SHORTAGES: A driver refuels others wait in a long line behind to fill up at a petrol station in Havana, Cuba, Tuesday, January 27
By pressuring Mexico to halt oil shipments, Washington is escalating its blockade of Cuba into a direct bid for economic collapse and regime change, argues SEVIM DAGDELEN
THE United States is forcing an oil boycott against Cuba through pressure on Mexico — a targeted blow aimed at bringing the island to its knees economically and forcing a regime change.
The decision by the Mexican government to no longer ship oil to Cuba threatens to initiate a countdown to the island’s economic collapse.
Following the US attack on Venezuela, Washington had already prevented oil from that country from being exported to Cuba.
Mexico stepped in temporarily and supplied over 40 per cent of Cuba’s oil imports.
The oil stop and the siege of Cuba
As a consequence of the Mexican oil stop, which occurred under pressure from US President Donald Trump, the US sanctions regime against Cuba is turning into a siege aimed at the complete sabotage of power generation, all production, and tourism.
At its core, however, the siege by the US is aimed at a regime change in Cuba within weeks. It is about breaking the country’s sovereignty.
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NUMSA march to US consulate in solidarity with Venezuela. Photo: NUMSA
Marching to the US consulate in Johannesburg, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) protested against US aggression on Venezuela on January 24.
Demanding the release of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, South Africa’s largest trade union marched to the US consulate in Johannesburg on Saturday, January 24.
“In defending Venezuela, we defend the sovereignty of all nations,” concluded the memorandum read aloud outside the consulate by Irvin Jim, general secretary of the over 460,000 members-strong National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA).
“It is Venezuela today … It will be South Africa tomorrow,” Jim warned in his address to the demonstration. US President Donald Trump, who has bombed parts of Nigeria after concocting a false story about a “Christian Genocide” in the country, has also been spinning tales about a “White Genocide” underway in South Africa.
“This is not a joke,” NUMSA warned in a statement. “Donald Trump can easily use the lie of a White genocide in South Africa to invade South Africa, capture South Africa’s president and transport him to a jail in the US, and declare that he is now in charge of our country and all its natural wealth, whilst controlling all trade and natural wealth … After the US criminal military invasion of Venezuela, it is foolish to ignore” this threat to South Africa.
“There is a madman in the White House. There is a fascist in the White House,” NUMSA’s president, Andrew Chirwa, said in his opening address to the demonstration. “Today, it is Venezuela that was attacked by this international criminal. Tomorrow it is” Cuba, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa. “All over the world this man” is baying “for blood.”
In parallel, the Trump administration is also attempting to strangle South Africa’s economy, threatening to exclude it from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which provides tariff-free access to the US market, on which the country’s automotive sector is heavily dependent.
“Our members and workers across various sectors are losing jobs” because “he has imposed 30% tariffs against South Africa,” Jim added in his speech.
Stressing the need for “an anti-imperialist front to mobilize the workers” across party and union affiliations, Jim said that NUMSA “will soon be convening a political colloquium”, inviting all progressive political parties. “It is about time to unite the working class … behind a revolutionary agenda,” as South Africa faces increasing US aggression.
South Africa punished for taking the genocidal state of Israel to the ICJ
South Africa, the union maintains, “is being punished by Trump for taking the genocidal state of Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).” Reaffirming that “this was the correct position … in defense of the people of Palestine,” NUMSA called on the South African government not to cave in to the pressure by Leo Brent Bozell III, Trump’s new ambassador to South Africa.
At his Senate confirmation hearing, he had stated that if appointed, “I would press South Africa to end proceedings against Israel,” and the ICJ itself to stop what he deemed a “lawfare” against Israel.
“If he continues to insult our national sovereignty … by demanding that South Africa must withdraw its case in the ICJ against Israel,” NUMSA insists, “the South African government must act swiftly, and ensure that he packs his bags and leaves the country.”
Demanding that the football governing body “cancel all World Cup matches in the US this year,” a copy of the memorandum was also sent to the FIFA President.
It further called on the African Union (AU) and the BRICS to urgently convene and formulate a coordinated and collective response to the US imperialist aggression.
“No country is safe from America’s greedy appetite”
Recalling the European leaders defending unipolarity under the cover of “rules-based order” at last year’s G20 summit in South Africa, the US had boycotted Alex Mashilo, spokesperson of the South African Communist Party (SACP) said in his address to the protest: “Little did they know that just after a few weeks, that unipolar power will turn against them and demand Greenland.”
Under “the mad Trump administration”, NUMSA emphasized in its statement, “no country is safe from America’s greedy appetite”.
The US is a danger to itself
The US has now even “become extremely dangerous to itself” and “its citizens”, with Trump “brutalizing the American people daily” using “his personal ‘Gestapo’ police commonly known as ICE.”
Expressing “solidarity with American citizens who are being brutalized by ICE,” NUMSA insisted, “This is a moment when all people of the world, including well-meaning US citizens and all South Africans, must unite” against imperialism.
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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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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.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.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.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Donald Trump holds a press conference after US forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and launched a ‘large-scale strike’ on the Latin American country | Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)
The US has a long history of military intervention in Latin America, but never before has it been so brazen
As the days pass, shock subsides over the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, which was ordered by Donald Trump and carried out by the US military. That the victim is a dictator has helped to justify the illegal use of brute force.
