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monroe doctrine
The Democrats Offer No Real Alternative to Trump's 'Donroe Doctrine' for Latin America
In Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, both parties agree with the assumption that Washington has the right to shape the political future of other nations.
Jun 18, 2026
Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington's efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute—if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering—is less about ends than means.
Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it—with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy.
The Central Role of Sanctions in Projecting Imperial Coercive Power
Under Democratic administrations, the US forged and institutionalized what may be its most effective instrument of hegemony. Coercive economic measures, commonly called “sanctions,” were first deployed by Franklin D. Roosevelt against Mexico in the 1930s. They were used by Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure Guatemala in 1954 and then—most drastically—against Cuba by both Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Today, one-third of the world’s nations are under US sanctions.
Sanctions—a form of collective punishment—are held by legal experts to be contrary to international law. Paradoxically, not only does Washington disregard international law in imposing sanctions, but the US then behaves as if they are applying the law when, for example, they pirate a ship delivering humanitarian supplies to a sanctioned country.
The shared strategic objective of the bipartisan Washington consensus is the projection of US hemispheric dominance.
Use of sanctions has accelerated because successive administrations have seen their unique advantages. Compared with “forever wars,” they are more easily justified to US voters as cost free and as not imperiling US lives. If sanctions are the precursor to military intervention—as in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and, of course, Venezuela in 2026—the interventions have usually been limited, with few US casualties.
Yet sanctions are very potent: Between 2010 and 2021, they caused around 560,000 deaths globally each year—more than five times the number of people killed annually in direct armed combat.
While sanctions are made more palatable by being described as “targeted” at governments or individuals seen as undesirable by Washington, in practice the “targeting” is deliberately far wider. Sanctions do most damage to the poorest sectors of societies—the sectors most likely to support progressive governments. The barely veiled message is that only by withdrawing this support will such communities be able to prosper and avoid the threat of even greater US intervention.
The frequent description of sanctions as “targeted” carries another implication—that they are intended to have a precise and conclusive effect. However, while sanctions cause severe economic damage, there is little evidence that they achieve intended regime change. Even so, sanctions on countries which refuse to change are maintained and—very frequently—intensified. Democrats are as guilty of this folly as Republicans.
Indeed, US sanctions have imperial utility through their “demonstration effect”: attempting to cripple progressive alternatives to the neoliberal world order. Recently subjected to draconian sanctions, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel proclaimed, “Cuba is not a failed state; Cuba is a besieged state.” Still, infant mortality in Cuba is lower than among African Americans.
Transitioning to “Democracy” in Venezuela
In the case of Venezuela, the Democrats have criticized the Republicans from the right, complaining that the cudgel of imperial power against essentially defenseless small states has not been wielded with sufficient malice.
Washington has imposed illegal unilateral coercive measures on Venezuela since 2015 in efforts to asphyxiate its Bolivarian Revolution. The transparently false rationale for continuing sanctions is that Venezuela poses an “extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US. Although the threat is obviously the other way around, mainstream Democrats have not exposed this lie. How could they, when it originated with President Barack Obama and was subsequently echoed by President Joe Biden and then Trump?
Despite the horrific toll of an estimated 100,000 excess deaths attributed to US-imposed sanctions, Venezuela has resisted and maintained an unbroken continuity of leadership from Hugo Chávez to Nicolás Maduro and to now Delcy Rodríguez. And that’s the rub for the Democrats.
Ranking Democrat members of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees, Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY) and Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), issued a “request [for] a clear explanation” of Trump’s Venezuela policy. Their meek missive came a full five months after the abduction of the Venezuelan president, an operation that resulted in more than 100 collateral deaths. Meanwhile, more than 200 occupants of small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have been subjected to extrajudicial murder by the Trump administration.
Yet these inconvenient facts are absent from the June 8 Democratic Party congressional foreign-policy leadership’s statement on Venezuela. Their complaint is that Trump’s White House has failed to sufficiently “exercise its leverage.” As they put it, “As of today, the [state] department has yet to provide any evidence the Trump administration is doing any of this hard work.”
