Venezuela, Cuba, and the U.S. Empire
The January 3, kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores by the United States is a body blow to the International class struggle. Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution,” continued by Nicholas Maduro, provided a continuous supply of oil to revolutionary socialist Cuba. Cuba reciprocated, providing doctors for the Venezuelan working class, rural and poor people who never had access to them before. Thirty-two Cuban bodyguards for President Maduro were killed by the United States. It cannot be emphasized enough that without oil, the Cuban Revolution is placed in the gravest danger, probably more so than during the “Special Period of Peace,” when the Soviet Union collapsed back to capitalism, cutting off huge amounts of trade and supplies to Cuba during the early nineties.
Both Mexico and Venezuela have submitted to armed and economic blackmail cutting oil shipments to Cuba. Under threat of U.S. bombing, invasion, and further economic strangulation, the Chavismo1 movement, under Delcy Rodriguez, has privatized Venezuela’s oil. A working-class revolution that takes the Cuban road is the only way to liberate Venezuela. So that Venezuela and Cuba do not have to stand alone, masses of people have to stand against their governments to take the heat off Cuba and Venezuela and allow them access to the world market and neutralize the aggression of their imperial overlords.
A Financial Times January 31, article titled, “Cuban Doctors’ Departure From Venezuela Saps Havana Of Vital Revenue” by Joe Daniels and Ana Rodriguez Brazor, reports, “In the weeks following Maduro’s daring nighttime abduction, scores of Cuban doctors—a pillar of the country’s populist health programs and a symbol of close ties between socialist allies, have quietly left their posts and returned to Havana.” “Some patients organized send-offs for their Cuban caregivers.” “It’s not fair,” said one of the patients who identified as a Chavista, as supporters of the government are known. “We revolutionary Chavistas support the Cuban doctors but after January 3, they started taking them away.”
As revolutionary socialists, we are required to stay optimistic, giving us the ability to shine the light on the weaknesses of international capitalism even when it appears invincible. While Trump and a significant part of the ruling class—that ruling class who projects their perspectives through the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal—celebrated the Maduro kidnapping and seizure of Venezuelan oil assets, the setting up of a CIA office, and placing the entire country into a receivership with the Qatar banks controlling Venezuela’s finances. That same U.S. ruling class, represented by the Trump regime, is being resisted by citizens all over the United States.
In Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti laid down their lives to resist ICE raids sweeping up working-class immigrants. Bruce Springsteen wrote an anthem song dedicated to the fight against ICE and the cruelty of the Trump regime. Lady Gaga paused during a concert expressing dismay at the government’s hatred and intolerance of immigrants. President Trump and Vice President Vance can’t even attend sporting events without getting booed.
The U.S.-enabled Gaza genocide has laid bare the apartheid and exterminatory nature of the Zionist project in Israel. It has united Jewish and Arab peoples to oppose it aggressively in the United States. Many citizens have turned against their nation states for supporting Israel. Even within Israel, a small portion of the population assembled in the streets denouncing genocide. As the 21st century comes into its third decade, mass action becomes a tool of resistance as capitalist wars, genocide, and austerity compel people to act in self-defense.
Our future, to right the wrongs inflicted by the international capitalist class, will be determined in the streets and eventually, the working class will have no choice but to use their innate power at the point of production to shut down capitalist machinery and choke off the profits to begin the process of self-defense and ultimately, remove this increasingly dangerous minority capitalist class from power.
We can never acquiesce to the idea that the United States has the right to lay hands on Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and the First Lady, Cilia Flores, even though most of the world, except Cuba, has abandoned them to their fate. The Trump regime is unhinged and openly defying international standards like blowing up speed boats traveling the Caribbean Sea, killing the passengers without out a shred of evidence that they are running drugs. The international standard is to gather evidence and not summarily execute innocent people.
Drug running is an absolute phony issue. Trump has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, a former Honduran President convicted of drug running, prosecuted on a mountain of evidence for his complicity and sentenced to 45 years in prison by the United States.
“Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces” by Seth Harp and “One Nation Under Blackmail Vol 1 and 2” by Whitney Webb, exposes the United States Special Forces and CIA involvement in drug running and doing business with banking concerns known for laundering drug money. The United States occupation of Afghanistan enabled the entire globe to be flooded with cheap heroin. This is detailed thoroughly in Harp’s book. The CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command looked the other way on poppy cultivation, hoping the Afghanistan war lords would make reliable allies against the resurgent Taliban. Harp’s book notes that the JSOC essentially ran a death squad war.
Professor Michel Chossudovsky, reporting for a think tank called Global Research, cited in his article, “Heroin Addiction in America Spearheaded by U.S. Led war in Afghanistan” published in 2018, cited:
“There were 189,000 heroin users in the U.S. in 2001, before the U.S.-NATO invasion of Afghanistan, by 2012-2013, there were 3.8 million users in the U.S. according to a study by the Columbian University Mailman School of Public Health.”
