Nicolas Maduro proclaimed himself the winner of the July 28 presidential elections in Venezuela and aims to stay in the Miraflores Palace, at least until 2031. How much does Hugo Chavez’s heir owe to Cuban intelligence for the survival of the “Bolivarian Revolution”? How has the Havana regime helped Caracas quell dissent?

In recent weeks, to suppress protests in support of former presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, the Maduro regime has escalated its repression against politicians, electoral witnesses, and the protesting population. In this context, several reports alleging the presence of Cuban state agents in Venezuela have rekindled discussions about the Cuban government’s interference in the South American country.

According to reports from NGOs, press reports, and citizen testimonies, Cuban authorities have been helping Venezuela for at least 15 years to redesign its armed forces and intelligence services, “imposing surveillance and fear.”

After suffering his first electoral defeat in 2007, Chavez, who sought to expand his powers and eliminate presidential term limits through a constitutional referendum, continued to seek mechanisms to stay in power. Fidel Castro provided him with agents from Cuba’s Armed Forces and security, intelligence, and counterintelligence apparatus.

Cuban intelligence used “missions of various types as a mask and disguise, whether for cooperation in sports, health, or education,” said Luis Almagro, Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS), during the June 2020 event “Cuba in Venezuela, the Conquest of the 21st Century,” organized by the Center for Latin American Studies (CASLA Institute).

During his first 10 years in power, Chavez made 24 official visits to the island and repeatedly expressed being “fascinated” by Castro. In 2007, the Venezuelan leader declared that Cuba and Venezuela were “one nation” and that “at heart, we are one government.”

After Chavez’s death in 2013, and a contested election that kept the “Bolivarian Revolution” in power by a narrow margin, Maduro maintained alliances with the Cuban regime. According to Rafael Ramirez, Chavez’s Oil Minister between 2002 and 2013, Maduro’s designation as Chavez’s successor had “a lot to do with the influence of the Cubans.”

However, the current Venezuelan opposition leadership suggests that Havana’s importance in the Venezuelan scenario could change. During the presidential campaign, Edmundo Gonzalez declared that his government would propose a reconfiguration of Venezuela’s foreign policy based on sovereignty and mutual respect, with an emphasis on revitalizing relations with Latin America and reevaluating ties with Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran.

“We need to review relations with Cuba, because it is not just the issue of SAIME [Cuban presence in the Administrative Service of Identification, Immigration, and Foreign Affairs]; it is the issue of ports and airports, citizen ID, intelligence services; in short, there is a wide range of cooperation that will need to be reviewed,” Gonzalez told Voice of America (VOA) in May 2024.

When María Corina Machado won the opposition primary in October 2023, she said that without Chavismo in power, “there will be no way or area in which the Cuban regime interferes in the affairs of the Venezuelan state, nor Venezuela in the affairs of the Cuban state.”

Agreements That Allowed Havana to “Redefine Security” in Venezuela

Two agreements signed in May 2008 “gave Cuba vast access to the Venezuelan military and wide freedom to spy on and reform it,” revealed a Reuters investigation published in August 2019.

According to the documents reviewed by the news agency, the agreements led to “the imposition of strict surveillance of Venezuelan troops through an intelligence service now known as the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, or DGCIM.” The alliance allowed the Cuban Armed Forces to:

• Train soldiers in Venezuela.
• Review and restructure parts of the Venezuelan army.
• Train Venezuelan intelligence agents in Havana.
• Shift the intelligence service’s mission from spying on foreign rivals to monitoring its own soldiers, officers, and even high-ranking commanders.

With the advice of Cuban military personnel, Venezuela “restructured the intelligence unit into a service that spies on its own armed forces, instilling fear and paranoia and crushing dissent,” reported Reuters.

Retired Venezuelan Army General Antonio Rivero, a senior ex-officer exiled in Miami since 2014, also confirmed to Dialogo Americas that Cuba and Venezuela signed several secret military agreements in 2008, “handing over control of the Venezuelan Armed Forces to Cuba.”

“In 2008, the presence of Cuban military personnel [in Venezuela] was consolidated through 15 secret agreements between Cuba and Venezuela to transform the Venezuelan Armed Forces and turn them into the same structure that functions in Cuba,” declared General Rivero, who also served as head of civil protection and emergency management under the Chavez government.

“Chavez invested billions of dollars in Russian weapons, with Cuban mediation, and thus Venezuelan military personnel began to give up space to ‘Cubanize’ the Armed Forces,” added the ex-military officer.

According to General Rivero, “Cuban officers developed doctrines, training manuals, and directed exercises, while some Venezuelan officers felt as if they were serving in the Armed Forces of another country.”

One of the agreements mentioned by General Rivero was the creation of a Cooperation and Liaison Group (GRUCE), a unit composed of Cuban officers permanently based in Venezuela.