The contradiction of kidnapping a lawful head of state in the name of restoring democracy does not trouble the Democrats. Rather, they “strongly support the Venezuelan people’s right to choose their leaders”… after the US abducts their president.
These Democrat leaders are also troubled that Venezuelan authorities were allowed to appoint a new attorney general and defense minister without apparent US interference. In addition, they express impatience with Trump’s lethargy in not yet overhauling Venezuela’s supreme court and electoral council.
To the extent that they make any concrete demand, the putative opposition party wants Trump to impose an “electoral timeline” on Venezuela. Yet, the same party has no problem with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine who suspended elections after his legal term in office expired two years ago, banned opposition parties, shuttered critical media, and arrested political opponents.
Restoring “Democracy” in Cuba
Democratic Party policy toward Cuba is perhaps best exemplified by Biden’s retention of the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, which he inherited from Trump. Then, just six days before leaving office, Biden rescinded the designation with full certainty that the incoming Republican would—and did—reverse his decision.
Former National Security Council officer Ricardo Zúñiga was Obama’s adviser for the Americas and Biden’s special envoy for the Northern Triangle. He writes in Foreign Affairs offering advice on, rather than criticism of, Trump’s Cuba policy.
Republicans may be more inclined toward overt confrontation, selective military assaults, and maximal pressure; Democrats typically prefer a combination of inhumane sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and multilateral coercion.
Zúñiga advocates achieving regime change in Cuba through “diplomacy” rather than “force.” Scare quotes are used because, for this Democrat, brute economic strangulation is regarded as diplomacy. Zúñiga would “forswear military action,” but only if Cuba submits to US dictates. And so long as “pro-market reforms” are adopted, “democracy” can wait.
Without a hint of opprobrium, Zúñiga casually references the US invasion of Iran and the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president as policy options that would not be effective in Cuba. Given these examples, he then complains that Cubans remain resistant to “American views on democracy and human rights.”
He acknowledges that even if Trump wished to selectively roll back the murderous sanctions currently imposed on Cuba, he would face opposition not only from Republicans but also from Democrats. Where this Democrat differs from Republicans is in his supremely hypocritical conclusion: “It is ultimately Cuban citizens who will determine their country’s future”… after the US overthrows their government.
Promoting “Democracy” in Nicaragua
Tiny Nicaragua is also labelled an “extraordinary threat” to the US. While the harshest and most successful sanctions against it were applied during the Reagan administrations, when an economic blockade and the US-financed Contra war eventually unseated the Sandinista government in 1990, economic pressure quickly resumed once the Sandinistas returned to power in 2007. Both the Bush and then Obama administrations made cuts in aid, and it was under Obama that Democrats joined with Republicans to launch the NICA Act, eventually implemented (under Trump) in 2018.
While Trump signed the NICA Act and sanctioned various Nicaraguan functionaries, Democrat senators took the lead in formulating stronger measures in the RENACER Act, signed by Biden in 2021. This led to an estimated loss of $500 million annually in development finance that would have been directed at Nicaragua’s poorest communities. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), with Marco Rubio, put forward new legislation in 2023 that was intended to strengthen the RENACER Act and ensure even greater damage.
Biden officials were consistently aggressive toward Nicaragua. In 2022, his nominee for ambassador to Managua, Hugo Rodríguez, promised the US Congress that he would “support using all economic and diplomatic tools to bring about a change in direction in Nicaragua.” As a result, Rodríguez was never accepted as ambassador and the post remains unfilled.
In 2024, Biden’s trade representative launched a hostile investigation clearly aimed at disrupting trade with Nicaragua and possibly at excluding it from the regional trade treaty, CAFTA. When it eventually reported in late 2025 it recommended punitive tariffs, but only relatively mild penalties were actually implemented by Trump.
Marco Rubio regularly imposes sanctions on individual Nicaraguans, including 100 more just this month. More than 2,300 have now been sanctioned by successive administrations. Nevertheless, hard-line Democrats, as well as Republicans, are pushing Rubio to do far more.
Two Parties, One Strategy
The shared strategic objective of the bipartisan Washington consensus is the projection of US hemispheric dominance. The two major parties differ mainly in messaging and, to a lesser extent, on tactics. Their theatrical contention is neither between intervention and nonintervention, nor between coercion and diplomacy. More often, it is between competing methods for achieving the same strategic objective.
