By Isaac Saney on December 18, 2025
In 1829, Simón Bolívar issued a warning that has echoed across two centuries of struggle: “The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” Bolívar was not indulging in rhetorical excess. He was diagnosing an emerging imperial logic—one that cloaked domination in the language of freedom, conquest in the rhetoric of democracy, and plunder in the vocabulary of order. Nearly two hundred years later, as U.S. warships prowl the Caribbean, sanctions tighten into sieges, and unilateral force replaces international law, Bolívar’s words read less like prophecy than political realism.
So too do the words of José Martí, written on the eve of his death in 1895: “Now I risk every day to give my life for my country and for my duty…which is to prevent before it is too late, by means of the independence of Cuba, that the United States does not spread through the West Indies before falling, with this additional force, on our homelands in the Americas…” Martí understood that Cuban independence was inseparable from the fate of the hemisphere. To lose Cuba to U.S. domination would be to open the floodgates to imperial control over Nuestra América itself.
Today, that danger has returned with renewed ferocity.
The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy marks a decisive escalation in Washington’s long-standing effort to reassert full-spectrum domination over Latin America and the Caribbean: the overt and unapologetic imposition of empire. Framed in the familiar language of “national security,” “counter-narcotics,” and “defending democracy,” the strategy in fact declares a hemispheric right to coercion. It divides the world into those who must support U.S. power—or remain silent—and those deemed part of an ever-expanding “axis
of evil.”
The seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker off Venezuela’s own coast, the imposition of a U.S. naval blockade, and the militarization of Caribbean Sea lanes are not isolated acts. They signal the activation of a strategy that seeks control over trade, communications, security, and energy routes across the Americas and beyond. This is the form war takes today: not always announced, often undeclared, but no less devastating.
Donald Trump’s order imposing a naval blockade on Venezuela is nothing less than a declaration of war. By seeking to cut off oil exports—the country’s principal source of revenue — while restricting maritime trade, the blockade is designed to choke off food, medicine, and essential goods. History is unequivocal about the purpose of sieges: to starve populations into submission. This is not “pressure.” It is a modern-day siege, a monstrous act of collective punishment explicitly prohibited under international law.
Children, the elderly, workers, and fishers are transformed into targets. Hunger becomes a weapon. Illness becomes leverage. Sovereignty becomes collateral damage: to be negated and extinguished in the service of imperial dictate.
The militarized seizure of the Venezuelan tanker—complete with armed operatives descending from helicopters—lays bare the predatory logic of U.S. policy. Justified with vague references to sanctions, unsubstantiated claims of “terrorist connections,” and familiar invocations of illegality, the act amounts to piracy under another name. The tanker’s crime was not violating international law; it was engaging in sovereign trade between Venezuela and Cuba — two nations bound by histories of resistance and solidarity.
Trump’s casual assertion that the United States would “keep the oil” stripped away any remaining pretense. This was not about law. It was about plunder and unabashed state piracy.
Such actions normalize the unilateral interdiction of commercial vessels, undermining global maritime security and setting a precedent whereby powerful states seize ships at their will and whim. They reveal an empire desperate to control energy flows, punish
defiance, and discipline the Global South into submission.
From reopening military bases in Puerto Rico to installing forces in Trinidad and Tobago and the Dominican Republic; from threats against Mexico and Colombia to efforts to secure Ecuador—the U.S. is tightening its grip on the region’s trade, security, and energy corridors. Under false pretexts of drug interdiction and migration control, warships and nuclear submarines turn the Caribbean into a theater of intimidation.
The recent U.S. military strike that killed eleven people aboard an alleged “drug boat” exemplifies this lawlessness. As the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime data confirm, Venezuela is not a major hub for drug trafficking. The drug crisis is a U.S. problem—rooted in its own demand, pharmaceutical profiteering, and criminal networks. Yet lies are manufactured, as they were with Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” to justify aggression. This is the Monroe Doctrine resurrected, Manifest Destiny rebranded, genocide and plunder normalized under the banner of security.
So, the question is now starkly posed: Whither Nuestra América?
The death of Marti in battle for independence, foto: Bill Hackwell/ Universidad de Informatica
Bolívar and Martí posed not merely warnings, but questions of destiny. Nuestra América was never just a geography; it was an ethical and political project rooted in sovereignty, dignity, and solidarity. Today, that project is under siege — from sanctions that starve, from blockades that kill, from narratives that blame victims for their wounds.
And yet, despair has never been the final word. From Cuba to Venezuela, from Haiti to Palestine, peoples continue to resist, organize, and care for one another under the harshest conditions. The survival of Cuba itself remains one of the most profound anti-imperialist acts of our time.
Whither Nuestra América? It goes where it has always gone: toward resistance against empire, toward the defense of sovereignty and self-determination, toward the insistence that another world is not only possible but necessary. Against the misery inflicted in the name of liberty, the peoples of the Americas continue to assert a different freedom— one grounded not in domination, but in justice.
Bolívar and Martí understood the stakes. So must we.
Isaac Saney is a Professor and Coordinator of Black and African Diaspora Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax Canada
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano