Graham: Cuba's Communist Regime on Way Out

Cuba's communist regime is on the way out, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Sunday.

"You just wait for Cuba. Cuba is a communist dictatorship that's killed priests and nuns. They've preyed on their own people. Their days are numbered," Graham told reporters Sunday while traveling to Washington, D.C., with President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One.

"Cuba looks like it's ready to fall. I don't know if they're going to hold out," Trump himself said, adding: "Cuba only survives because of Venezuela."

"It's very similar [to Venezuela] in the sense that we want to help the people in Cuba, but we want to also help the people that were forced out of Cuba and are living in this country."

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants to the U.S., made similar comments following the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

He told NBC News that Cuba's government has been a "huge problem" for the U.S. when he was asked if the Trump administration would go after its government next.

"I think they're in a lot of trouble, yes. I'm not going to talk to you about what our future steps are going to be and our policies are going to be right now in this regard, but 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 said.

A defiant Maduro on Monday declared himself "the president of my country" as he protested his capture and pleaded not guilty to federal drug trafficking charges that the Trump administration used to justify removing him from power in Venezuela.

Maduro's court appearance in Manhattan, his first since he and his wife, Cilia Flores, were seized from their Caracas home Saturday in a stunning middle-of-the-night military operation, kicked off the U.S. government's most consequential prosecution in decades of a foreign head of state. She also pleaded not guilty.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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