Cuban soldiers during a demonstration honoring the 32 combatants killed in the US attack on Venezuela. Source: Miguel Díaz-Canel/Facebook
Yohandris Varona Torres, a Cuban combatant and survivor of the US attack on Venezuela, describes the events of January 3.
Cuba honored 32 soldiers who fell in combat with the US army on January 3 in Venezuela, carrying out security activities legally agreed upon with the Caracas government. Many of the Cubans killed were part of the personal security detail of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was kidnapped after the attack and transferred to the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans attended the ceremonies commemorating the fallen in what the Cuban government described as a new attack against the Revolution.
But not all Cubans who fought against US forces died. Little by little, the testimonies of Cuban soldiers who survived a clearly uneven fight have been revealed.
The testimony of a surviving combatant
Among them is Yohandris Varona Torres, who gave an interview to Adelante, a Cuban media outlet. Varona had been in Venezuela for just over two months as a security guard until the day of the intervention, where, according to Venezuelan authorities, 100 people died and 100 more were injured.
“We fought there against the planes that were firing at us. Even though our weapons were smaller, we didn’t stop fighting; we confronted them. I am trained, and I know how to fight, but they were superior to us. At that moment, my only thought was to fight. We had to shoot, and I started doing so,” said Varona during the commemoration ceremony for the fallen combatants.
Regarding his personal experience during the attack, Varona stated that despite the narrative that the mainstream media tried to impose, the forces on the ground did confront US troops: “That night, I had gone on duty at midnight and was supposed to be there for six hours. The attack took place at approximately 2:00 a.m. It was dawn. Everything was dark. If a helicopter comes at you, the only thing you can do is shoot at it and defend yourself. That’s how it was. We were shooting until the very last moment.”
Varona also spoke about the huge technological gap between Venezuelan and US forces. The same argument had already been made by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who explained the difference in weaponry and military infrastructure between the troops defending Venezuelan soil and the US attackers.
In addition, Varona said that after the attack, there was dispersion, and that there was no timely support to collect their dead compatriots: “Our comrades are a glory for all of Cuba. They were my brothers. They were working with me. I saw them all fall, and I carried them all. There was no support from anyone for that, but nobody was left on the field. We preserved them in one of our dormitories. I cannot explain the pain. But at least no one was left in Venezuela. Here they are, in our homeland.”
In the face of threats of possible new aggression against Cuba, during his speech to the crowd honoring the dead, Díaz-Canel said that revolutionaries are willing to fight to the bitter end if a similar or worse attack were to occur against the island. In the same spirit, Yohandris Varona Torres declared: “I will always be at my country’s disposal to fight the enemy wherever necessary. That is what the Commander [Fidel Castro] taught us. And the deaths of my comrades cannot be in vain.”
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Palantir is supporting violent US hegemony. It has no place in UK public services | Ina Fassbender / AFP via Getty Images
Palantir is not a normal software company. It was founded with an explicit mission which remains at the heart of its operations today: to maintain US global domination.
We know exactly what that means. Endless wars. Drone strikes. A vast machinery of surveillance and occupation stretching from Afghanistan and Iraq to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. A world in which Washington’s military reach grows ever longer, and the UK prime minister increasingly behaves less like an ally and more like a compliant poodle, nodding along to whatever the White House demands.
On an investor call last February, Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, said he was “super proud” of what his company does. Perhaps he was referring to Palantir’s role in enabling ICE to target migrant communities and tear families apart. Or perhaps he meant reports that its technology has allegedly helped the Israeli military generate “kill lists” – a practice condemned by human-rights organisations for contributing to the mass civilian casualties we are witnessing in Gaza.
Whatever Karp had in mind, Keir Starmer did not appear troubled. Later that month, he flew to Palantir’s Washington headquarters to kiss the ring of a corporation deeply embedded in the US military and intelligence infrastructure. He did so alongside his then US ambassador, Peter Mandelson – close friend of the late notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – whose lobbying firm, Global Counsel, has long represented Palantir.
Since then, this government has only tightened its embrace. Building on ties established under the Conservatives, Labour is embedding a company accused by campaigners of facilitating human-rights violations deeper and deeper into our public life. Palantir already operates inside the NHS and across Whitehall – particularly within the Ministry of Defence – pulling Britain further into the slipstream of US military priorities and the worst excesses of the American security state.