Republicans may be more inclined toward overt confrontation, selective military assaults, and maximal pressure; Democrats typically prefer a combination of inhumane sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and multilateral coercion. But both approaches rest on the assumption that Washington has the right to shape the political future of other nations.
Despite differences in tone and tactics, the supposed opposition party offers not an articulated alternative to the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine but, at the very most, a variation of it.
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Trump’s Cuba Strategy Is Economic Genocide
In an interview, scholar Danny Shaw discusses President Donald Trump’s policy of strangling Cuba and offers an anatomy of the impact of the economic embargo on its people after having witnessed firsthand the existing conditions on the island.
Jun 10, 2026
Cuba has been under a US trade embargo since the Eisenhower administration, although it was President John F. Kennedy who implemented a comprehensive embargo on all trade with Cuba. And while every subsequent administration has tried since to cause pain and suffering to the Cuban people for its support of a revolutionary government, it is the Trump administration that has made the collapse of the communist regime on the island a top priority by expanding sanctions against the island, blocking fuel deliveries, and threatening Cuba with military action.
Cuba is indeed on the brink and unlikely to survive since the inhumane and criminal actions of the second Trump administration have plunged the island into a deep humanitarian crisis.
In the interview that follows, Danny Shaw discusses President Donald Trump’s policy of strangling Cuba and offers an anatomy of the impact of the economic embargo on its people after having witnessed firsthand the existing conditions on the island. Danny Shaw is a scholar of Latin American and Caribbean studies and a longtime supporter of the Cuban revolution. He recently traveled across Cuba, where he documented for The Grayzone the harrowing conditions following the Trump administration's imposition of an energy blockade.
C. J. Polychroniou: US President Donald Trump has revived the Monroe Doctrine with a series of forceful actions in the Western Hemisphere, such as the attack on Venezuela, which resulted in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and conducting military strikes against fishing boats in the Caribbean. It may not be totally clear what’s driving the Trump administration’s gunboat diplomacy, but Cuba, which has endured perhaps the longest economic embargo in modern history, is next on the wannabe dictator’s hit list.
Danny, can you talk about the policy methods the second Trump administration has used in order to further isolate Cuba and, in the process, strangle its economy and its people?
Danny Shaw: On January 29, the Trump administration—the true spokesman of the billionaire class with global reach, as we’ve seen from Caracas to Tehran—took actions to completely shut down the Cuban economy. Threatening any country that sold oil to Cuba or continued to trade with them tightened the screws on an already long-existing, illegal, unilateral Economic War. Washington and their right-wing minions across the hemisphere also went after Cuban medical missions from Honduras to Jamaica, which brought much-needed foreign reserves for Cuba and most importantly afforded medical attention throughout the Americas and the world to marginalized populations. Ecuador and Costa Rica kicked out the Cuban embassies. The Trump administration has made it clear to the world: Any attempt to support the Cuban government will be severely criminalized. Concretely, this means Cuba is more isolated and desperate than it has ever been.
The US method of stoking “hunger” and “desperation” has completely crushed this fascinating, historical experiment in resistance and a people’s government.
We must see Trump’s energy blockade in the context of an economic blockade which has left Cuba on life support since 1991, the year the Soviet Union and the Socialist Block countries fell. Overnight, these measures cut Cubans’ average caloric intake in half. Periodically, under both Democratic and Republican presidencies, the US government has taken a scalpel to the Cuban economy. With a Gazaesque strategy of surgical precision, the State Department has cut off remittances, wiped out tourism, and penalized any foreign company that did business with Cuba. January 29 was yet another inflection point of what has truthfully been an ongoing “special period” and is now proving to be a death sentence for many Cuban families. Now the FBI and Homeland Security are going after those of us who have brought humanitarian aid to Cuba.
