Cuba is very worried about its colonial outpost in South America. Things are not going well there. The Viceroy is ailing just as the province is having serious difficulties in providing the monthly stipends due to the imperial metropolis, Havana. Thus measures had to be taken before the natives become more restless than what they already are.
First, the Viceroy needs to be controlled tightly. His ailments cannot be let known by all and any. His planned health trips have to take place in Havana where it is easier to hide the side effects of chemotherapy. The problem is that the masters have not found yet someone reliable enough to replace him, or politically skillful enough to make sure that the stipends keep coming, and to make sure that the natives keep believing they are an independent nation.
Thus as a second measure Cuba will pretend the Viceroy is still in charge while a radical team is left in Caracas to manage the day to day. Since all is said in Orwellian jargon, by radical we must understand ultra conservative in that the team left in charge with the Viceroy´s Brother at the helm is comprised of people that want to keep unchanged the link between Cuba and Venezuela, the people that cannot tolerate that Venezuela were to become an independent nation.
In third there is a need to tighten control over the natives. These are under the strange impression that they are still a protectorate and not an outright colony. Under protectorate systems the masters still associate to a certain level the natives to the local administration, Independence is just "temporally suspended". This might have been true in Venezuela until a few years ago but since 2007 at the very least Venezuela is a colony, the year when a minority felt enabled to impose its will over the majority. The unfortunate side effect of this confusion is that there are still ways to convey news and opinions, even if self censored to a great extent; and there are elections even if the outcomes are increasingly rigged. Thus the new measures to put in jail whomever says the truth and whomever does good at opinion polls threatening the Cuban colonial system.