“El turno es de los pueblos,” an editorial by the Cuban digital magazine La Tizza, “a site to think and build socialism from Cuba,” appeared on 10 January 2026. What follows is the English translation-adaptation of an expanded and revised version of the same text for the purpose of its widest dissemination in English language.

“Venezuela is once again a laboratory for the 21st century, where the sustainability — possible and necessary — of a sovereign and revolutionary social project is being decided in the face of a combination of hybrid warfare, economic siege, and global ideological offensive. We cannot allow ourselves to have our certainties hijacked: there is no other path than fighting on all fronts and uniting the peoples of the world against imperialism. Only together will we have the necessary strength to forge the necessary unity to respond to infamy and tyranny with dignity and revolt. Peace — if we are able to prevent it from becoming the shameful silence of cowardice and surrender — will not be the result of an agreement between sole political leaders or sole State governments, but of people’s ability to impose a new balance of power from below, and prevail.”

— La Tizza

“Socialism cannot exist without a change in consciousness resulting in a new fraternal attitude toward humanity, both at an individual level, within the societies where socialism is being built or has been built, and on a world scale, with regard to all peoples suffering from imperialist oppression.

“[…] There should be no more talk about developing mutually beneficial trade based on prices forced on the backward countries by the law of value and the international relations of unequal exchange that result from the law of value.

“How can it be ‘mutually beneficial’ to sell at world market prices the raw materials that cost the underdeveloped countries immeasurable sweat and suffering, and to buy at world market prices the machinery produced in today’s big automated factories?

“[…] The socialist countries have the moral duty to put an end to their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.”

Ernesto Che Guevara, Speech at the Afro-Asian Conference in Algiers (Algeria), February 24, 1965.

“Warsaw Pact divisions were sent to Czechoslovakia, and we ask: Will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent to Vietnam also if the imperialists increase their aggression against that country and the people of Vietnam ask for this aid? Will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent to the Korean Democratic [People’s] Republic if the Yankee imperialists attack that country? Will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent to Cuba if the Yankee imperialists attack our country, or simply if, in the face of the threat of an attack by the Yankee imperialists, our country requests it?”

Fidel Castro, Speech on the invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, Havana (Cuba), 23 August 1968.

The United States has attacked Venezuela with regime-change malicious intent and, by doing so, has trampled with their boots a shared will — from Caracas to Bogotá to Havana and beyond — to build a better world, although so far it has made greater strides in achieving the former than in disactivating the latter. The Empire and its hawks wish to prove — with their democracy of aircraft carriers and twin-rotor helicopters, with the carpeted cowardice of command rooms from which they safely monitor the execution of their death decrees — that nothing and nobody can resist their will to domination, that they are the masters of the world, that they possess a natural right to exert their dominion on what José Martí once called Nuestra América (Our America).

As for Cuba, the Empire and its hawks wish to make us pay with fear for the debts of their panic. But — alas!, what a miscalculation! — we Cubans are creditors when it comes to other debts.

La Tizza speaks and will speak, from Cuba, about Venezuela because we do not believe in the “non-interference in the ‘internal affairs’ of other countries,” that bourgeois resort serving no other purpose than opening the way for imperialism to commit crime after crime, infamy after infamy, with impunity. If imperialism knows no borders, why should we Cuban revolutionaries stop at them?

The world is defined by two fundamental issues, neither of which — by virtue of the globalization of all human relations and interactions — is strictly “internal”: 1) the will to subjugate humankind — some nation-States to others; some peoples to others; some ideas, some ways of thinking and living, some ways of conceiving life itself to others — and 2) the struggle against such subjugation. When viewed closely, all other matters, nuances, scales … gravitate around these two great masses of historical substance.

