In these early days of January, we have witnessed what we 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 the US military operation has given way to global denunciation and solidarity. These responses emerge from a serious assessment of an overwhelming flow of information—some accurate, much of it misleading or entirely false—circulating through social and 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 learnt.
The US military assault on Venezuela and the 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 the entire apparatus 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 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 $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 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-too-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 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 overwhelming military force and the capacity to strike anywhere, imperialism today goes beyond the Monroe Doctrine. Donald Trump and his ilk want everything and want to lose nothing. Herein lies his fragility.
Trump has been forced to confront the absolute failure of the Venezuelan Right. He has withdrawn the fiction 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 María Corina Machado. To place either of them in the Miraflores presidential palace, US troops would have had to climb the hills around Caracas and fight street by street against the resistance of a population unified by its hatred of a return to 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 a sign 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 has carried out a mission successfully. But it has other components—economic, political, ethical, symbolic fronts—that remain contested. The protagonist in 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.
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 José Martí’s admiration for Simón Bolívar and 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 the 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—exchanges that 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. 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 acutely aware that no people can confront alone the threats now being launched against Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and the region. 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.
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This article was produced by Globetrotter. 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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