“[It is] a Cuban military unit that exists in Fort Tiuna in Caracas, which has a national deployment in Venezuela, distributed mainly in the command posts of operational and strategic units across the country,” he detailed.

A “Branch of the Cuban G2” in Caracas?

Rafael Ortega, a former member of the Venezuelan Supreme Court, now in exile, also believes that the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) is almost a branch of the G2—the Cuban secret service—in Venezuela.

The collection of confidential information in Venezuela was handled by three entities: the Military Intelligence Directorate (DIM), SEBIN, and the police forces. In 2013, the Strategic Center for Homeland Security and Protection (CESPPA) was created “to unify the information that spies, both Venezuelan and Cuban, obtained about opponents of the regime,” according to Demo Amlat, a project led by the NGO Transparency Electoral.

The espionage machinery included experts in cyber-attacks, hackers, call control, and wiretapping, as covered in several reports by the portal Vertice News.

“All that information ends up in the hands of the Cuban intelligence services, the G2,” Gyoris Guzman, former director general of Venezuela’s National Office against Organized Crime and Terrorism Financing, told ABC. Guzman, who held that position between 2013 and 2015, now lives in Spain with political asylum.

According to Demo Amlat, “it is clear that CESPPA is a branch of the G2 that was created in its image and likeness and under its command. Twenty percent of the Cubans working in Venezuela perform tasks in the area of intelligence and security.”

In 2014, General Rivero stated that the Cuban presence in Venezuela was significant: “In security and defense alone, we estimate that there may be about 5,600 people. In the Armed Forces, there are about 500 active Cuban military personnel serving as advisors in strategic areas: intelligence, weaponry, communications, and military engineering.”

Venezuelan officers exiled in Colombia told the newspaper EL TIEMPO in 2020 that G2 personnel were present in SEBIN and received intelligence and counterintelligence reports to develop strategies.

“They have offices in almost every ministry and in highly sensitive agencies such as the Foreign Ministry, SEBIN, the oil company PDVSA, the Directorate General of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM), the Operational Strategic Command of the Armed Forces, the Administrative Service of Identification, Migration, and Foreign Affairs, ports, and airports,” said General Manuel Ricardo Cristopher Figuera, head of SEBIN until 2019, when he went into exile.

Rocío San Miguel, director of the NGO Control Ciudadano, noted in 2019 that “Cuba today directs the country’s destiny.” “The situation room where the most important strategic decisions are made—political, military, but also economic and social—is in Havana,” San Miguel said, as quoted by Infobae.

In an interview with BBC Mundo, San Miguel explained that Cuba progressively intervened over the past decades in the restructuring of the Bolivarian Armed Forces and in drafting the five reforms to the Organic Law of this military entity. “The new Bolivarian military thinking was conceived and is overseen by Cuba. It has also participated in mediating the purchase of weapons systems,” she said.

According to the expert, the Cubans had a permanent presence at the Ministry of Defense headquarters in Fort Tiuna and other Venezuelan barracks.

“We don’t have figures, but we have testimonies from military personnel that account for the Cuban presence at different times and in different spaces within the Armed Forces. Both in meetings to design the strategic-military concept and the presence of civilians who carry out work permanently in military installations and who, in times of crisis, are clearly willing to take up arms,” she said. Rocio San Miguel was arbitrarily detained by the Venezuelan regime in February 2024.

Former General Antonio Rivero has warned that “the active participation of Cuban officers in Venezuela is classified as a crime against Independence and National Security,” in addition to violating the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another State.

Rivero showed Diario las Américas the alleged copy of a training plan for exceptional situations, directed at Cuban military personnel stationed in Venezuela.

According to the document, Cuban military personnel would defend the regime against any presumed civil or military uprising, which could range from opposition-identified protests to a military intervention with airstrikes directed from the United States.

“There is an intervention, there is interference, there is an invasion, there is a flagrant and permanent violation of our security and defense system in which a foreign military force operates, subjugating our State sovereignty,” denounced the exiled general in Miami.

2014 and 2017: Two Waves of Repression

The testimonies of those who suffered attacks during the repression of protests against Nicolás Maduro in 2014 and 2017 point to the responsibilities of Cuban officials.

According to a report by the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FHRC) titled “Cubazuela,” “during these two major waves of protests, the repression focused on methodically, brazenly, and shamelessly violating the sacred human right to life, seeking to create an unprecedented climate of terror in Venezuela.”

Demo Amlat detailed that “one of the most used and cruel methods is to shoot protesters in the face, leaving them disfigured and in agony for several days, but without recovering and eventually dying in a hospital bed. These are the cases of Geraldine Moreno Orozco (22), Jimmy Vargas (34), Juan Carlos Montoya (40), Genesis Carmona (21), Roberto Redman (31), Bassil Alejandro Da Costa Frías (24), among others.”

