Image is of thousands of Cubans gathering in 2026 to honor José Martí.
After the Soviet Union fell, in the 1990s, Cuba entered a period (known as the Special Period) of extreme economic pressure, losing almost all of its international trade and fuel imports. Caloric intake almost halved, and electricity was mostly unavailable for much of the day. In response, Cuba undertook Option Zero, in which the country prioritized distributing resources to the most vulnerable, and rationed what little was available as fairly as possible. During this time, the threat of total collapse led to experiments and innovations, and, paradoxically to those on the outside, Cuba’s population came together under pressure, rather than shattering. The collective understanding that their suffering resulted from abroad rather than from internal inefficiencies and corruption meant that Cuba’s government, and thus their sovereignty, survived.
As the American Empire contracts in the wake of multipolarity and can now no longer tolerate sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere, we are seeing a return to the time of the Special Period, with the illegal blockade being dramatically worsened - among other measures, the US is preventing all fuel from entering the island, a strategy made more viable with Venezuela’s fuel exports now restricted. Imperialist supporters are predicting an imminent collapse, after which American mining corporations would descend on Cuba’s massive nickel and cobalt reserves.
While it’s absolutely possible that this time Cuba’s government could collapse, it’s important to note four things: 1) as noted, Cuba has been in a situation like this before and survived; 2) the geopolitical situation is quite different to how it was in the 1990s, with China and other powers increasing in power and influence compared to the USSR’s incompetent final leaders leaving the lane wide open to American exploitation; 3) there has been a concerted effort to transition to renewable energy sources recently, with solar panels being imported from China and making up an increasing amount of the energy supply; and 4) Cuba’s government is taking this threat very seriously, and beginning rationing efforts immediately.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
from what i read. Venezuela sold Oil to a US intermediary and then they sold the Oil to Israel, i think more than ignorance or bad reporting its mostly a propaganda thing to try to give the USA a win, when currently beside kidnapping Maduro and Delcy giving a pinky promise for economic reforms they havent won anything from their agression against venezuela and cuba
What? They’ve won by taken a portion of Venezuela’s oil profits, gaining veto control over releasing oil funds to Venezuela, redirected oil flows from anti-imperialists towards imperialists, got India to stop buying Russian oil by replacing it with Venezuelan crude. Tons of rightwing political prisoners and terrorists got released as well. This is a major win for the US. The US got everything it wanted.
Going from Libs aren’t upset about Venezuela being colonized and look the other way, to this forum where socialists aren’t upset about Venezuela being colonized and look the other way. Feels like I’m being gaslit. Is there a communist forum somewhere that people can be angry and talk about reality instead of in denial?
This is no more true than it was the last five times trump said it
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indian-oil-hpcl-buy-2-million-barrels-venezuelan-oil-trafigura-sources-say-2026-02-09/
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/more-us-venezuelan-crude-to-flow-into-india-refiners-asked-to-prioritize-these-oil-grades-economic-viability-in-doubt/articleshow/128203100.cms
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/02/business/india-russian-oil-trump-tariffs
2 million Venezuelan barrels to be delivered two months from now when Russia delivers almost 2 million barrels a day. Also,
Venezuela is literally incapable of replacing Russian oil to India. At absolute best, Venezuela is producing a million barrels per day. It would take a decade to get the equipment there up to speed. You will see a decline in Russian oil only to the extent Venezuelan oil is able to replace it in a fashion that’s economically beneficial to India.
Pay attention. Every two or three months since he got in office Trump has claimed that Modi agreed to stop buying Russian oil and it’s never been true.
Per https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/india-ramped-up-buying-us-trade-rep-responds-on-whether-new-delhi-has-stopped-buying-russian-oil/4138354/
So it’s not actually fake. Venezuelan oil is being redirected to Israel and Venezuela has lost control over its oil flows and is allowing US total control through intermediaries. Inserting a middle man doesn’t change the overall transaction, it in fact proves that Venezuela has no sovereignty over its own oil.
