President Trump on Sunday took aim at Cuba after the U.S.’s recent capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“You know, one of the things that is happening, and I think you see it, you see it all the time, Howard. You’ve seen it — that Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump said on Air Force One alongside Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
Trump announced over the weekend the U.S. had gone through with a “large-scale strike” on the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. The president also said the U.S. would “run” the South American country up until a transition after Maduro’s capture.
“We’re in the business of having countries around us that are viable and successful and where the oil is allowed to freely come out, because that’s good, it gets the prices down,” Trump also told reporters aboard Air Force One.
“That’s good for our country. We have a very sick neighbor. It’s not a neighbor, but it’s close to a neighbor, and that’s Venezuela. It’s very sick. Colombia is very sick too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States,” Trump added, most likely referencing Colombian President Gustavo Petro.
Petro has slammed the recent American action in Venezuela, saying the U.S. “is the first country in the world to bomb a South American capital in all of human history.”
“What a terrible medal that is because for generations South Americans will not forget. The wound remains open for a long time; our revenge must not exist, even though our Latin ancestors always whisper to us in our minds about ‘Vendetta,’” Petro said Sunday in a translated post on the social platform X.
Trump also gave a warning to Mexico, saying the country “has to get their act together,” and that drugs are “pouring through Mexico and we’re going to have to do something.”
“We’d love Mexico to do it,” he added. “They’re capable of doing it, but unfortunately the cartels are very strong in Mexico.”
In a statement Monday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that her country’s “position against any form of intervention is firm, clear, and historic.”
“In light of recent events in Venezuela, where the United States government carried out a direct intervention that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, as well as the loss of human lives, Mexico reaffirms a principle that is not new and admits no ambiguity,” she added in her statement translated from Spanish according to Google. “We categorically reject intervention in the internal affairs of other countries.”
