President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to orchestrate regime change in Cuba before the end of this year, emboldened by the recent capture of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, according to a report.

The administration is “searching for Cuban government insiders who can help cut a deal to push out the Communist regime,” The Wall Street Journal reports, noting that its officials had met with exiles and civic groups in Miami and Washington in the hoping of identifying an official in Havana ready to “see the writing on the wall.”

Trump’s team reportedly do not have “a concrete plan” in place for toppling Cuba’s Communist government, in place since Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959, and former Obama administration official Ricardo Zuniga has warned of the difficulty of achieving such a goal.

“These guys are a much tougher nut to crack,” Zuniga told the WSJ. “There’s nobody who would be tempted to work on the U.S. side.”

Workers fly the Cuban flag at half-staff near the American embassy in Havana in memory of the 32 Cubans who died during the U.S. raid on Venezuela (AP)

Trump has made his intentions towards Cuba plain since the fall of Maduro, who was abducted along with his wife Cilia Flores in a dramatic raid on Caracas in the early hours of January 3 that saw them spirited away to New York to answer federal narco-terrorism charges, to which the ousted president pleaded not guilty.

“Cuba lived, for many years, on large amounts of OIL and MONEY from Venezuela,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on January 11.

“In return, Cuba provided ‘Security Services’ for the last two Venezuelan dictators, BUT NOT ANYMORE! THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles raised in Miami’s anti-communist Cuban expatriate community, has also spent much of his career denouncing leftist governments in South America over their hostility towards the U.S. and has long advocated for regime change in his ancestral homeland.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are reportedly feeling emboldened to turn their attention towards Cuba (AP)

The administration believes now is the time to strike because Cuba’s economy is in danger of collapse, dealing with chronic shortages of basic goods and medicines and suffering regular power outages, according to U.S. intelligence assessments cited by the WSJ.

The country benefited from subsidized Venezuelan oil under Maduro and Hugo Chavez before him and Washington is now in a position to completely cut off that supply, now that it is dictating terms to Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodriguez, which would further weaken the government in Havana.

However, the temptation to see Venezuela as a “blueprint” for action in Cuba arguably overlooks the fact that, despite Maduro’s authoritarian rule, Caracas was at least nominally a democracy and had an existing political opposition, tolerated protests and staged regular elections, which is not the case in the single-party state across the water.

Miguel Díaz-Canel is the president of Cuba (AP)

“Cuba’s rulers are incompetent Marxists who have destroyed their country, and they have had a major setback with the Maduro regime that they are responsible for propping up,” a White House official told the WSJ, repeating Trump’s demand that they “make a deal before it’s too late.”

The State Department meanwhile said that it is in the U.S.’s national security interests for Havana “to be competently run by a democratic government and to refuse to host our adversaries’ military and intelligence services.”