According to the publication by the NGO Transparency Electoral, “all of them demonstrated in some way against the Maduro government, (…) and suffered this aggression from Cuban agents and the Bolivarian National Guard, who make no distinction between age, profession, or form of protest.”

In March 2014, then-deputy Maria Corina Machado and other Venezuelan opposition figures marched in Caracas and other cities against “Cuban interference” in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Armed Forces.

“We know that at this moment, they are listening to us, and we speak to their conscience; we are going to liberate Venezuela, and we will liberate the Armed Forces from the humiliating presence of Cuban officials and Cuban military personnel,” said Machado, who led the protest around the La Carlota airbase in eastern Caracas.

On August 7, 2024, the NGO Provea denounced on social media Maduro’s representative before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination for claiming that “the right to protest is guaranteed in Venezuela” without mentioning that “in 2017 alone, 2,553 people were detained, and in 2024, more than 2,200 have been detained in one week of protests (after the July 28th elections). Added to this are the 3,802 injured in 2017 and the 143 deaths that same year.”

Cubans Behind Torture Tactics in Venezuela, According to Report

The 2023-2024 annual report by the CASLA Institute on crimes against humanity in Venezuela denounces that Cuban intelligence officers run Venezuelan intelligence services and “have built a state torture apparatus.”

The investigation points to increased repression in Venezuela, with a rise in arrests and torture of politicians, journalists, military personnel, influencers, relatives of imprisoned individuals, and exiles.

Tamara Suju, a Venezuelan lawyer specializing in human rights, denounced that the Maduro regime applies “medieval torture methods,” including metal shackles, drownings, beatings, and hangings. According to the activist, they also pull out prisoners’ teeth, insert needles under their nails, and administer electric shocks to their genitals.

Moreover, the intelligence agency officers also employ psychological torture. According to the report, Cuban officers often participate in these torture sessions.

In late 2018, the CASLA Institute reported to the International Criminal Court (ICC) the involvement of Cuban officials and intelligence officers in planning and committing the crime of torture.

Ronald Dugarte, an aviation lieutenant who defected in 2019, is one of the former officials interviewed by the CASLA Institute. In his testimony, he denounced the existence of torture facilities “within military units located inside Fort Tiuna and in clandestine places, of which only Cuban militia personnel and colectivos [Chavista paramilitaries] know the location.”

The investigative journalism portal Armando.info cites in a 2022 report the statements of exiled lawyer Zair Mundaray, a former prosecutor in the Venezuelan Public Ministry, who “claims that DGCIM (military counter intelligence) officials’ testimonies coincide in pointing to Cuban advisors in the institutionalization of physical and psychological torture in the country in recent years.”

In a video from March 2024, from The Hague —headquarters of the International Criminal Court— Sujú stated: “We need to recover Venezuela (…) from all those agents and paramilitary organizations invading it. But we also need to recover, besides our democracy and our institutions, our dignity. It is unacceptable that foreign agents are responsible for repression and inducing crimes against humanity in our country against our compatriots.”

UN Mission Confirms Cuba’s Role in Persecuting Opponents in Venezuela

The findings of the CASLA Institute report align with those of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, established by the UN Human Rights Council, which revealed that Cuba trained Venezuelan military personnel to punish dissent.

The report investigated 223 cases of extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and torture in Venezuela. Additionally, 2,891 other incidents were reviewed to corroborate patterns of violations and crimes.

Francisco Cox, an expert member of the Mission, said in a conversation broadcast by Amnesty International: “We were able to find documentation that we physically saw of a 2008 memorandum of understanding between the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, which provided for this advisory role, the creation of a new agency within DGCIM (military counterintelligence), and training in tracking, infiltration, and determining military objectives.”

According to the lawyer, “crimes against humanity, committed through state intelligence agencies, orchestrated by individuals at the highest levels of authority, have occurred in a climate of almost total impunity. The international community must do everything possible to ensure that victims’ rights to justice and reparation are guaranteed.”

“The International Community Has Been Unable to Do Anything”

Student leader Villca Fernández declared in 2014, while in hiding in Venezuela, that he would never regret fighting for his country’s democracy and freedom and that this battle includes the Cuban regime, “which ultimately gives the orders.”

Fernández added: “Our sovereignty has been violated by a dictatorship that tries to establish itself in our country, and we will not allow this. The struggle is for life but also for our country’s sovereignty.”

Human rights lawyer and advocate Laritza Diversent, director of the legal advisory center Cubalex, argued during a 2020 conference organized by the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL) that for more than six decades, the international community ignored the repressive and dictatorial system imposed by the Castros on the island.

“If measures had been taken with Cuba, they would have known how to address the Venezuelan crisis, which has a very severe humanitarian crisis,” said Diversent, who is exiled in the United States. “The international community has been unable to do anything. The mechanisms are ineffective against dictatorial governments. What more do we have to wait for in the face of what is happening in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua?”