Sen. Lindsey Graham warned Cuba’s Communist leaders Sunday night that the Havana regime’s “days are numbered,” after 32 members of the island’s armed forces and intelligence agencies were killed in Saturday’s daring US raid to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
“You just wait for Cuba. Cuba is a Communist dictatorship that’s killed priests and nuns. They’ve preyed on their own people. Their days are numbered,” Graham (R-SC) told reporters while traveling to Washington with President Trump on board Air Force One.
“Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know if they’re going to hold out,” Trump himself said, adding: “Cuba only survives because of Venezuela.”
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, made their first appearance before a Manhattan federal judge Monday after being extracted to the US to face charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, illegal weapons possession and conspiracy to the same.
No US forces were lost in the early Saturday raid, while more than two dozen members of Maduro’s security team were reportedly taken out.
A Facebook statement from the office of Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel labeled the mission a “criminal attack perpetrated by the United States government,” and lauded the dead as “victims of a new criminal act of aggression and state terrorism.”
Graham, by contrast, said the capture of Maduro showed “America at her best.”
“Maduro miscalculated our Commander in Chief, and President DonaldTrump made clear he will not be trifled with,” the senator wrote in a Sunday post on X.
Graham has long called for US military action in Venezuela in response to the presence of Cuban security forces in the country.
“If Cuba goes, Maduro goes and we have a history of standing up to Cuban intervention in the past,” he said in a 2019 interview with McClatchy.
“We’re not occupying Venezuela, but if Maduro refuses to go and the Cubans keep using their military apparatus to prop him up, it is in our national security interest to do in Venezuela what Reagan did in Grenada,” Graham said in the same interview.
In October 1983, President Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada with about 6,000 US troops after the country’s prime minister was executed in a pro-Communist coup.
The eight-day operation toppled the so-called Grenadian People’s Revolutionary Government and expelled Cuban and Soviet military forces and advisers.
