people against the U.S. and Israel? Or a criminal, underhanded, sneaky, kidnapping of president Nicolas Maduro, with the abductor creeping into Caracas in the middle of the night, followed by the coercion of his successor Delcy Rodriguez to permit the rape of Venezuela? You pick. I consider it the latter.

If Trump truly believes he merits this maxim, then Iran and Russia will soon corner “the spoils,” for those are two conflicts in which Mr. Trump is not dictating terms. But what happened in Venezuela cannot be dignified by calling it a conflict – just a cowardly crime to loot the country’s oil and cash, more brazen than those of any brigands who have run Washington in its long gangster history would ever have dared. Some people even now call Venezuela a U.S. “protectorate in all but name,” per ABC News July 31. “Recent reports suggest more than $U.S. 13 billion ($18.66 billion) has been collected by the U.S. from Venezuelan oil sales, but Mr. Trump has said he thinks it is ‘even more than that…We’re taking in a lot of money –‘” this repellant boast continues, “billions and billions of dollars from Venezuela.’” This, while half of Venezuelans live in “extreme poverty. Venezuela has been in a severe economic depression for 13 years.” Why? Well might you ask. Not because of Maduro’s policies, no; because of U.S. sanctions and theft, via the Bank of England, of $2 billion of Caracas’ gold in 2018.

Venezuelans are protesting U.S. control of the nation’s wealth in small but frequent demos, reported Venezuelanalysis August 5. A recent protest, August 4 comprised only 150 people – “organized by a coalition of leftist political groups, including Communes, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), and the League of Socialist Workers (LTS).” These people dislike the Trumpster’s deep and putrid involvement “in an overhaul of the country’s Hydrocarbon Law” and how these imperialists “have brokered negotiations with Western corporations under the revised pro-business framework…Pedro Eusse, the secretary-general of the CUTV trade union federation, urged political unity against ‘colonial domination.’” This was preceded the night before by a twitter storm that landed a “Trump out of Venezuela” hashtag at the top of X, trending in the country. An August 1 protest of similar size, called for defending the Hugo Chavez legacy.

Meanwhile the Venezuelan left denounces “an alleged plot, orchestrated by the DEA, to assassinate grassroots leaders in working-class neighborhoods.” I would not be surprised in the least by such a conspiracy from Trump’s DEA; after all, we’re dealing with a Washington executive branch whose bigwigs conduct themselves like mobsters. Furthermore, these demonstrators vociferate against the acting government in Caracas’ rapprochement with Israel – well, isn’t a hallmark of subversive Israeli activity the proudly proclaimed assassination of enemies? Delcy Rodriguez may be prepared to shake Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand, I don’t know, but your average Venezuelan isn’t ready for that. The memory of 13 years of U.S. sanctions starvation is too fresh – indeed it’s ongoing – to start making nice with the Empire’s genocidal attack dog.

Rodriguez was pretty much told point-blank by the white house that if she didn’t cave, she’d wind up like Maduro. “But the U.S. president is not believed to be the man pulling the strings,” per ABC. “Rather it is his secretary of state.” Indeed, the New York Times reported that the voraciously ambitious Marco Rubio regularly messages Ms. Rodriguez on What’sApp, “influencing and directing Venezuela’s day-to-day operations. He reportedly has direct control over the country’s export revenue and sets out the conditions on how its public funds can be spent.” A protectorate indeed.

What should Rodriguez have done? Something, anything, other than what she is doing. She might, for instance, have taken a page out of Cuban president Miguel Diaz Canel’s courageous book and grown a spine. She might have fought back – plenty of Venezuelans were ready to do that after Maduro’s kidnapping and would have supported her. The military might have, too. Why do you think, per the headline in the Hill August 6, “Rubio targets Cuban military procurement with new sanctions?” Because this white house trembles at a fair fight. Instead, it slithers around, kidnapping presidents, killing ordinary people with sanctions that compel diabetics to ration their insulin and poor people to skip means and, in Cuba, criminal blockades to bring the countries it aims to loot to their knees. Rodriguez just made it easy for the Trump regime to do that.