Every word I share, including my quotation of hungry and dispirited Cubans, has to be seen within the context of a 67-year-old war on a country that has sought to be sovereign from empire. As an ethnographer, an international affairs analyst for Cuban and Venezuelan television since 2014, and someone building fluency in Cuban Spanish for over three decades, I have had a lot of intimate contact with Cubans, their opinions, and their struggles. We have to go back to the original State Department memorandum as laid out by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory on April 6, 1960:
..it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
I quoted the ruling class’s thinking at length because that is precisely what has been happening in Cuba now since at least 1991. The US method of stoking “hunger” and “desperation” has completely crushed this fascinating, historical experiment in resistance and a people’s government. What I witnessed in Cuba in February, March, and April of this year was apocalyptic.
C. J. Polychroniou: The Trump administration forced a leadership change in Venezuela, but it is debatable whether there has also been a regime change. However, the plan for Cuba seems to be regime change even though its government is not doing anything to threaten the United States. Why is Trump after regime change in Cuba and to what end? Whose interests is he really serving?
Danny Shaw: Trump is the ultimate distraction. Like all billionaire bubble boys, there are no consequences for his lies, threats, and general clownishness. But behind the bombastic, arrogant billionaire are the true global power brokers, a small group of 2,800 billionaires who seek to preside over humanity’s destiny. They use Trump as their spokesman to carry out a fascist global agenda that was thought to be impossible prior to 2016 when he first came into power.
The War on Cuba and all states who represent any type of resistance—China, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Russia etc.—is designed to convince us again and again of “the end of history.” The idea that cowing to the billionaires and soon-to-be trillionaires is inevitable.
The corporate media has long presented “Cuba” as a “failed socialist state.” This serves the empire’s ideological interests. They can showcase this “miserable island,” stripped of all contexts, and show this horrible place on CNN and Fox hemorrhaging their own people. Millions of Cubans are dying and migrating. Even before this crisis, the most extreme ever, the Cuban population shrank by 1.4 million between 2020 and 2024. The capitalist media can then propagandistically contrast this reality with a mirage of extreme abundance and excess that they parade in front of our faces through their ideological apparatuses. Think social media, Hollywood, the mainstream media etc.
We are all focused on US drones, bombs, and boots on the ground, but the invasion has already arrived.
The other interest the US has in Cuba is of course economic. The Cuban state has been the ultimate arbiter of questions of foreign trade and investment and an obstacle to unfettered penetration by private capital. Trump, his business partners, and cronies will cash in on land grabs, mineral deals, and the buying of shorefront hotels. Cuba has long had a big tourist economy that they can cash in on.
So these are some of their motivations. But I think your question is an interesting one that I have sat with for decades.
Truthfully, the Empire would only have to blow and the Cuban government would fall. In terms of being able to provide for and defend the Cuban people, the Cuban government fell long ago, arguably in 1991.
Private property is now ascendant in Cuba and has been arguably since 1991. Whatever leadership that is there now, though they put out daily patriotic statements, is not the leadership of Fidel, Che, and Camilo that we in the Western left came to love and defend since 1959. What I have seen over the past 31 years was a people left to fend for themselves. The ethos and general mindset in Cuba is not “Patria o Muerte” and “Venceremos,” (“Homeland or Death” and “We Shall Overcome”), the historic slogans of the Revolution; it is the “Law of the Jungle” and “Every Man For Himself.”
While leftist tourists maintain a glorified, outdated image of this museum of socialism, another mentality already reigns over Cuba, especially among the two generations born into the special period. For example, in the province of Sancti Spiritus I stayed with a family that was relatively stable. The father was a retired track coach and the mother a retired physical therapist. The son plays professional basketball in Brazil and, at 6 feet 9 inches, is one of the tallest Cubans in the country. They have given a plate of food to two elderly neighbors, Sonia and Francisco, for years now. They can no longer afford to do so as they can barely feed themselves and their immediate family. Sonia and Francisco are now hungry and malnourished. They will soon die, two more anonymous victims of this macabre US foreign policy. But who will record their deaths? Who will know their names? The local officials will just record that they died of old age.
And this happens everyday now in Cuba. Generalized hunger has become mass malnutrition, and everyday that passes there is more death. Many Cubans say there is already starvation in the most historically neglected areas like Guantanamo and Las Tunas.
So I think being able to point a finger and enact laws in Florida about "commemorating the victims of communism” serves the billionaires' interests. This begins to explain why they have sadistically sought to cause so much suffering in Cuba.
