“You have to accept that your time is up,” said the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, addressing the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela.
MIAMI, United States. –The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2025stated that, once freedom is achieved in his country, he will promote the democratic cause on the Island. “Rest assured that as soon as we liberate Venezuela, we will continue for the freedom of Cuba and the freedom of Nicaragua,” he said in an interview with journalist Mario Pentónof Martí News.
Machado placed Venezuela “already in a decisive phase, in the final stage, after 26 years of tyranny,” after “overcoming all obstacles” and having “faced this ferocious tyranny.” In his count he included “thousands and thousands and thousands of Venezuelans murdered, imprisoned, disappeared” and stressed that “a third” of the country “has had to flee in the last 15 years.” “We are now in a moment where we see freedom so close to our reach and the regime, effectively, in its weakest position,” he added.
Asked by Pentón about the deployment of US military forces in the Caribbean, near the coast of Venezuela, and the official confirmation that the CIA could work in Venezuelan territory, Machado responded that the people of her country “heartily appreciate the firm position that the President’s Administration has adopted.” [Donald] Trump.”
Likewise, he maintained that Venezuela “is not just another dictatorship,” but “a criminal, narco-terrorist system” that operates “a hub of organized crime” and that cutting “the flow of drugs” has an impact inside and outside of Venezuela because “no money is coming in to [Nicolás] Maduro” to repress.
Regarding Cuba, Machado stated that “from day one, when he arrived [Hugo] Chávez, there was already a great alliance and an agreement with Fidel Castro,” which led to “the total surrender of national sovereignty to another regime.” He assured that Cuban agents infiltrated the intelligence bodies, the Armed Forces and “various ministries.” He added that many of the Cubans sent to Venezuela [médicos y otros profesionales exportados por el régimen de la Isla] “they were deeply mistreated and persecuted” and that “Venezuela gave him and continues to give him oil [al régimen de Cuba]because it is totally free, the Cuban regime does not pay for it.”
In his direct message to Havana and Caracas, he noted: “You have to accept that your time is up, that we have really entered a phase where impunity is over.” In his opinion, “for their own good, Nicolás Maduro and the Cuban regime must understand that what is best for them is to accept the terms for a negotiated exit. But if it is not negotiated, they will still leave.”
Machado also addressed the Cuban people: “Have confidence, have confidence.” He said that they have “great allies in the United States, in the United States Congress,” and mentioned the Cuban-American congressmen. Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez and Maria Elvira Salazaras well as the current Secretary of State, also a Cuban-American Marco Rubio. “I want to visit a free Cuba and I want to receive you in a prosperous, luminous, democratic Venezuela, very soon,” he added.
In another passage of the interview, he expressed regional optimism: “I believe that this is a unique moment, I am very optimistic (…), I feel that our people have reached a saturation point of these outdated communist ideas (…) and that the liberation of Venezuela (…) is going to bring expansive waves of energy, of hope.”
Finally, she sent a message to the women who resist in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. She remembered the Ladies in White and a meeting with Berta Soler, leader of the women’s organization. “In Cuba as in Venezuela, women were always in the front row (…), and women are like lionesses (…) when it comes to defending our family, our children,” she said, before insisting that she will not rest “until we see an absolutely free and democratic Cuba.”