A country like the United States, neck-deep in the drug trade, has no right to falsely accuse President Nicholas Maduro and Cilia Flores for drug trafficking.
On February 9th, U.S. military forces seized an oil tanker carrying Venezuelan oil in the Indian Ocean that was bound for China. A posting from the U.S. Department of War explained, “The Department of War will deny illicit actors and their proxies the ability to defy American power in the global maritime domain.” The United States has pirated a total of eight tankers carrying Venezuelan oil. This aggressive declaration by the U.S. Department of War, proclaims—expect piracy and violence if we deem your commerce runs counter to American interests. We are in charge of the entire maritime globe.
Imagine if any nation declared itself the supreme arbiter of global maritime commerce? The U.S. would mobilize all its military assets to terrorize that nation into submission. The world is realizing that the United States is a rapacious, expansionist state using brutal military power and economic strangulation, desperate to hold its diminishing influence on the planet.
A telling January 5, 2026, Wall Street Journal editorial titled, “The International Law Illusion ‘In Venezuela’” reveals how the U.S. ruling class sees its place in an ever-competitive world where nation states pursue their independent aims in the marketplace and their political relations with other nation states:
“It would be nice to think that we live in a Wilsonian garden where international law governs relations among nations. We don’t. The closest we’ve come was in the aftermath of the Cold War, when the U.S. was dominant globally and rallied coalitions to enforce international norms in the first Gulf War and the Balkans. Today rogue regimes are on the march and international law, and institutions upholding it end up protecting the law breakers.”
(Quite a laughable piece of writing coming from the U.S. ruling class engaged in high seas piracy and blowing up speed boats, killing their passengers as a prelude to abduct a head of state.)
The editorial continues:
“The only defense against global rouges is the deterrent of Western military force. [What arrogant, racist bluster!] That force was on display with flawless precision in snatching Mr. Maduro. And the demonstration of U.S. nerve and military prowess will do more than a thousand UN resolutions to the free world and make Russia, China, and Iran think twice.”
China is showing great restraint not responding to their oil being stolen on February 9th. War with Russia and China would bring ruination to the United States. There was a time when empires could declare a “Pax Romana.”2 Humanity functions at a higher level now. We have a sense of inalienable civil rights, a belief that wealth should not be hoarded while imposing austerity on the majority of the population. There is a healthy nationalism, in even the most backward states, that independence is worth fighting and dying for rather than be occupied by a great power. China and Russia think twice? The entire world saw the United States defeated in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Nation states are dealing most carefully using caution, appeasement and holding out olive branches for negotiations with the United States, much like you would deal with any unpredictable insane person that could lash out and cause you great harm. The United States will not be able to play the unhinged, crazy-like-a-fox-game before its bluff is called. There will be a push back from the capitalist nation states.
Cuba and Venezuela have suffered decades of life-choking sanctions devastating both their economies. Access to the world marketplace is a necessity for obtaining raw materials, medicines, food, machines and spare parts. There are rules to participating in the world marketplace. Rule number one, profits come before people. Cuba and Venezuela were sanctioned by the United States and enabled by a docile international capitalist class who posed no real opposition to this criminality. Cuba and Venezuela committed the most grievous offense by using their resources to raise the material and cultural level of their working and farming people. Breaking rule number two, they committed insubordination against the United States running their countries independently. The world capitalist class accuses Cuba and Venezuela of mismanagement when they were receiving nothing from the world market to manage their economies with.
Cuba has exported medical doctors, technicians, and even helped secure the independence of Angola. They’ve militarily fought the apartheid state of South Africa. There are pictures of kids from African nations attending international camps on the Isle of Pines where the banners of their countries fly on the island. Cuba has made breakthroughs in cancer treatments where even American citizens were able to go to get treated. There are daycare centers, nursing homes, cultural centers, sports gymnasiums, dance and music schools available for all their citizens. For all these great things, heroic Cuba could collapse because the Trump administration has resorted to 16th and 17th century piracy that was practiced by the emerging maritime powers of the day, Spain, Britain and France.
Cuba and Venezuela’s fate are bound up with the international class struggle. Until mass forces hit the stage, we hope that Cuba can find a powerful nation state great enough to ship oil to its shores. Solidarity with the Venezuelan and Cuban working-classes! Oil for Cuba! Release President Maduro and Cilia Flores. Down with U.S. Imperialism, the number one criminal state against humanity.
1 Chavismo is a Venezuelan political ideology and movement based on the ideas of former president Hugo Chavez emphasizing “socialism in the 21st century,” nationalism, and anti-imperialism.
2 The Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”) was a roughly 200-year period of relative stability, prosperity, and territorial expansion in the Roman Empire, lasting from 27 BCE to 180 CE. Initiated by Emperor Augustus, this “golden age” featured economic growth, 70 million people, and major architectural advancements like concrete, though it still involved military expansion and, often, brutal repression of border revolts.