Expect more of these word games from the Venezuelan government
US has bought Venezuelan oil for years. They resell the oil to Israel, and then try to get elements of the resistance to fight each other by spreading inflammatory rhetoric here.
On top of that US is actively stealing Venezuelan oil and their tankers, and then reportedly decides to send it to Israel.
And you want us to be demoralized by the supposed fall of Venezuela. Come on man.
Are you fedjacketing me? Sounds a bit like it. Not everyone who delivers unpleasant truths to your echo chamber is a fed
There’s a difference between buying and reselling, and just directly taking control and forcing sales to who the US wants, and the US controlling the proceeds in a Qatar account. It’s full on colonialism. This cope needs to end, from that same source:
That “returns part of it to venezuela” part is especially important, because the US government has the veto right to withhold the funds. Venezuela is now directly held hostage with their entire budget and economy having to be approved by the US.
The US has sanctions on Venezuela, and for the companies it gives a license to which allows them to get around the sanctions, they require that money to go through an intermediary and they take a cut. It is a mob scheme, bullying a weaker party and taking a cut.
You are jumping to the idea that every drop of oil is dictated by the US and all money that Venezuela gets goes through the US controlled bank account in Qatar. Nothing has implied this but you are desperate to make that conclusion out of a different situation. The US was taking their oil tankers and not allowing any profit to get back to Venezuela, and now they are able to make revenue again. Venezuela has no means of keeping their tankers safe, attacking the US, or even defending their own territory from US drones and missiles. What do you expect them to do? It seems like this narrative only serves to try and demoralize the movement, and has set the standard of what success looks like as the communes trying to overthrow the government they elected.
You are describing a form of colonialism.
It is. Anything not dictated by the US is sanctioned and unable to be sold. Any policy unfavorable to the US will result in them withholding the oil revenues arbitrarily.
You’re just wrong but like I commented elsewhere, the last resident ultra disappeared so feel free to keep making it up and fill that void
Isn’t Chevron colonial? It’s a US company trying to superexploit Venezuela’s resources with the backing of the US military.
I don’t know if they’re successful colonizers, but they seem to be trying.
nearly every formerly colonized nation has some predatory western company controlling part of their resources through coercion and even more importantly inhibiting their ability to develop domestic production and then bring that to the global market. we would have no analysis of modern capitalism, imperialism, or neo-colonialism if we reduced everything to “colonialism.” Everything going on now is an extension of a historic period of colonialism that has changed and transformed a lot. Venezuela is a sovereign post colonial nation which is under siege, not a colony that is colonized. This Venezuela has been sanctioned for a long time, has been selling oil under sanction for a long time, and has been forced to cut in the US for a long time. This is an escalation of an ongoing relationship by the US because they are desperate to unseat any socialists in their sphere of influence. The US put on the maximum pressure, restricting all sales by forcibly seizing all tankers they could, and Venezuela maneuvered a quick way to turn that around into getting some amount of income for their project instead of no amount of income, which is all they can really do without being able to shoot down US aircraft, drones, and missiles and escort every oil tanker to its destination. Much like Cuba, they are in the US’s most powerful zone and are pretty much all they can do is try to keep their revolution alive domestically until the empire finally falls. Unlike ultras on the internet who decide a socialist movement has folded from the sidelines because they see they are being hit hard by the imperialists, the people who are actually involved with the movement have not folded and are displaying immense solidarity with their socialist project despite being put in the most difficult situation yet.
No let’s double down on the assertion that this is actually fine, and that Venezuela losing its oil rights is no big deal so we are now openly being colonial apologist and denialist lol
you just keep asserting i’m wrong without actually demonstrating it
I have many times but you pivot to the next extrapolation
I’m not fedjacketing you. Not even implying it.
I’m talking about Bloomberg.
I meant “here” as in “in this case”, not as in “Hexbear”.