Cuba has done otherwise. Hence Rubio’s attack on the island’s military and any business capable of assisting it. The Hill cited the U.S. “crackdown on Cuba’s state-owned Grupo Administracion Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), a powerful military-owned business conglomerate that controls at least 40 percent of the Cuban economy” in May. That crackdown occurred when Rubio garishly painted GAESA as the “heart of Cuba’s kleptocratic communist system.” Moa Nickel SA (MNSA) was also sanctioned.

According to the white house, its executive order including these sanctions said its purpose was “countering Cuba’s malign influence.” What malign influence? This is a tiny country whose electrical grid collapsed in March “leaving nearly 11 million people in the dark for more than a day.” You honestly think Cuba has the wherewithal, as Rubio accuses it, “to sponsor terrorism that spies on Americans [since when?], arms violent left-wing radicals [who? Where?], spreads poisonous Marxist ideology [how?] and serves as a staging ground for Russia, China and Iran just 90 miles from our shores”? The only staging ground Cuba serves is for the 5000 solar panels Beijing delivered to it the week of August 3, or the oil tanker Moscow shipped to it in March at the start of the Trump embargo, an adventure whose barbaric purpose appears to have been killing newborns in the NICU.

Meanwhile the usually reliable Guardian, which occasionally behaves more like the rest of corporate, faux liberal trans-Atlantic security state media, runs headlines like “As the lights go out, Cuba’s true believers vow to resist U.S. intervention.” What – they should capitulate? Like Delcy Rodriguez – ‘cause things are going so swimmingly in Venezuela that proconsul Rubio has his mitts on all government export revenues?

The problem here is not Cuba. It’s Trump’s lunatic obsession with everything from antifa to anti-capitalism to Marxism, an obsession compounded of pathology and opportunism. Not for nothing was the current white house denizen an acolyte of commie-hunting maniac Roy Cohn. Trump thinks he can get mileage out of bashing the entire left; it’s backfiring, but don’t tell him that, he’ll send ICE after you. Meanwhile, pace Guardian, plenty of Cubans blame Trump and his CIA for the lights going out in Cuba. They know what the rest of us read in the New York Times August 5, namely, that the CIA established a secret task force to deal with Cuba – “for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political and leadership changes demanded by President Trump.” Smarting from defeat by Iran and from Russia’s tenacity in Ukraine, el jefe Trump evidently believes he needs a win. He’s looking for that in the brutalization of a small island of 11 million people.

Trump is killing Cubans and plans to overthrow their government, because the U.S. is a rogue Mafia regime. That’s what’s happening in the Caribbean.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is “Death Calls It a Day.” She can be reached at her website.

The Posse Comitatus Presidency: Trump’s Standing Army on American Streets

John W. Whitehead – Nisha Whitehead

 August 14, 2026

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The National Guard was just the beginning.

One year after President Trump deployed military troops to the nation’s capital, we find ourselves navigating a posse comitatus presidency in which the visual trappings of martial law are the norm, not the exception.

When Trump declared a supposed “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., called in the National Guard, unleashed federal law enforcement throughout the city and temporarily seized control of the Metropolitan Police Department, we warned that the police state had found a new playbook: martial law, one city at a time.

The emergency is long over.

The troops never left.

Now the Pentagon says the National Guard deployment can remain in Washington until January 20, 2029—the final day of Trump’s presidency—unless Trump himself decides to terminate it sooner.

That is not an emergency response.

That is a standing military presence.

The government expects American taxpayers to spend another $1.4 billion maintaining it.

What began in August 2025 as an extraordinary response to a supposedly “extraordinary” crime crisis has become part of the architecture of everyday government.

Thousands of military personnel have remained deployed in the capital. Armed Guard members patrol streets, Metro stations, parks and tourist attractions. They have supported arrest operations. They have responded to medical calls. They have shoveled snow. They have removed trash and weeds and participated in “beautification” projects.

During the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations, their numbers swelled to roughly 5,000.

