The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

the New York Times understood the problem, running a major story on March 17 recounting how Cuban “medical assistance” had been used to shore up Maduro’s support among Venezuela’s poor and held back from those unwilling to carry out Maduro’s orders.45 The article demonstrated the extent of Cuba’s penetration of Maduro’s regime and how bad conditions in Venezuela were. In addition, a top Venezuelan General who defected to Colombia described publicly later in the week the extent of the corruption inside the country’s medical program, adding further evidence of the rot within the regime.46 The Wall Street Journal carried an article shortly thereafter detailing Maduro’s loss of support among Venezuela’s poor, something we’d believed since the outset of the rebellion in January.