C. J. Polychroniou: As you already pointed out, you were recently in Cuba and traveled throughout the island. Describe the actual conditions that you encountered.
Danny Shaw: Let me take you deeper into the class contradictions that have long been surfacing in Cuba.
One of the first things a visitor to Cuba will notice is that as the people are dehydrated and starved, the private sector is growing. It is important to clarify that Marco Rubio, Trump, and the architects of the intensification of the economic war on Cuba are at the same time bolstering the private sector. So the owners of private businesses, the MIPYMES, are allowed to import gas, generators, food, etc. It is the Cuban masses that are completely cut off, as an emerging business sector continues to consolidate its economic power on the island functioning as Miami and Washington’s beachheads. But to access these private shops one has to have dollars, or big stacks of Cuban pesos. The 99% of Cubans have neither. The private MYPIMES also have more quality food, but they are private peninsulas of privilege, or Little Miamis, that very few Cubans can afford.
Four days after the guerrillas took power in Havana on January 1 1959, Fidel Castro asked a crowd of tens of thousands in Camaguey, “How can we call this our homeland, if the homeland gives us nothing?” Today, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation of Cubans circulate this heroic speech that grew out of their anti-imperialist and anti-dictatorship struggle and ask, “Why are we being shut out of our own country?”
Collectively, right now, Cuban children have less access to toys and food than what I have seen across Haiti since I first went there in 1998. Some of my friends in Cuba have asked me if there is any way for them to escape to Haiti. Haitian medical students I knew in Santiago and other Haitians were forced to flee Cuba and return to their besieged homeland because of how bad Cuba is. When Haiti is a reference for relative abundance, that is the ultimate indicator of how blockaded and dire Cuba is.
My responsibility is not to parrot Cuban government speeches and positions as the left does here in the West, but to give a voice to a population captured in a looming Economic Genocide, trapped between two bureaucracies,
Agricultural products cannot get from the countryside into the city. Every day there is more hunger, malnutrition, and encroaching starvation. The Cuban people say they have no voice. The most vulnerable, the elderly, children and prisoners, are already dying. There is a stark sense of generalized hopelessness. There are no functioning means of transportation. Yet as one waits for buses that never arrive, imported cars from Miami speed down the highways. The people say those are rich Cubans or government officials. The people do not trust their government and see them as a central ingredient in the genocidal campaign they are facing.
Let’s break down the math of starvation, CJ. Because we are all focused on US drones, bombs, and boots on the ground, but the invasion has already arrived. What will play out in the upcoming days and months is the consolidation of the umpteenth US intervention in the affairs of the people of the Caribbean, South America, and the world. And it will continue to exterminate a lot of lives. When Cubans say that today Cuba is the equivalent of Gaza without bombs, they are not exaggerating.
A liter of gasoline in Cuba costs more than 6,000 pesos ($10 US dollars), meaning a gallon of gas costs $40. The average Cubans’ salary or pension is 2,400 pesos ($4 dollars) monthly. A bottle of Turkish sunflower oil to cook costs 1,500 ($2.50), a pound of rice costs 350 ($0.60), and the electricity bill, regardless of whether there is any, is 400-500 pesos (less than $1 per month), meaning that alone consumes a Cuban’s money for the month.
In Cuba, no matter how much money you have in the bank, you can only take out $2 or $3 dollars. That is why you see long lines across Cuba of retirees and heads of family waiting all day in front of banks, trying to get their money out. Cuba is a country of lines, long lines.
Infant mortality rates have increased by 148% in Cuba. Center for Economic and Policy Research’s director of international policy Alexander Main: explains: “The Trump policy of 'maximum pressure' on Cuba has killed a lot of babies… it’s highly likely that more babies are dying now, and at an even higher rate than last year as a result of the current US fuel blockade targeting Cuba.”
Many families have to get up in the middle of the night because that is the only time they have access to a few hours of electricity. Measures of insomnia, depression, and all mental health indicators are skyrocketing. US terrorism comes in many different forms.