Now the Trump administration is making plans to build “apartment-style lodging units” for the troops stationed in DC at a cost of $292 million to the taxpayer.

That is in addition to the $1 billion Trump wants for White House security upgrades, including a new ballroom topped by a proposed “droneport” that he has envisioned as a rooftop staging ground for military trucks, personnel and battlefield weaponry.

The symbolism is hard to miss.

This is how emergency power grabs become entrenched and permanent.

We do not have to speculate about where this leads.

We have already begun to see it.

When Trump federalized California National Guard troops and deployed Marines to Los Angeles during protests against immigration raids in 2025, a federal judge subsequently ruled that the administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using military personnel to carry out civilian law-enforcement functions.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer warned that the administration appeared intent on creating something the Constitution was never meant to tolerate: a national police force with the president effectively serving as its chief.

That description increasingly fits the Trump presidency.

Trump is not merely claiming authority as commander-in-chief over America’s military. He is increasingly behaving as though being commander-in-chief makes him commander-in-chief of the American people.

It is a profound, constitutional difference.

A president governs citizens. A commander commands troops. A police chief directs law enforcement. A king commands subjects.

The danger begins when one man starts behaving as though all four offices belong to him.

Trump has increasingly embraced his own digital version of that authoritarian theater.

Just days ago, he circulated an AI-generated image depicting himself in an elaborate military uniform alongside Generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur, laden with decorations and medals he never earned for military service he never performed.

It would be tempting to dismiss such images as narcissistic internet trolling.

That would be a mistake.

This is how Trump sees presidential power: as authoritarian power backed by military force.

The National Guard deployment in Washington is the physical embodiment of that worldview.

Armed soldiers are stationed around the monuments. They guard the perimeter of the Reflecting Pool. They patrol the National Mall. They appear at Metro stations, tourist sites and public parks.

Their presence is no longer presented as extraordinary. That is precisely the problem.

A free people should never become accustomed to soldiers policing their streets. Once that sight becomes ordinary, the constitutional barrier separating military power from civilian government has already begun to collapse.

And Washington is the ideal laboratory as a testing ground.

What can be normalized in the capital today can be demanded elsewhere tomorrow.

Indeed, we have already seen repeated attempts to expand the model beyond Washington: federalized National Guard troops in Los Angeles, attempted Guard deployments elsewhere, federal agents sent into cities, immigration enforcement increasingly carried out with military equipment and rhetoric, and presidential threats to “liberate” jurisdictions whose elected leaders resist federal policy.

Not every deployment has survived judicial scrutiny.

That is encouraging, but the real danger is larger than whether any particular deployment is eventually blocked by a court. The danger is that the country is being conditioned to accept the premise behind all of them: that whenever the president declares a city dangerous, disorderly, disobedient or insufficiently cooperative, military force is an appropriate instrument of domestic government.

That premise should frighten conservatives and liberals alike.

This is not fundamentally a question of whether you trust Donald Trump. It is whether you trust any president with a standing military force at his disposal for domestic political purposes.

The Constitution was not written on the assumption that good people would always hold power. It was written because power attracts abuse.

Every authority surrendered to Trump becomes an authority available to his successors. Every emergency power normalized now becomes part of the presidential toolbox later. Every constitutional boundary ignored because the “right” president is violating it becomes one less boundary available when the “wrong” president takes office.

This is how republics lose their safeguards: One deployment. One emergency. One executive order. One city. One exception at a time.

As we have warned repeatedly in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is how constitutional lines disappear—not because someone formally erases them, but because enough people stop noticing when they are crossed.

The Founders feared standing armies because they understood that military power and political liberty exist in constant tension.

The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that same hard-earned wisdom.

Soldiers defend the country. Police enforce the law. Presidents execute the laws within constitutional limits.

Citizens are not troops. Cities are not battlefields. Political opponents are not enemy combatants. And the president is not the American people’s commander-in-chief. He is commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

That distinction may be one of the few things standing between a constitutional republic and a police state presidency.

We had better remember it before the exception becomes the rule—and the troops never go home.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books The Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield America: The War on the American People are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.