By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on December 4, 2025 from Havana
Stickers indicating Venezuela needs to be saved on display in a supermarket in Doral, Florida, December 2, 2025. Photo: AFP
The vice of “anonymous sources” in the United States’ war against Venezuela has turned lies into a comfortable and profitable sanctuary. Montaigne warned of this centuries ago: “The deterioration of truth has a thousand aspects and an indefinite scope. The Pythagoreans assert that good is certain and finite; evil, infinite and uncertain.”
I read with astonishment that the problem in convincing Nicolás Maduro to relinquish power is that his “Cuban handlers could execute him if he yields to US pressure and resigns.” The phrase appeared a week ago as a leak in an Axios report (https:// l1nq.com/51WRH), attributed to unnamed and faceless US officials, and within hours it was circulating on websites, social media, and in columns as if it were a proven fact.
The conjecture is now a resounding headline: Maduro “could be executed by Cuban spies if he leaves the country,” “the United States believes that Cuba would be willing to assassinate Nicolás Maduro if he tries to escape from Venezuela.” The hypothesis, born in the shadows of an anonymous leak, was presented to the public as another piece of geopolitical “realism,” when in fact it had not even passed the minimum threshold of verification.
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal (https://l1nq.com/NZs8P) echoes the narrative and repeats that the Venezuelan president “is not entirely in control of his own destiny” because Havana’s allies would condition his political survival. No one remembers anymore that all this comes from the most mendacious government in recent US history (it was not the newspaper Granma, but The Washington Post Fact Checker that counted more than 30,000 false or misleading statements by Donald Trump).
The murderous fantasy of “Cuban spies” willing to kill Maduro serves several very specific purposes. First, it demonizes Cuba and presents its government not only as an “authoritarian regime,” but as a criminal structure capable of eliminating a foreign leader in cold blood. It is no longer just about former security adviser John Bolton’s old “troika of tyranny” referring to Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, but about presenting the Cuban intelligence services as an international assassination apparatus.
Second, it erases the Venezuelan state: if Maduro is merely a hostage of Havana, Venezuelan society, its armed forces, and its political actors disappear from the picture, reduced to extras in a plot written in another capital. Third, it contributes to creating a sense of the inevitability of war: if Havana were willing to prevent any resignation “by force,” diplomacy is discredited from the outset and political solutions are portrayed as naive illusions.
The lie, therefore, is not an isolated outburst, but part of a campaign to consolidate the impression that there are no political paths left and that “tougher” options are inevitable. The coda in this equation is that, after Caracas, the next natural target would be Havana. The editorial in The Wall Street Journal even fantasizes about the possibility that, once a “democratic” government is installed in Venezuela, “the Cuban people would rise up against their dictators,” as if the region were the chessboard of a single, sequenced offensive.
Accepting this economy of anonymous leaks means reproducing the same framework that makes it seem reasonable to discuss the overthrow of a foreign government from the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. Asking who benefits from the dissemination of stories such as that of the “Cuban handlers” and demanding proof before elevating them to the status of news is not a gesture of automatic sympathy toward any government; it should be a minimal defense of the right of peoples not to have their destiny decided amid hallway rumors, psychological operations, and editorials in The Wall Street Journal.
It is common sense that in the face of “infinite and uncertain” misinformation, as Montaigne suggested, the defense of verifiable truth is a form of resistance. But we already know that common sense is often the scarcest of commodities.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English