By the time we publish, the hyperinflation and devaluation of the Cuban peso will be even more extreme. Everyday, the peso is worth a fraction less than the dollar, damaging Cubans’ earning power even more. What Cubans have whispered to me since 1995 is that if they film their reality or try to speak out against the economic disparities, the authorities will arrest them immediately.
What if you have children? How do you feed them? Cuban families are weary of having children because they cannot feed them. The War on Cuba is a Demographic War, a War of Depopulation. From the perspective of capital, Cuba’s population is excessive and expendable, especially old people who are generally more loyal to the revolution because they can remember what it once was prior to 1991. Similar to Palestine and Haiti, masses of people can be displaced and exterminated. Why would capital care? And why would a Western public care, if they have never heard one positive word about these “sh^thole countries,” to quote the ever-eloquent Trump again.
Religion, alcohol and drug addiction all find a foothold among a population who cannot see beyond this bleak material reality. All of the ingredients for an Economic Genocide are in place. Cubans I met and hung out with in Las Tunas, Holguin, or Granma were not worried about imperialist drones or bombs. They said the bombs of thirst and hunger have long been their number one enemy. Colonial death comes in many different forms.
C. J. Polychroniou: Cuban government officials have said that the country will fight to death in the event of a US invasion. But is it realistic to expect a starving nation fight back in the event of a full-scale invasion of the island by the world’s most powerful and advanced military?
Danny Shaw: Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodriguez, himself explained: “It seems that the US government has chosen a dangerous path, a path that could lead to unimaginable consequences, to humanitarian catastrophe, to a genocide.” He then says what every leader has to say but it is tough to take seriously: "Cuba will exercise its right for its legitimate defense to the very last consequences with massive, mass support of the people." These militant government statements are out of touch with mass sentiment.
Observing our movement of activists, Marxists, the left, or whatever we call ourselves, we pretend like it is 1959 or 1989 and Fidel and well-trained, honest revolutionaries are still at the helm of the state. If we cannot honestly reflect on this question of leadership, the Cuban state and the masses, aren’t we complicit in the ongoing strangling and starvation of today’s mambisado (the masses who fought for Cuba’s independence against Spain)? Do we judge a revolution by the objective and subjective conditions the people confront, or by the latest interview or speech of Diaz-Canel? Have any of these activists who defend Cuba ever gotten outside of the Hotel Nacional and outside of the government-guided tours? If we mischaracterize the objective and subjective conditions in Cuba, aren't we complicit in our own way in the war on Cuba, which Cubans say comes from both an internal and external blockade?
Capitalism is the accumulation of misery in one pole, and luxury in the other.
To think Cuba can resist in any way is ridiculous. How can a half-starved, unarmed people resist the largest military with the largest budget, $1.5 trillion, in the history of the world? Cubans overwhelmingly told me they are so sick of “resolving," “surviving," and “resisting." Besides some elderly veterans of the heroic war of liberation in Angola and that generation of fighters, I met almost no Cubans with any enthusiasm for the idea of fighting back against the United States. There’s a complete state of demoralization across Cuba. Hyperbolic leftist comparisons to “People’s War” in Vietnam under the direction of Ho Chi Minh and General Nygun Vo Giap are goofy and dishonest. Cubans see their government and police as complicit in everything that is happening. Why would they die for a process they long stopped believing in? The Western “left movement” is clueless about the objective and subjective conditions in Cuba because we uncritically take our cues from the Cuban government. The private sector could not be ascendant in Cuba if there was not collusion with high-level officials. The Cuban masses perceive that government officials are saying one thing publicly but behind the scenes are looking out for themselves. And if you listen to the statements on CNN by this generation of Castros, that is exactly what they say. They praise capitalism and position themselves to adapt to the inevitable reconquering of the island.
Cuban officialdom and their leftist counterparts have engaged in what we can call “high politics.” Spanish researcher of communes in Venezuela, Cira Pascual Marquina, explains that we often base our conclusion on “institutional declarations, negotiations, geopolitical responses—while overlooking the dense fabric of everyday political practice that sustains the process.” Look at the Venezuela General Vladimir Padrino and all of his rhetoric before January 3 about a “people's war” in Venezuela that would resist any efforts by the Trump administration. What resistance has there been in Venezuela? Today, six months after the US
occupation of Venezuela, Padrino is an agricultural minister.