Thirty-two Cuban combatants fallen in the defense of Venezuela’s sovereignty and dignity are our source of law to speak. We are indebted to their ultimate sacrifice and heroism. They acted on our behalf. We speak on theirs. The shrapnel that took their lives and those of up to one hundred more does not only concern Venezuelans and Cubans, but the peoples of all of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Venezuela has now become the symbolic and material epicenter of the dispute over the new world (dis)order emerging in a context of hegemonic transition. Venezuela has represented, since Hugo Chávez first came to power in 1999 through the popular vote, a series of bitter setbacks for the United States, a demonstration that even without a popular insurrection and instead through winning one demonstrably fair election after another — and therefore essentially playing by the rules of liberal democracy — a revolutionary project can still rise to power, transform, emancipate, and endure. Such evidence renders moot the ideological defense of the liberal model as being immune to revolutionary challenges. Unlike the Unidad Popular government in Allende’s Chile in the early 70’s of the last century, the Chavista project managed to prevail time and again and build a stable power. Contrary to all progressivisms in our region, Chavismo was able to achieve a complex fusion between a popular movement, a political vanguard, and the armed forces.

Hence the imperious need for the United States to destroy such evidence, to nullify the Venezuela that has overcome successive tests of resistance under the most ferocious economic and, most recently, military siege as well. Venezuela’s example poses too dangerous a challenge to the ongoing update of the United States’ hard-power strategy.

If the imperial condition is inherent to the United States’s natural historical unfolding, and if ruthless, amoral, and unconstrained domination is inherent to imperialism, American or otherwise, the ways to achieve regional and world domination invariably adjust to the historical conjuncture. Gone are the days of George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” a whole opportunistically and demagogically overblown strategy aimed at relaunching American unrestrained might on a global scale, with a shamelessly transparent emphasis on controlling hydrocarbon reserves by installing lackey governments wherever needed and increasing repression in newly subjugated countries.

Today we witness Donald J. Trump launching a new line of domination that simultaneously feeds on the American Empire’s and its Western satellites’ — formerly so-called “central” countries more and more resembling peripheral ones; see Macron’s France — ever more aggravated and unsolvable internal contradictions, and on the ensuing global neo-fascist wave, which the United States seeks to lead. The invasion of Venezuela fits in with a strategy of regional control, as was Trump’s barefaced meddling in Argentinian elections to ensure Javier Milei’s victory and consolidate the new right-wing surge in Latin America and other parts of the world. The goal is to regain lost ground and impose greater coercion on the working classes, both politically and economically. In short, a new wave of State repression and the symbolic reinvention of political conservatism as a new Far Right riding the crest of fascism’s return, this time as a new “International” of sorts rather than as a set of purely concurrent national phenomena. What is at stake this time is not only the direct control over this or that territory, over this or that natural resource, but also the imposition of an ideological climate of submission, where any alternative to capitalism and imperialism is presented not only as unviable but even worse, as a criminal enterprise, punishable with political and diplomatic sanctions and isolation, economic collapse, and if needed with military intervention or simply “law enforcement operations,” if none of the above works.

The attack on Venezuela is a military and psychological operation which, by deploying the United States massive apparatus and arsenal of pitiless violence and armed terror, seeks to convince the peoples of the world of their inherent powerlessness. The message is one and it is clear: “Our power is irresistible; our might has no contender.” Only that such threats and bullying are the flip side of a deep fear. The moment of greatest show of force may at the same time reveal structural anxieties. The system finds itself operating on a minefield. The Empire knows that the peoples of the world can win, but do the peoples of the world know it?

In times like these, when anger may get in the way of careful consideration, it is imperative not to lose sight of the overriding geopolitical factor defining our epoch: that the great powers are once again partitioning and distributing among themselves old and new zones and spheres of influence. In this new redistribution of the world, this new  provisional inter-State pax, people’s sovereignty is once again an interchangeable pawn.

Twice in the course of the 20th century, such partition was decided on the battlefield. The current moment does not seem to be any different, but for too long the peoples and revolutionary forces of the world have submitted themselves to the abstract rejection of the use of violence as a dubious excuse able to absolve them from any moral equivalence or association with the enemy. With traumatic consequences, the world order that emerged in 1945 died with the spectacularly self-humiliating fall of the USSR. The promised post-Cold War everlasting pax universalis not only did not last any long, but instead the number of U.S. military interventions increased: 251 between 1991 and 2022 out of a total of 469 since 1798. Venezuela’s oil reserves were an inescapable prize in this contest of the United States with the rest of the world and with itself, and therefore should not come as a surprise to anyone that Washington saw itself left with no other option than seeking to control Venezuela’s riches by any means necessary, including by sheer force.