No company so entangled in foreign military operations and border policing should be anywhere near our public services. Full stop.
Experts and civil liberties campaigners have repeatedly warned about Palantir’s expanding access to sensitive British data, including NHS medical records – data that the US private healthcare industry is eager to exploit. The risks to privacy, accountability and democracy are profound.
Yet, as with the Tories before them, nothing is off the table for this Labour government when it comes to carving up public services for multinational corporations and their lobbyists. Their deference to Washington is now so complete that they barely bother to conceal their enthusiasm for cosying up to Donald Trump’s network of tech-bro oligarchs. We saw this clearly last summer, when Starmer rolled out the red carpet for Palantir and signed off a £1.5bn “strategic partnership” – at the very moment public services across Britain were collapsing under austerity. It begs the question: who, exactly, is Starmer unwilling to roll out the blood-stained red carpet for?
Across the country, libraries are closing. Swimming pools are shutting. Councils are going bankrupt. But somehow, there is always money available for a CIA-funded contractor at the heart of the US war machine.
And it does not stop at Westminster. Palantir’s tentacles are already extending into our communities. In my constituency of Coventry, the Labour-run council awarded the company a £500,000 contract to develop an AI tool for children’s services. Yes – a firm implicated in military targeting abroad and the kidnapping of children as young as five in the US, was hired to shape how we safeguard children here at home.
We fought back. Led by Your Party councillor, Grace Lewis, and backed by our unions and community campaigners, we forced that contract into review. And let me be absolutely clear: we will not stop until it is cancelled entirely.
But this fight is bigger than one contract or one city. We need a politics that draws a clear line: Palantir – and every corporation that profits from occupation, surveillance, genocide and war – has no place in our society and should never again receive a penny of public money.
This country needs a party willing to resist a government that bows to Washington, sells off our public services and hands power to war-profiteering tech giants. That party is Your Party.
And our fight is only just beginning.
Zarah Sultana is the Your Party MP for Coventry South
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth commemorate one year of Trump’s administration. Photo: Department of War
After the illegal US military operation against Venezuela, the United States faces a crisis of legitimacy, even among its own allies.
In these early days of January, we have had to witness what hoped never to see, though it comes as no surprise: the kidnapping of a legitimate sitting president through a criminal act of aggression by the United States.
The initial bewilderment that followed in the first hours after the US military operation has given way to actions of denunciation and expressions of solidarity worldwide. These actions are a result of serious assessment in the face of an overwhelming flow of information (some accurate, others misleading or entirely false) that circulated across social media and the formal media.
Venezuela’s state and government remain intact: the National Assembly convened on January 5 and Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president.
However, dawn has not yet broken over the battlefield.
There is no room for naïve optimism. The fires still burn. The lessons are not yet learned.
The US military assault on Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and National Assembly Deputy Cilia Flores was no “surgical strike”. There is nothing surgical about deploying 150 aircraft, Delta Force units and then the entire ensemble of the US Southern Command (its electronic warfare systems capable of shutting down power and communications). This operation destroyed Venezuela’s military defense systems and other military installations across the country, as well as civilian structures (including warehouses holding medical equipment). Over a hundred Venezuelans were killed resisting the abduction, facing a military equipped with weapons systems funded by more than USD 1 trillion a year.
This is not only a display of power but also of desperation. The final resort after 25 years of failed operations to enact regime change in Venezuela. It is meant as a global warning: a message of force and issued by a power that has been unable to break Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and seize control of the world’s largest oil reserves before time runs out. There is nothing new in this posture. It follows an all-to familiar script from a long history of US interventions: the coups against Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala in 1954, João Goulart of Brazil in 1964, Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and the broader coordinated terror campaign against the entire Left in Latin America through Operation Condor from 1975. Chávez knew this history. Maduro does as well. For a country with strategic resources, nothing is clearer than the need to defend sovereignty (a lesson that is well known across the Global South).
With this criminal operation (one that violates all the norms of what remains of so-called “international law”) the United States faces a crisis of legitimacy, even among its own allies. The face of imperialism is laid bare: the assertion of dominance over all others, in any hemisphere. Propelled by an overwhelming military force and the capacity to strike anywhere in the world, imperialism today goes beyond the Monroe Doctrine. Donald Trump and his ilk want everything and want to lose nothing. Here lies his fragility.