All of these triumphant-sounding speeches mask the reality of the Cuban masses, and arguably do more damage than good. As a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, I waited years if not decades to say some of these things publicly. Because again, I am with David, not Goliath. But scholars and supporters of Cuba need to be vocal about the whole truth. My responsibility is not to parrot Cuban government speeches and positions as the left does here in the West, but to give a voice to a population captured in a looming Economic Genocide, trapped between two bureaucracies. Here is an essay by a Cuban student in Ireland which brilliantly captures how the Cuban people feel they are stuck between two competing rhetorics, which both ignore their interests.
C. J. Polychroniou: US imperialism never went away but has gone totally berserk under the second Trump administration. Can the beast be reformed?
Danny Shaw: In Cuba, the closest place to get Cuban food is Miami.
It’s surreal. After navigating dehydration and hunger across Cuba for one month, I returned, like other activists and friends of Cuba, to be detained and interrogated by the FBI in Miami. When I was released, after my third detention and interrogation in less than two years, I walked through an airport full of every last type of food and consumer good. Capitalism is the accumulation of misery in one pole, and luxury in the other. The Donroe Doctrine means US imperialism cuts off any attempt by China, Russia, Iran, etc., at building multipolarity in the hemisphere and recolonizes any bad example or “maroon state" that has escaped their hegemony. There is no reforming US imperialism. Only the unity of oppressed peoples as expressed through multipolar projects like the BRICS+ nations could ever defeat empire. That is the only hope right now for defeating this beast which will continue to starve, bomb, and genocide resistant populations until a knife is plunged into its neck.
Like the War on Haiti, first through the use of paramilitary gangs beginning in 2018, and now through Erik Prince and his private security companies to displace the once resistant population of Port-au-Prince and Latibonit (another department or province of Haiti), this constitutes the latest and most intense chapter of war on the Cuban people. Cubans are dying in silence as US government officials talk about bringing “freedom” to Cuba and Cuban government officials give speeches about Cuba’s “historic resistance.” What I have lived and witnessed in Cuba since 1995 constitutes an ongoing Economic Genocide against a defenseless, muzzled population.
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Venezuela After January 3: A Nation Standing in the Storm
In Caracas, the situation is tangled, contradictory, and volatile. But amid the uncertainty, one thing felt clear: the Venezuelan left is not collapsing. It is recalibrating.
Mar 06, 2026
On our recent delegation to Venezuela, one quote echoed again and again — a warning written nearly two centuries ago by Simón Bolívar in 1829:
“The United States appears destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”
For many Venezuelans, that line no longer feels like history. It feels like the present.
The January 3 US military operation that seized President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores marked a dramatic escalation in a conflict that Venezuelans describe not as sudden but as cumulative—the culmination of decades of pressure, sanctions, and attempts at isolation. “We still haven’t totally processed what happened on January 3,” sanctions expert William Castillo told us. “But it was the culmination of over 25 years of aggression and 11 years of resisting devastating sanctions. A 20-year-old today has lived half his life in a blockaded country.”
Carlos Ron, former deputy foreign minister and now with the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, described the buildup to the invasion as the result of a carefully constructed narrative. “First there was the dangerous rhetoric describing Venezuelans in the United States as criminals,” he said. “Then endless references to the Tren de Aragua gang. Then the boat strikes blowing up alleged smugglers. Then the oil tanker seizures and naval blockade. The pressure wasn’t working, so they escalated to the January 3 invasion and kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the deaths of over 100 people.”
While in the United States the events of January 3 have largely been forgotten, replaced by a devastating war with Iran, in Venezuela the reminders are everywhere. Huge banners draped from apartment buildings demand: “Bring them home.” Weekly protests call for their release.
In the Tiuna neighborhood of Caracas, we met Mileidy Chirinos, who lives in an apartment complex overlooking the site where Maduro was captured. From her rooftop, she told us about that dreadful night, when the sky lit up with explosions so loud her building shook and everyone ran outside screaming.
“Have your children ever woken up terrified to the sound of bombs?” she asked.
