Cuban External Affairs Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla attended a ceremony in Caracas, Venezuela, on Thursday to honor the 32 Cuban Communist Party agents killed during the arrest of deposed dictator Nicolás Maduro last week.

Rodríguez’s appearance, alongside interim Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodríguez (no relation), was the most high-profile public engagement by a Cuban communist official in Venezuela since Maduro’s arrest. Rodríguez spoke to honor those fallen in defense of the illegitimate narco-dictator and to send a message that the Cuban Communist Party was not yet abandoning its colonialist mission in the country.

Maduro and his wife and “first combatant” Cilia Flores were arrested on Saturday in an American law enforcement action that rapidly infiltrated Caracas, broke through the Miraflores Palace’s Cuban-led security, and extracted its targets. Both are expected to go on trial in the Southern District of New York for a long list of crimes including “narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machineguns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machineguns and destructive devices against the United States.” The U.S. government had offered a $50 million bounty for information leading to Maduro’s arrest, which no one earned, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted on Saturday.

While no Americans were killed during the operation to extract Maduro and the number of Venezuelan casualties remains unclear at press time, the Cuban Communist Party announced this week that it had lost 32 soldiers who died defending a foreign dictator.

“Faithful to their responsibilities for security and defense, our compatriots fulfilled their duty with dignity and heroism and fell, after fierce resistance, in direct combat against the attackers or as a result of the bombing of the facilities,” Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, confirmed this week.

Delcy Rodríguez presided over a ceremony on Thursday honoring these individuals, alongside the Cuban Foreign Minister. Bruno Rodríguez used his remarks at the ceremony to declare that Cubans and Venezuelans under communism were effectively the same people and that the demise of Maduro would not change that.

“The blood of both peoples was drawn on Venezuelan soil, as it should be with brotherly nations,” Bruno Rodríguez declared. “Cuba comes to offer an emotional tribute to the Cuban combatants who, in unequal combat, faced the imperialist enemy that desecrated the sovereignty of the Venezuelan nation.”

The foreign minister promised that the Cuban Communist Party would continue to be a dominant power in the current chavista era.

“The Bolivarian and Chavista Revolution and the Cuban Revolution, in their destinies and common struggle, will be examples for the liberation of the peoples of our America,” Bruno Rodríguez declared. “We will continue in our work in the defense of peace, in international mobilization, in the campaign to defend international law, and the rights to life and peace of peoples.”

In reality, Cuba is far from a defender of international law. A U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism, the Cuban communist regime maintains close ties to some of the world’s most nefarious regimes and non-state actors, including the governments of Iran and China as well as terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Delcy Rodríguez addressed the event to similarly call Cuban communists “heroes of this fatherland.”

“Like one people, they fought defensively before the illegal and illegitimate aggression,” the Venezuelan acting head of state claimed. “We are united in love, our concept of fatherland is that the fatherland is humanity.”

The commitment to the Cuban regime from Delcy Rodríguez, notorious as one of the most radical Marxists in Maduro’s orbit, is notable given her cooperation so far with the Trump administration. Trump has described her as conciliatory and claimed she has spent hours on the phone regularly working with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The Cuban communist regime has maintained close ties to chavista Venezuelan since Chávez’s time in power and dramatically expanded its stranglehold on the country under Maduro.

“He [Maduro] spent a lot of time in Cuba; it’s the reason the Cubans wanted him to be [late dictator Hugo] Chávez’s successor: because he is committed to that model,” Rubio explained in a 2019 interview with Breitbart News. “But the majority of the people in his inner circle, the key people, the seven to eight people that really hold up the regime, are not ideological, to varying degrees, but not like him.”

Rubio exempted from that analysis only Delcy Rodríguez, her brother Jorge, and Flores, the first lady, who he described as ideologically committed enough to be less open to turning against Maduro at the time. The secretary of state reiterated concerns in the White House regarding Cuba’s relationship to what is left of chavismo in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press last weekend.

“I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro,” Rubio explained in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “His entire, like, internal security force, his internal security apparatus is entirely controlled by Cubans.”

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