Trump has been forced to confront the absolute failure of the Venezuelan Right. He has withdrawn the fictitiousness of their right to rule and instead has had to accept the continuity of the Chavista leadership. Just as they failed to impose Juan Guaidó, they have now failed with Maria Corina Machado. To place either of them in the Miraflores presidential palace, the US troops would have had to climb the hills around the city and fight street by street against the resistance of a population unified by its hatred of a return to the oligarchy.
Faced with such US aggression, one cannot believe in a path of diplomacy necessarily based on the recognition of sovereign and equal states. The United States interprets the willingness to dialogue of our nations as signs of weakness and pounces like a starving beast. We must never forget this. Nor should we forget that they lie.
The battlefield has a military component, in which the United States have carried out a mission successfully. But it has other components (economic, political, ethical, symbolic fronts) that are contested. The protagonist of these dimensions is the Venezuelan people, mobilizing their memory, their recent history, their dignity, their victories, and their protagonism. The people mobilized under Chávez’s enduring gaze.
The role of Cuba
For Cuba, blockaded for more than 60 years and accused by the same empire of being a state sponsor of terrorism and a failed state, there is no other path than to deepen anti-imperialism.
The ties between Cuba and Venezuela were born from the admiration José Martí (1853-1895) had for Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) — that traveler who wept before the statue of the Liberator. These ties were nourished by the love between Chávez and Fidel a century later. These are not mere commercial ties forged out of the need to survive amid a blockade, though sovereign cooperation would be entirely legitimate. They are bonds of fraternity, ties between siblings in the pursuit of a socialist path, nourished by faces of the people, by thousands of Cuban professionals who have served in Venezuela, and by stories of affection, loyalty, and sacrifice born over decades.
Our countries have sustained economic relations based on trust and mutual commitment, on the exchange of oil for medical and educational services, on compensated trade relations with preferential agreements. These exchanges have diminished in recent years due to unilateral sanctions and the tightening of the blockade. A naval blockade on Venezuelan oil could mean new difficulties for that exchange, but what Cubans are talking about these days is not national economic interests, but imperialism, revolution, internationalism, commitment — words we must bring into our lives as a compass for everyday practice.
The Left is living through a moment of definition and must take its rightful place in history at this hour. We have failed to advance regional integration. We have failed to strengthen regional sovereignty by pooling our resources and strengths. We have failed to deepen our understanding of one another’s struggles and the differences in our national realities. And in the face of this, there has always been an empire (today more voracious and soulless, but the same as ever).
Cubans condemn the US military aggression against Venezuela and the threats against the countries of the region, and we firmly condemn the kidnapping of Maduro and Flores and demand their release. In defending the Proclamation approved at the II CELAC Summit that recognizes our region as a Zone of Peace, we defend peace with sincerity. Our anger today does not translate into hatred, but carries the history of the victory over mercenary troops at Girón, the October Crisis, resistance to acts of state terrorism and to a blockade that was already 40 years old when formal fraternal relations with Venezuela began.
Today, the Cuban people mourn 32 sons of a country that only wants to work to live better along the path it has chosen. They are so aware that no people can confront the threats now being launched against Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland alone. Only united can we stop a powerful fascist who has no morality or ethics other than dispossession and unpunished criminality, who feels entitled to every part of the world that interests them and endowed with the right and the power to destroy the part of the world they can do without.
Llanisca Lugo González is a member of the No Cold War Collective, is a researcher and the Antonio Gramsci Chair at the Instituto Juan Marinello, Havana, Cuba. She is a Deputy in the National Assembly of Cuba.
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People gather outside the US Embassy in Madrid, Spain to protest the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela on January 4, 2025. (Photo by Diego Radames/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“This is militarized authoritarianism,” said one advocacy group. “We must act to stop it now, before it spreads to enflame the entire region, if not the entire globe, in a dangerous, unnecessary conflict.”
Protests broke out at US diplomatic outposts across the globe Saturday and Sunday following the Trump administration’s deadly attack on Venezuela and abduction of the nation’s president, brazen violations of international law that—according to the American president—were just the start of a sustained intervention in Venezuela’s politics and oil industry.
Demonstrators took to the streets of Brussels, Madrid, Ankara, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and other major cities worldwide to voice opposition to the US assault on Venezuela and Trump administration officials’ pledge to “run” the country’s government for an unspecified period of time, a plan that Venezuelan leaders have publicly met with defiance.