We shook our heads.
“Ours have,” she said. “And they are US bombs. Now we understand what Palestinians in Gaza feel every day.”
She told us psychologists now visit weekly to help residents cope with the trauma.
Within days of the US invasion, the National Assembly swore in Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as acting president. President Trump publicly praised Rodríguez for “doing a good job,” emphasizing his strong relationship with her. But from the beginning, she has been negotiating with the United States with a gun to her head. She was told that any refusal to compromise would result not in the kidnapping of her and her team, but death and the continued bombing of Venezuela.
The presence of US power looms large. Nuclear submarines still patrol offshore. Thousands of troops remain positioned nearby. Every statement and decision made by the government is scrutinized. And on February 2, despite Trump’s praise for Delcy Rodríguez, he renewed the 2015 executive order declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security.
The visits from the heads of the CIA and Southern Command have undoubtedly been difficult for the government to swallow. Delcy’s revolutionary father was tortured to death in 1976 by a Venezuelan government that worked closely with the CIA. The US Southern Command coordinated the January 3 attack.
But the government is not without leverage.
“The United States thought the state was weak, that it didn’t have popular support, that the military was divided,” said Tania Díaz of the ruling PSUV party. “January 3rd could have triggered looting, military defections, or widespread destabilization. None of that happened.”
The United States has overwhelming military dominance, but it was also aware that millions of Venezuelans signed up to be part of the people’s militia. This militia, along with the army that remained loyal to the government, gave Washington pause about launching a prolonged war and attempting to replace Delcy Rodríguez with opposition leader María Corina Machado.
While Machado enjoys enthusiastic support among Venezuelan exiles in Miami and the Trump administration recognized her movement as the winner of the 2024 election, the picture inside Venezuela is very different. The opposition remains deeply divided and Trump realized there was no viable faction ready to assume power.
Besides, as William Castillo put it bluntly: “Trump does not care about elections or human rights or political prisoners. He cares about three other things: oil, oil, and oil.” To that, we can add gold, where the US just pushed Venezuela to provide direct access to gold exports and investment opportunities in the country’s gold and mineral sector,
Certainly, under the circumstances, the Venezuelan leadership has had little choice but to grant the United States significant influence over its oil exports. But while Trump boasts that this is the fruit of his “spectacular assault,” Maduro had long been open to cooperation with US oil companies.
“Maduro was well aware that Venezuela needed investment in its oil facilities,” Castillo told us, “but the lack of investment is because of US sanctions, not because of Maduro. Venezuela never stopped selling to the US.; it is the US that stopped buying. And it also stopped selling spare parts needed to repair the infrastructure. So the US started the fire that decimated our oil industry and now acts as if it’s the firefighter coming to the rescue.”
In any case, the easing of oil sanctions—the only sanctions that have been partially lifted—is already bringing an infusion of much-needed dollars, and the government has been able to use these funds to support social programs.
But in Venezuela the conflict is not seen as simply about oil. Blanca Eekhout, head of the Simon Bolivar Institute, says US actions represent a brazen return to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine originally warned European powers not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere, but over time it became a justification for repeated US interventions across the region.
“We have gone back 200 years,” she said. “All rules of sovereignty have been violated. But while the Trump administration thinks it can control the hemisphere by force, it can’t.”
The historical contradiction is stark. In 1823, the young United States declared Latin America its sphere of influence. A year earlier, Bolívar envisioned a powerful, sovereign Latin America capable of charting its own destiny. That tension still echoes through the present.
Bolívar’s dream is also being battered by the resurgence of the right across the region. The left in Latin America is far weaker than during the days of Hugo Chávez. Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa have been replaced by conservative leaders. Cuba remains under a suffocating US siege. Progressive regional institutions like CELAC and ALBA have faded, and the vision of Latin American unity that once seemed within reach now feels far more fragile.
In Caracas, the situation is tangled, contradictory, and volatile. But amid the uncertainty, one thing felt clear: the Venezuelan left is not collapsing. It is recalibrating.
As Blanca told us before we left:
“They thought we would fall apart. But we are still here.”
And in the background, Bolívar’s warning continues to drift through the air—like a storm that never quite passes.
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