Nicaragua and Cuba in the mirror of Venezuela

The so-called “troika of tyranny” in Latin America — the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — coined by John Bolton, national security advisor during Donald Trump’s first presidency, was actually always a misleading oversimplification.

Despite sharing some common elements due to their authoritarian resilience, 21st-century dictatorships were never a homogeneous bloc, and beyond their strengths and weaknesses, their differences warrant the design of differentiated policies for each country, as is indeed happening under Trump’s second presidency, albeit always under the exclusive banner of MAGA interests. Three months after Nicolás Maduro’s removal by force, the only clear lesson from Venezuela is that the paths of the improvised “Donroe Doctrine” do not necessarily lead to a transition to democracy.

For over 60 years, Cuba has been a state dictatorship ruled by the army and a single party. Its inefficient, centralized state-run economy, exacerbated by the U.S. embargo, relies on massive external subsidies, first from the USSR and later from Chavista Venezuela. Before reaching the stage of collapse the country has been experiencing for several years, the Cuban regime either rejected or was unable to implement profound economic and political reforms after the “Special Period” in the 1990s, during Barack Obama’s opening in 2014, and following the 2021 protests. This past failure represents its greatest vulnerability to pressure from Trump.

Venezuela, under the populist dictatorship of Hugo Chávez, became Cuba’s main economic backer and only partially Nicaragua’s until 2017. With Maduro as heir and coordinator of an authoritarian regime, the economic collapse and political repression continued, triggering a mass exodus, culminating in the monumental theft of the 2024 presidential elections. The United States’ military intervention ousted Maduro from power but left the Chavista regime intact, now headed by Delcy Rodríguez, to control oil and natural resources in an authoritarian “innovation” that Luz Mely Reyes describes as “a kind of 21st-century colonialism.”

Nicaragua is a dynastic dictatorship, transformed into a marital “co-dictatorship.” Ironically, its fragility lies in the extreme centralization of power in a personalist regime that, like the Somoza dictatorship in the last century, depends on a single family, yet enjoys far greater economic autonomy than Cuba and Venezuela. According to the latest Varieties of Democracy report (V-Dem 2025), Nicaragua is the least democratic country in Latin America, even below Venezuela and Cuba, and ranks fifth among the world’s worst autocracies after Eritrea (179), North Korea (178), Myanmar (177) and Afghanistan (176). However, in Nicaragua there are no power outages, the economy is stable, and its dynamism depends on exports from the private sector to the United States market and on family remittances from migrants in that country, which represent more than 50% of the national economy.

With the fall in oil prices between 2018 and 2020, the three Latin American dictatorships survived the decline of the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) as a club of autocracies aligned with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, immune to the diplomatic pressures of the OAS and the European Union, whose political vacuum around the democratic agenda was filled by the United States’ policy of force.

The capture of Maduro led to a regime overseen by Donald Trump, who cut off Venezuela’s economic cooperation with Cuba and severed military and security ties. Under the U.S. oil embargo, Cuba has no economic way out, but still retains reserves of state repression to try to contain a new outbreak of social protest, while negotiations begin with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, led by the GAESA business conglomerate, the military-party-business alliance that is projected as the core of the stability Trump demands in a transition, whatever the outcome.

Devastating political blow

The fall of Maduro in Venezuela has had no economic impact on Nicaragua, but the political blow has been devastating for Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. The message is clear: given the determination to use force, even outside the bounds of international law, the co-dictators are expendable, and there is no international ally that can offer them protection. On the other hand, it warns Nicaraguans that the end of the co-dictators does not necessarily represent the restoration of freedom and democracy. Rather, it creates perverse incentives among the political heirs to power and places the country in a holding pattern that political scientist Manuel Orozco, a researcher at the Inter-American Dialogue, summarizes as follows: “There is no domino effect — after Venezuela and Cuba — but Nicaragua remains on the United States’ agenda.”

The Venezuelan crisis has already triggered paranoia in Nicaragua’s co-dictator Rosario Murillo, leading her to order increased control, surveillance, and repression against potential opponents, including the more than 10,000 deportees who have been secretly received as part of her collaboration with Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. And although there are no signs of any official negotiations with the United States, a frenetic wave of activity has erupted among the political and civic opposition in exile, based on an irrefutable argument: if Trump excluded the opposition led by María Corina Machado from the Venezuelan transaction after Edmundo González’s landslide victory in the 2024 election, and advises them against returning to the country to maintain authoritarian stability in Venezuela, what can be expected in Nicaragua, where the opposition leadership is not only fragmented but, despite widespread rejection of the regime, has not yet validated its legitimacy and cannot freely express itself under the police state?

Therefore, among the five opposition platforms —Concertación Democrática Monteverde (CxL, Unamos, UNAB), Espacio de Diálogo, Alianza Universitaria Nicaragüense, PUDE-Ruta por el Cambio, and Gran Confederación Opositora — urgent calls have emerged to create a “Transition Commission,” agree on a roadmap for democratic transition, and assume peremptory demands for unity in action to bring about the suspension of the police state.

As political scientist and former political prisoner Félix Maradiaga, founder of Ruta por el Cambio, points out, “Nicaragua cannot afford to miss this opportunity: waiting for the Trump administration to do the work for us in the opposition would be a mistake. Washington can exert pressure, but the legitimacy of the opposition and its minimum cohesion are tasks that only Nicaraguans can resolve. Outsourcing these responsibilities is political abdication.”

The million-dollar question is: how can the power of a police state be broken from exile to restore democratic freedoms, or how can an authoritarian power that has managed to maintain total control, despite the wounds and fractures caused by purges and political revenge, be fractured from within?

Without a doubt, Trump’s actions have set the clock ticking for dictators, but dismantling dictatorships and achieving democratic transition requires, in addition to legitimate leadership, a combination of risk-taking and political audacity; a minimum program for democratic transition; political incentives to form alliances that include dissidents and former allies of the regime; and an international, Latin American, and European environment that counterbalances the Trump doctrine and prioritizes democracy.

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