The United States has resorted to three tested and tried scripts in its handling of the Venezuelan situation. First, it has manufactured an external “narco-terrorist” enemy through a blatantly fraudulent media narrative incessantly fed to the world and turned into common sense within the dominant strains of analyses disseminated by all sorts of mainstream and reactionary media, forgive the redundancy. Second, it has carried out spectacular and televised “surgical” lightning attacks to instill fear and invite compliance. Third, it has publicized without any remorse or guilt — as if saying once again “we dropped the bomb, so what?,” in the thuggish style of which we Cubans have been so often the recipients and know so well — the true drives, means, and purposes behind its fixation on Venezuela: unsatiable territorial, natural-resource and market appetite and regime-change ready-made script there where anyone dares not obey the Northern diktat — an appetite and a script both key to the organic recomposition of capital.

On the other hand, two major players in this new world (dis)order — China and Russia — have not responded in earnest to the challenges posed by Trump and his nuclear gang. They have, however, shown once again their selfish and short-sighted willingness to limit themselves to protecting their traditional geopolitical interests, genetically alien to any kind of anti-imperialist, revolutionary, or otherwise emancipatory vocation: Ukraine in the case of Russia, Taiwan in the case of China. A foreign-policy approach from which no concomitant willingness has stemmed to step outside of their spheres of influence and engage in a meaningful confrontation with the United States, as the latter has done by openly contending for turning the Ukraine war and the Taiwan “issue” against the two Eurasian hegemons.

Fundamentally, to a country like Cuba, China and Russia provide diplomatic or merely rhetorical support, sell weapons, and offer some kind of economic assistance and/or relief — always partial and conditioned: both China and Russia keep urging the Cuban government to go farther in its reforms in exchange for more “aid” — through the provision at world market prices of machinery, goods, services, and technology while avoiding direct and systemic confrontation with the United Sates, “the enemy of humankind,” as Che rightly put it. Russia’s and China’s passive stance in the face of the cynical surrender of Syria, their genocidal abandonment of Gaza, the lack of a forceful response on their part to the deadly surgical attacks launched against Hezbollah in Lebanon, all of which began with the unpunished assassination of Qasem Soleimani and culminated in both Israeli and American attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, show a dangerous “laissez-faire” attitude that has reached its peak in Venezuela, but which has been on shameful display in their de facto abandonment of Cuba, a country that has embodied for now almost seven decades the most unconditional and consequential forms of internationalism at all levels while always finding itself in the most vulnerable of geopolitical positions. Not that either Russia or China may have forgotten the consequences of appeasement toward Hitler or the disastrous effects of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.

We have an obligation to remind everyone that peace achieved through agreements between States is always precarious and cannot replace that which is won through relentless struggle on behalf of the people and the greatest possible social justice.

We Cubans should no entrust anything to China, Russia or any other big actors traditionally identified as contenders of the United States. Neither they nor their brainy strategists will defend Cuba’s self-determination, or let Cuba insist on pursuing its own revolutionary path even in times of crisis. They have not done so for Palestine. Why would they do so for Venezuela? Why would they do so for Cuba? Why would they do so for all of us?

Imperialism is banking on fear and demanding that the Venezuelan leadership carry out a transition that will put an end to any vestige of the Bolivarian revolution. The United States’ bet on relying on Chavista government cadres to implement the three-phase plan that has been publicized seeks to secure a double victory for the imperialist agenda: on the one hand, to ensure the political death of Chavismo — its discrediting and its incapacitation to ever again win a popular vote — through the staple stick-and-carrot scheme in exchange for compromises and concessions, all of them on Venezuela’s government, designed to fracture the latter’s capacity for political dialogue and negotiation on an equal footing. It does not take any daring to anticipate that if — as the American authors of the plan desire — a split occurs between Chavismo and post-Chavismo, the responsibility for any loss of social gains and any setback in social justice and equality will squarely fall on the latter. On the other hand, the bet on relying on Chavista government cadres also seeks to guarantee the governability of the transition, without internal social unrest, imbalances and breakdowns that would make it more difficult to take control of the Venezuelan oil industry and redirect the country’s course in the international arena. This tactic of apparent “continuity” is aimed at securing both short- and medium-term victories for the aggressor.