There is a long history of US military intervention in Latin America. It’s been the expression of the most enduring principle that has governed relations in the American continent.
Everything Trump did in the first year of his second presidential term was old news: tariff wars, interventions in the internal affairs of other countries, threats, extortion and the revival of the old Monroe Doctrine.
What is new is the brazenness, the absence of even the slightest legal justification, or even the effort to frame actions within some interpretation of international law, however twisted it may be. There is no talk of democracy, freedom or human rights for millions of Venezuelans.
This is an unexplained and uncontested exercise of power. “What’s next, Mr President, Colombia?” journalists asked Trump like subjects asking their emperor. “It sounds good to me,” he replied. Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland… “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
The threat is material – Maduro in handcuffs, the naval deployment in the Caribbean, the boats bombed for months – and at the same time diffuse. No one knows what the logic or the alleged motive for the next action will be.
The effect of Trump’s actions, already tested with the so-called “peace deal” for Palestine in the aftermath of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, is to sow confusion and division, and paralysis. The era of this new power has begun with little to oppose it, and with international laws useless like broken toys. And we are all warned.
Maduro was extracted from his bunker in eight minutes, which was enough time to kill 32 Cuban guards who were protecting him. The rest of the regime remains intact, now as the executive arm of Trump’s designs, which have articulated only one priority: oil.
When asked about elections, democracy or the release of some 800 political prisoners, Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, reply that all this “is premature”. The nature of the events indicates the coup was orchestrated with a part of the regime whose head was Maduro.
Nothing remains of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, not even dignity. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice-president and one of the most vocal figures in his administration, has been appointed interim president, with Trump’s acquiescence. She and her brother Jorge, the president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, the minister of the interior, and Vladimir Padrino López, the head of the armed forces, have become administrators of a Trump protectorate – a new, perhaps provisional, status quo that sets Venezuela and all of Latin America sailing into uncharted waters.
The eternal misunderstanding
In a speech to the US Congress 202 years ago, US president James Monroe laid the foundations for his new country’s relationship with the other republics emerging across the American continent amid struggles against the European colonial powers.
That relationship would be one of US dominance and Latin American subordination, although the Monroe Doctrine was presented as a warning against new European colonial adventures in America.
“America for Americans” – Monroe’s phrase that coined the eternal misunderstanding – postulated that America, the continent, was for them, who called themselves “Americans”. In that single remark, the rest of the American peoples were left in an inferior category, confined to their nationalities or to a subordinate belonging to the same single continent (Latin Americans, South Americans, Central Americans or Caribbeans). Never simply Americans.
Other US presidents followed Monroe’s lead. More than five decades after his doctrine came Rutherford Hayes’s corollary of 1880, on the need for the US to have exclusive control in Central America and the Caribbean, and therefore of any interoceanic canal, followed by Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary of 1904, which postulated the freedom of the US to intervene by force in any country on the continent if it considered that its interests were affected.
Just a few weeks ago, on the anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, Trump published his own corollary, which contains nothing new, though the foreign power to keep away now is no longer Europe but China. The novelty lies in what began in Venezuela.
The question of democracy
In December, the UN reported that Venezuela’s human rights situation was continuing to deteriorate. In 2021, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor opened a formal investigation into crimes against humanity, such as torture, disappearances and executions at the hands of the state.
Like Delcy Rodríguez now, Maduro became interim president in 2013 after the death of leader Hugo Chávez. Shortly afterwards, he won the elections by a narrow margin and, from 2015 onwards, took an openly authoritarian turn when he refused to recognise the result of parliamentary elections that left him without a majority in the National Assembly.
Opponents of the regime tried different approaches to overthrow it. To name just a few: peaceful demonstrations, violent actions, calls for a military uprising, attempts to get neighbouring governments to blockade the country, support for economic sanctions by the US and the European Union, complaints to international organisations, boycotts of elections they considered rigged, negotiations with the regime mediated by third countries, and massive participation in elections. None of this moved the needle.
Despite the opposition’s victory in the 2024 presidential elections, Maduro was once again proclaimed president, through fraud.
Then Trump reappeared, with a military deployment unseen in decades, indiscriminate bombing of ships in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and persecution and stigmatisation of Venezuelan migrants as terrible criminals and mentally ill people ravaging US cities.
The main opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, clung to this strategy like a lifeline in the storm. She argued that the military siege, the accusations of narco-terrorism against Maduro and his circle, and the imminent military action by Washington would bring down the regime and open the door to a transition. Shortly after Maduro’s kidnapping, Machado proclaimed: “Today we are prepared to assert our mandate and take power.”
Trump’s response could not have been colder. He removed her from the scene, claiming she lacked the necessary “respect” and “support” for the moment.
In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Machado tried again to court Trump and said she wanted to give him her Nobel Peace Prize, which the US president has long coveted and considers himself deserving of. Days later, Trump indicated to Fox News that he might meet with her in Washington, saying: “I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her.” The Norwegian Nobel Institute was forced to clarify that its peace prizes cannot be transferred to third parties.
There were celebrations by Venezuelans in exile in cities across the western hemisphere when Maduro’s overthrow was announced, but not within Venezuela. Maduro no longer governs there, but the same regime does, under Trump’s shadow.
SHORTAGES: A driver refuels others wait in a long line behind to fill up at a petrol station in Havana, Cuba, Tuesday, January 27