And it turns out the Bloomberg article was basically correct. Venezuelan crude is being taken over by US intermediaries and then sold to Israel and India, with the proceeds being held in a Qatari account to be released by as the US sees fit. The US will take a cut and they will veto the money if Venezuela ever goes against the US. It’s fully captured now.
This isn’t an elaborate ruse to demoralize you, it’s just colonialism and a nation getting colonized.
In my echochamber, Maduro isn’t the only socialist in Venezuela, and him being reversibly being taken out of the picture doesn’t mean that the sky is falling.
Never suggested that was the case. But the leadership of the government are acting functionally as compradors and that’s the material reality. You can’t be a colony and a revolution at the same time
You’re saying that the control of oil exports being seized by force by the US is identical to the defeat of the Bolivarian Revolution outright and that the US got everything it wanted out of their attack in January. You’re claiming that the Venezuelan leadership has betrayed the revolution at home and in particular in regards to Cuba. All of this is wrong.
Yes, of course, the seizing of the Venezuelan oil industry is a defeat. It is a colonial theft of sovereignty over resources that strengthens the US position and weakens the Venezuelan and Cuban positions. This is not the same thing as the defeat of the revolution and it obviously falls short of what the US’s maximalist goals were.
Regarding the latter point, the US has not removed the PSUV from power or placed in power a compliant compraror leadership. Rodriguez and the rest of the leadership have not handed over oil control - they have lost it militarily and for the time being have no means to do anything but accept the meater pittance they’ll receive from oil revenue. But there are no major oil companies outside of Chevron willing to invest because they have absolutely no faith in the US’s ability to retain and stabilize that control in a way that they can profit from. Only a total seizure of state power and a subjugation of the entire revolution would achieve that. So the current situation is not dramatically different from the previous status quo - only Chevron freely exports, and the US directs where that oil goes. Venezuela receives a much smaller stream of oil revolution than they should. This is not a massive change. The biggest change is the blocking of oil to Cuba, but that is not a betrayal by Venezuela - it’s just a fact that they cannot penetrate the US naval blockade. The US has no meaningful control on the ground.
And that leads into the former point - that the revolution has been defeated. The Bolivarian Revolution was never about oil. Oil, as the supreme global commodity and Venezuela’s key resource, played a critical role in financing the revolution in its first decade. But the revolution was not just a pipeline of oil money to the people - it was and remains a society-wide effort of socialist construction, and absolutely nothing indicates that’s changing. The Bolivarian Revolution is not a top-down affair, but one of the working and oppressed masses building collective and communal economic power with the assistance of a revolutionary state. That remains the case. And the strangling of oil revenue didn’t start in January 2026 but over a decade ago with the US’s brutal blockade of the country, which cratered all oil revenue and crippled the capacity of the state to financially support the grassroots movement.
How did the revolution respond to the blockade? With the communal movement. Venezuela began to restructure its economy away from both private and state ownership to communal ownership. Following Chavez’s literal dying wish, the Venezuelan people, with only limited state involvement, have achieved strides in socialist construction not yet seen in human history. They already weaned themselves of total dependency on oil and adapted to a long-existing reality of low and unreliable oil revenue. The economic crisis there has been successfully managed for years due to the communal movement.
When you say the revolution is dead and compradors are in charge, you’re taking a single US military victory and extrapolating it to an entire political system change that simply isn’t borne out by the evidence. Venezuela remains under siege. Perhaps they can maneuver in this situation to secure more oil revenue than they could under the prior phase.
Your take is completely undialectical because it a surface kevel reading of a single portion of the revolutionary process at a single point in time as indicative of the entire societal transformation that is already 25 years underway. The revolution is not dead until both the revolutionary state and the communal movement are defeated, and for now all we see is that the state has taken a painful but by no means fatal blow.
There is no colonizer to get rid of, they are being bullied from the outside and don’t have the means to stand up for themselves against an openly genocidal fascist regime which will bomb them every day forever if they resist. Continuing to exist as a state and build socialism without being bombed every day is actually the preferable situation by the people who would be getting bombed, go figure.
This actually isn’t colonialism. It’s theft, it’s might makes right imperialism and coercion, but it’s not colonialism. Taking another country’s resources by gunpoint is not a colonial endeavor.
It’s closer to Venezuela being forced into an unequal treaty than any genuine colonial relationship. Qing China, despite suffering numerous unequal treaties from multiple imperialists, giving up far more than what Venezuela has given up, and being led by a thoroughly incompetent government, was merely semi-colonized. Qing China had to give up entire provinces (Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan) on top of cities (Hong Kong, Macau, Qingdao) as concessions.
The conflation between signing unequal treaties and colonization is even worse when you consider Japan, which also signed unequal treaties starting with the Convention of Kanagawa where the Tokugawa Shogunate was forced at gunpoint to open ships to US merchant ships (this is euphemistically described within US curriculum as Japan “opening up”). Yet, we also know that Japan would quickly become an imperialist power themselves starting with Luuchuu and Korea. It doesn’t make sense for Japan to go from colonized to colonizer without decolonization. But Japan underwent no such decolonization where imperialists were booted from Japan. The way to make sense of it is to say that despite the unequal treaties, Japan was never colonized, which meant it didn’t need undergo decolonization before becoming a colonizer themselves.
Japan was never colonized despite the unequal treaties.
China was only semi-colonized because despite having its territories be slowly annexed, it still had a government of limited sovereignty with a population that constantly waged war to expel the imperialists.
Korea was colonized, but it was colonized through Japanese invasion of Korea. The unequal treaties it had with Japan paved the way towards Japanese colonization, but the treaties in and of themselves weren’t colonization.
Yeah, unequal treaty is a great way to frame it. Just classic Great Power politics. “The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must” hours. Been the same since Thucydides wrote that 2500 years ago. Not every tributary relationship is colonial.
Colonialism is theft via force.
All theft is via force, whether that be implicit or explicit. Colonialism is more nuanced and historically contingent than just theft, else basically every relationship between states throughout all history could in some form be described as “colonial,” in which case the word loses all meaning. There’s an aspect of control (whether that is over land, people, etc) and theories of racial superiority that make colonialism different. There’s also usually the idea of some kind of civilising mission, which in this case is entirely absent. I don’t think it’s accurate to describe colonialism as just “theft via force.”
And that’s what this is. Venezuela’s resources and sovereignty being stolen by force. It’s colonialism.
???
This is so fundamentally incorrect I don’t even know where to begin
The United States has no “guys” on the ground, they don’t control Venezuela’s policies, they’re not shaping Venezuela as a colony of a metropole, they have no mechanism by which to determine the administrative decisions of the Venezuelan government other than naked force. It’s more like an imperial relationship, where the oil is tribute. Calling it colonialism is like saying the Liao made the Song into a “colony” because the Song agreed to pay the Liao thousands of silk bolts every year not to raid them. Venezuela is giving oil as tribute to an imperial overlord, and that overlord is then selling that oil to Israel, and Venezuela is doing this so that imperial overlord doesn’t fuck them up further. That’s not a colonial relationship.
Colonization doesn’t require “guys” on the ground. It can be done through financial instruments and institutional control and trade imbalances. This is colonialism 101.
You’re right that it doesn’t need guys on the ground, but just stealing somebody’s resources isn’t enough to mean it’s colonialism. What “institutional control” are the Americans demostrating here? There’s no “trade imbalances” or even “financial instruments” other than sanctions, and sanctions does not a colonialism make, unless you wanna claim that Russia and Iran and Cuba are also “colonised” by the United States because they’re under US sanction. The EU stole Russia’s central bank deposits by force. Does that mean Russia is a European colony?
People just make up fake theory on here. It’s getting worse.