The United States is equally betting on disunity and the betrayal of the principles on behalf of which Chávez gave his life and the Venezuelan people have written pages of indelible heroism. The regression into “neocolonial normality” is not a fact of some “geopolitical force of gravity” in which many enlightened intellectuals now believe and which they hypocritically lament: it has had to be imposed by cannon fire. The United States’ greatest fear is that its relative hegemonic decline will be accelerated by the ability of popular forces to resist the “suction effect” of the Empire’s collapse, and prevail.

There is no denying the utmost gravity of the current situation. What is more, there is already a de facto transition underway in Venezuela: now it remains to be seen where such transition is headed and who controls it and how. More than ever, the centrality of class struggle and the strategic importance of building our own alternatives, able to bypass the pipe dreams of so-called multipolarism — which has only served to make the U.S. pole even more aggressive — is evident. The signals coming from Venezuela today are unclear against the media noise on both sides. Statements and declarations coming from both sides seem to speak more to the respective target bases than to any verifiable truth on the ground.

Declarations and symbolic gestures and moves, in themselves, are not an issue for imperialism, accustomed as it is to a pragmatic conduct ever able to adapt to changing circumstances. The disconnect, though, between statements and facts, words and deeds, intentions and results represents indeed a clear danger for the Venezuelan popular movement and revolutionary forces, and to the consciousness, willingness, and mobilization of millions of people all over the world to actively defend the territorial integrity, the national sovereignty, and the safeguard of the emancipatory horizon in Venezuela.

For Cuba, most obviously, the events in Venezuela are neither foreign nor distant. The intertwining of the Cuban revolution and the Bolivarian revolutionary process initiated in Venezuela in 1999 has grown steadily and has withstood various tests over the past 25 years, including the passing of the founders of that relationship: Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro and Commander Hugo Chávez.

It is therefore no surprise that the adversaries and enemies of the Cuban revolution are now harboring and voicing newly found hopes that an eventual regime change in Caracas would be the final nail in the coffin that  so often has beenreordered and rebuilt for Cuba. Nor is it a coincidence that for Cuban revolutionaries — just as in the emotional days of April 2002 when Chavez was briefly ousted or the somber days of March 2013 when Chavez died — keeping up with the news on the situation in Venezuela since Saturday, January 3, is part of everyday life.

In Cuba, all across the spectrum of infamy, ranging from the most intellectually repelling and morally mendacious anti-Communist counterrevolution through the always unreliable faints of heart who insistently claim to be on the Left but who, out of cowardice or mere political irrelevance, sooner or later would end up following the path of the anti-Communist counterrevolutionary reflex, the discourse has had as overarching threads 1) the attempt to rationalize away and justify Maduro’s and Cilia Flores’ kidnapping — by actively repeating the U.S. narrative of “narco-terrorism”; by passively questioning the legitimacy of Maduro’s government — and 2) the brandishing of an alleged warning mirror in which Cuba should start looking itself. In both cases, the starting point is the extremely delicate economic, political, and social situation in Cuba, which is used to advance the inevitability of a counterrevolutionary, compliant alternative. They are all well aware of the seriousness of the crisis the country is going through and hope to steer it once and for all toward the final blow to the Revolution. Their frantic desperation once again speaks of their deep-seated insecurity in their own revived reassurances. There is nothing inevitable about the fall of the Cuban revolution. They know it better than anyone.

While some dream of social upheaval without repair in Cuba, and even of civil war, others — apparently less “extremist” — demand from the Cuban government to commit suicide and renounce what has proven to be the only guarantee of survival for the sovereign State born from the Revolution and, for 67 years now, that of the Revolution itself: the resolute and effective exercise of their people-based power, including through the force of arms against external and internal enemies whenever needed. Both the old-style, textbook counterrevolution with its headquarters in the Miami-Washington axis of losers and the new waves of “post-revolutionary” and even “post-national” fifth columnists become thus accomplices, to varying degrees of enthusiasm and immorality, to the imperialist aggression against Venezuela and to the renewed threats — and aggressiveness — against Cuba, a permanent and obsessional target of all sorts of U.S. aggressions, beginning with the criminal blockade imposed and maintained by one U.S. administration after another, for now exactly 64 years, and to any eventual direct military U.S. intervention in Cuba.

