From an iPhone 14 nine thousand miles away, I watched the missiles’ final flight. Since it was pitch-black in Caracas, it wouldn’t be fair to say I watched our munitions as they invisibly shot through the air towards preselected targets. But there was no mistaking the moments of impact: orange gulfs of flame taller than apartment buildings, screams of confusion, and the terrible, growing pit in my stomach as I realized that my generation’s war had finally come.
Maybe Venezuela would be our Iraq, Afghanistan, or even our Vietnam. But since not even the crusades of the early 2000s had necessitated the activation of the draft, I had no fear of cradling a rifle in a sweltering jungle and shooting at men closer to me in complexion than most of my comrades. Nor did I imagine desperately shedding weight like “The Ultimate Fighter” to get a service disqualification.
But I remembered the psychosis that followed Sept. 11 and our holy wars in the Middle East, even if I wasn’t born to witness them. The national trauma predates me, you, the girl you lookawayed yesterday morning, and your roommate’s boyfriend who smells like cigarettes and never puts the toilet seat down. But that’s what makes it so familiar: we’ll never know a life without airport metal detectors, terrorist threats, or yearly tributes at Yankee Stadium.
There would be a new hysteria, another tightening of the security state. Hell, it was already happening. I remembered my flight from Boston to Seoul, and the lonesome girl in a tear-stained college sweatshirt as flight attendants handed her a paper titled: “Deportation Verification Checklist.” I thought about Yunseo Chung, the green card-holding Columbia undergrad arrested and facing deportation for attending a pro-Palestinian protest, and how one of my friends grew up with her—one degree of separation. I ran through a mental list of American citizens who had been detained or even deported. I memorized my passport number just to be safe.
And just like that, the war was over. Our abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, and his wife, Cilia Flores, had gone according to plan. No one died in the operation, unless you counted two Venezuelan civilians and 32 Cuban troops.
Less than a week later, I returned to the United States. Maduro had beaten me there on a military plane, handcuffed and blindfolded. He faces trial for, among other ludicrous charges, conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism and import cocaine.
The kidnapping of another country’s leader and the wanton slaughter of foreigners in their own nation are just the most recent instances of American gangsterism on the world stage. After all, the prelude to Maduro’s abduction was months of airstrikes on mostly fishermen’s boats in the Caribbean, which have killed 145 people at time of publication; last summer, the United States illegally struck Iranian nuclear facilities, and now appears poised to launch a new offensive on that nation. After his aggression in Venezuela, President Donald Trump has publicly threatened the leftist governments of Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba with military intervention, and has set his sights on annexing Greenland—all while continuing to arm Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this month in Munich:
… [We] do not live in a perfect world, and we cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law which they themselves routinely violate.
For once I agree with Rubio, though I suspect we have very different definitions of “those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens.”
And for a moment, I should like to dwell on Rubio’s role as a caporegime for American imperialism, whose tentacles now strangle the besieged nation of Cuba. It is no coincidence that after abducting Maduro, Rubio called for “regime change” against Havana’s socialist government. Millions of Cuban-Americans have shared Rubio’s preoccupation since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, an obsession that has led to the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, a crippling embargo that has starved the Cuban population, terrorism, and even biological warfare.
Our war on the Cuban people isn’t just a Republican fixation. Democrat John F. Kennedy spent the vast majority of his presidency failing to oust Castro, and Bill Clinton tightened sanctions on Cuba. Barack Obama tried to normalize relations, but Trump and his successor, Joe Biden, reversed this policy. Clearly, neither of the major political parties has any interest in human rights in Cuba, the same way they don’t even pretend to care about the rights of Venezuelans and Gazans—if it did, we wouldn’t be starving a tiny island that poses zero threat to our security.
As Trump, Rubio, and much of Miami-Dade County have long fantasized, the next domino in the chain of Cuban recolonization has fallen. For them, it was never enough that the Cuban people merely suffer for their cardinal sin of self-determination; no, their error must be reversed. Time will tell if Venezuela, with its terminal economy and incompetent leadership, was just a testing ground for the American right’s final battle against the Cuban revolution.
But let us return to Venezuela. For the time being, acting president Delcy Rodríguez has placated the Trump administration by opening Venezuela’s state-owned oil industry to privatization, including foreign capital.
But what happens if the United States sours on Rodríguez, or when it inevitably feels the need to protect its investment from future imagined threats, or if it demands a greater share of Venezuela’s natural resources?
Or what if Nobel laureate and far-right opposition leader María Corina Machado, who spent months groveling for an American invasion to install her as president only to find herself out of power, attempts a coup like Juan Guaidó in 2019? Whatever the future holds for Venezuela, the prospect of another American military intervention, bloodier and more destructive, looms large.
Perhaps a robust optimism will preserve us. This optimism preaches that while American imperialism is mighty, that power is its fatal flaw. Every bomb dropped in the name of American interests will only succeed in antagonizing the people of the world against the United States. Paranoid, whipped, and howling to the rocks in its days of judgment, American imperialism may find its final rest.
I choose to carry this hope, but not because I hope for the downfall of my nation. On the contrary, I hope for an end to our imperial hegemony because I love America too much to judge it by the destructive power of its weapons. I hold America to a higher standard: our capacity for maturity, our ability to uplift the downtrodden, and our willingness to encourage change without resorting to violence. And on all three counts, America must not continue its current disastrous performance. We are right to demand more.
Aspiring high school history teacher. Some of my opinions are OK
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