The US Mission to Mexico—one of several Latin American countries Trump threatened in the aftermath of the attack on Venezuela—warned in an alert issued Saturday that “a protest denouncing US actions against Venezuela continues to take place in front of the US Embassy in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City.”
“Protestors have thrown rocks and painted vandalism on exterior walls,” the alert read. “Social media posts about the protest have included anti-American sentiment. Embassy personnel have been advised to avoid the area.”
Social and political organizations mobilized to the US Embassy in Mexico City, Mexico on January 3, 2026. (Photo by Miguel M. Caamano/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Hundreds gather in front of the US Embassy in Brussels, Belgium on January 4, 2025. (Photo by Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Demonstrators hold posters and chant slogans during a protest in front of the US Embassy on January 4, 2026 in Ankara, Turkey. (Photo by Serdar Ozsoy/Getty Images)
A photograph taken on January 4, 2026 shows an anti-war placard in Brussels during a demonstration against the US attack on Venezuela. (Photo by Nicolas Maeterlinck/Belga/AFP via Getty Images)
Protesters gather during a demonstration in front of the US Embassy on January 4, 2026 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by Olmo Blanco/Getty Images)
The global demonstrations came as some world leaders, including top European officials, faced backlash for failing to adequately condemn—or condemn at all—the US attack on Venezuela and continued menacing of a sovereign nation.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said she supports “a peaceful and democratic transition,” without mentioning or denouncing the illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and US bombings that reportedly killed at least 40 people, including civilians.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared that “this is not the time to comment on the legality of the recent actions” as protesters gathered in Athens in opposition to the US assault.
“If you still believe that the European Union cares about international law, then look no further,” wrote Progressive International co-general coordinator David Adler, pointing to Mitsotakis’ statement.
“We are outraged, but this moment demands more than outrage. It demands organized, coordinated resistance.”
Mass protests and demands for international action to halt US aggression proliferated amid ongoing questions about how the Trump administration intends to carry out its stated plan to control Venezuela and exploit its oil reserves—objectives that experts say would run afoul of domestic and international law.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who played a central role in planning the Venezuela attack and has been chosen by Trump to manage the aftermath, said Sunday that the administration intends to keep in place a military “quarantine” around the South American nation—including the massive naval force amassed in the Caribbean in recent months—to pressure the country’s leadership to bow to US demands.
“That’s a tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes, not just to further the national interest of the United States, which is number one, but also that lead to a better future for the people of Venezuela,” Rubio said in a television interview.
Rubio also suggested the president could deploy US troops to Venezuela and dodged questions about the legal authority the Trump administration has to intervene in the country. The administration has not sought congressional authorization for any of its attacks on vessels in the Caribbean or Venezuela directly.
US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Sunday that “in recent history, we’ve tried ‘running’ multiple countries in Latin America and the Middle East. It’s been a disaster for us, and for them, every single time.”
“Congress must pass a War Powers Resolution to get our military back to defending the US, instead of ‘running’ Venezuela,” Casar added.
“We must act to stop it now, before it spreads to enflame the entire region, if not the entire globe, in a dangerous, unnecessary conflict,” the group added. “We are outraged, but this moment demands more than outrage. It demands organized, coordinated resistance.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
President Donald Trump points to a reporter to ask a question during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, January 3, 2026, in Palm Beach, Fla.
DONALD TRUMP’S unprovoked attack on Venezuela and his kidnapping of its President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, to face trumped-up drug-trafficking charges in New York, are an outrage against international law and the sovereignty of nation states.
They confirm that the undisguised seizure of other countries’ resources is to be the new normal for the outlaw regime in Washington — and, in line with its National Security Strategy published in November, that it will act to break every government in Latin America that pursues an independent foreign or domestic policy.
Trump’s accusations that the Venezuelan state is involved in drug-trafficking — which have already led to the murder of well over 100 seafarers on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific — have been levelled too at the Mexican government, and Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro.
While bragging about his plans for Venezuela on Saturday Trump indicated that socialist Cuba is also something “we’ll end up talking about,” while his rants about Venezuela having “stolen” (that is, taken into public ownership) oil reserves that had been exploited by US corporations logically put any country that wants control of its natural resources on Washington’s menu.
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President Donald Trump points to a reporter to ask a question during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, January 3, 2026, in Palm Beach, Fla.