Several among the same external and internal actors now either applauding or acquiescing to Trump’s neo-imperial agenda and who back in the day reestablished a relationship of convenience with Cuba when their bosses at the State Department gave them permission to open franchises and businesses in the “Communist island” — capital is not governed by moral consistency wherever and whenever a new possibility for accumulation opens up, even under a “Communist dictatorship” — are today rushing to demand from the Cuban government more concessions to them as former “pioneers” of the Obama era, “Pilgrim Fathers” aboard a new Mayflower, as well as wider-ranging concessions touching upon the very defining and ever indispensable traits of Cuba’s political system. Through the first group of concessions — those allegedly due to them by Cuba out of “loyalty” or mere gratefulness — they seek to leverage what they consider, still quietly and covertly, to be a probable transition in Cuba, with “help” from the U.S. Navy ships currently stationed off Cuba’s coasts. To leverage any regime-change “opening” and to be seen by any future transitional forces as the ones who “gave first” so that they will be allowed, preferentially, to “give twice” when it’s all over.

Through the second group of concessions — those made out of “common sense” if not simply self-preservation instinct — they seem to be suggesting to the Cuban government that the effective surrender that such concessions would entail will be the only way to “prevent” Yankee bombs from falling on the island. A pre-emptive surrender akin to the abandonment of all notion of national sovereignty and dignity. A reactionary “vanguard” seeking Yankee forgiveness while there is still time, and pleading for a bowing of our heads with our backs turned to our heroes and martyrs and our glory. In short, a surrender of our independence and our freely chosen path to avoid the alternative that Trump has just stated to be the last one left to try with Cuba: “To go in and destroy everything.”

Looked at it from such an amoral perspective, responsibility for any aggression against Cuba would lie not with the aggressor or the invader, but with the victim who has brought it on themselves. “Spare us, as you have done until now, from having to compete with other vultures; and become vultures yourselves, in this world of hawks,” they seem to say.

In a world where nation-States privilege their hard-power calculations over moral principles and consistent anti-imperialist solidarity, the initiative falls to transnational coordination among peoples. This implies the need to go beyond rhetorical anti-imperialism in order to build networks of material support, communication, and coordinated political action. It means denouncing and confronting the complicity of local elites who bow to imperialism. It means reinventing the diplomacy of social movements, capable of pressuring their governments and generating, where possible, alliances outside of traditional State channels.

Venezuela is once again a laboratory for the 21st century, where the sustainability — possible and necessary — of a sovereign and revolutionary social project is being decided in the face of a combination of hybrid warfare, economic siege, and global ideological offensive. We cannot allow ourselves to have our certainties hijacked: there is no other path than fighting on all fronts and uniting the peoples of the world against imperialism. Only together will we have the necessary strength to forge the necessary unity to respond to infamy and tyranny with dignity and revolt. Peace — if we are able to prevent it from becoming the shameful silence of cowardice and surrender — will not be the result of an agreement between sole political leaders or sole State governments, but of people’s ability to impose a new balance of power from below, and prevail.

It is people’s turn.

Featured image: Fidel Castro directs Cuban militias on the battlefield at Playa Girón, as the Bay of Pigs invasion unfolds, on April 17, 1961. © Raúl Corrales. Public domain photo.

Featured video: Fidel Castro addresses popular militias in downtown Havana on April 16, 1961, on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion sponsored, financed, and armed by the United States, on whose occasion the socialist character of the Cuban revolution was officially proclaimed in Fidel Castro’s own words: “What the imperialists cannot forgive us is that we are here. What the imperialists cannot forgive us is the dignity, the firmness, the courage, the ideological integrity, the spirit of sacrifice, and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people. This is what they cannot forgive us: that we are here right under their very noses, and that we have carried out a socialist revolution right under the noses of the United States! And that we defend this socialist revolution with these guns!” Video © Cubadebate

Translated and adapted from the Spanish by Rolando Prats.

La Tizza