From Cuba to Venezuela, Communism Runs on Oil

0:07 President Diaz-Canel from Cuba announcing working relationships now, talking relationships with the US government. As soon as the the the captor of Nicolas Maduro January 3rd, they would cut off essentially their 60% of oil imports that they would receive from the Venezuelan government. >> Cuba right now is is very bad shape and they're talking to Marco and we'll be doing something with Cuba very soon. That revolution, it's not even a revolution, that thing they have, has survived on subsidies from the Soviet Union and now from Venezuela.

0:42 They don't get subsidies anymore, so they're in a lot of trouble. Latin America has had swings and instability for a very long time, for decades and decades. I have mixed feelings about about this because I don't in general particularly like US foreign interventionism, but I love taking down commies. Every time socialism and the seizing of private property by the government has been instituted on every country and every creed, it has resulted in terror, in poverty and terror. That is the facts. The fact that we have to have this conversation in 2026 is fundamentally a complete failure of our education system. Because a real education system would teach all of us real history and real history has a very different spin on colonialism and which colonial force was the worst, the most repressive, the most far-reaching, the most dominant. And that is the European colonial power known as Marxism, cooked up in French salons by people living off their buddies like Karl Marx and then propagated by the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution.

1:58 What most people don't understand and what a friend of mine, an economist Phil Magnus, pointed out is that Karl Marx himself was basically sort of one of many like kooky utopian left-wing progressive scribblers right up until 1917. He was indistinguishable from a kind of mass of utopian writers. But with the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union proceeded to promote him and turn him in their quest for total global domination, also known as colonialism, into their project. They created institutes to push Marx and Marxism-Leninism around the world. They funded places like Cuba, which exported this foreign idea to have ownership and to trade with each other is human. It is natural. Communism is unnatural. It is a colonial force. It has been imposed on the world by the Soviet Union, by force, by gulags and walls and men with guns. And yes, the US has been an imperial power, too. But ours is of a different sort. What President Trump did with Mr. Maduro is is of a different kind than a lot of the typical US intervention. I personally just My own opinion is I'm glad he did it.

3:27 Take them all out. Take all the communists out. That's my position. With the caveat that these things usually don't go great, anyway. >> [laughter] >> The reason why communism and socialism fail is because no central planner has the knowledge to manage a complex society. That's why we need individual freedom. And that applies equally to foreign interventions and nation-building abroad. We can't run communism even at the level of a city. Trying to run other countries isn't up for grabs. And actually, for what it's worth, President Trump has basically said, "Nah, we're going to protect the oil. We're going to make sure there's no more thugs. And then we're going to mostly protect the oil."

4:11 You know what has turned out to be the thing that the Soviets understood, the thing that actually all of the the red wave on this planet has ultimately been powered by crude oil? It's the greatest irony of our times. The Soviet Union was centered in Russia. Russia has always basically been a petrol state. At one point, at its height, the Soviet Union was funding something like 20% of Cuba's entire GDP. From Russian ports for a long time now, military supplies have been sent to Cuba. Not only rockets, but bomb-carrying planes. And so close is Cuba to the States that the warning system would be useless.

4:55 American men-of-war rapidly deployed, and to the red ships bound for Cuba went orders to change course. In Cuba, President Castro long ago chose to ally his government with Russia, a course he may regret. He made his allegiance clear at the United Nations 2 years ago. The Russian leader played up as only he can. But as we go to press, he did announce that he will suspend shipments of arms to Cuba. Kennedy has spoken and acted in the way the Soviet understands. Despite having wealth come out of the ground, they collapsed. When they collapsed, they stopped funding Cuba.

5:32 And so Cuba needed a different petrol state to fund its communism. And they turned to Venezuela. Hugo Chavez, he was only there because he had a buddy. >> [applause] >> That's it. That's why he was there. And why did that buddy hold on to power despite being opposed by the United States just a couple miles to the north? They backed Mr. Chavez, and then Mr. Chavez returned in kind sending whole tankers full of oil to Cuba for free.

6:06 Mr. Chavez, Mr. Hugo Chavez, he was beloved by Hollywood. He was beloved by all of these people. He still is. He is lionized. He did exactly what they want to do. He did all of it. He built an entire policy regime that looks an awful lot like Mr. entire set of South American inspired, let's say, proposals are are are flat-out theft of the public. My platform is that every single person should have housing. Whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a state-wide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now.

6:51 This is someone that wants to steal 8 million people's property and put it in the hands of the state. Again, as part of his his effort to make everything free and to make housing a human right, which of course means it's a right to other people's property and labor, which last time I checked sounds a little more like slavery. >> I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist. >> [cheering] >> I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical. He clearly will not. I will give it to him on that.

7:29 Here is all of their favorite charismatic leader going around doing what they intend to do in his country while it still had some wealth to steal. Expropriate. He is in the square, I believe that's Bolivar Square, just pointing at buildings to take.

8:05 Take that one. Take that one. He would walk into people's businesses and say, "This is now the people's business." Which is to say his business. And what were the results? What happened? One of Mr. Chavez's programs was called the Great Mission Housing Venezuela, GMVV. And the state seized unused land and property to build, at least they were building something I guess, but build 4.6 million homes. But the residents in them didn't really get to keep the keys and were muscled to vote for him in order to keep the keys to these homes that they didn't really own. It was all a patronage scam to keep him in power.

8:45 Of course, Mr. Chavez had the benefit of running a petrol state, a state powered by oil, where money actually grows out of the ground. But that didn't stop him from sending Venezuela down a dark path because of socialism. And after his death, his successor, Mr. Maduro, well, kept the train running. A former bus driver and trade unionist, Nicolas Maduro became the protege of revolutionary Hugo Chavez and was catapulted to the presidency when Chavez died in 2013. He was not long in office before protests erupted over runaway inflation and critical shortages of basic goods. Protests in which his government quickly gained a reputation as repressive.

9:28 Indeed, the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into the regime in 2021 for alleged crimes against humanity, including torture and sexual violence. By and large, these these international law enterprises are pretty suspect. They are often dominated by the leaders of dictatorial regimes. Uh so, um I I believe Iran has played a role in the UN Human Rights Committee, Council, whatever. So, it's fair to be skeptical of of a lot of these things. Even so, even the international sort of like left-of-center progressive technocrats don't think and haven't thought for a long time that Nicolas Maduro was legitimate. He was just a thug.

10:16 >> Millions of Venezuelans have left the country under his rule due to political and economic troubles. I also happen to have spent, um well, my entire June in neighboring Colombia, in Bogota. So, I got a taste first hand of some of the instability in our neighbors to the south. I saw on the streets of Bogota that the people begging were there from Venezuela. I saw families begging on the streets in Bogota and around Colombia, all from Venezuela or claiming to be from Venezuela because it was understood that basically there was what has turned out to be one of the worst refugee crises on planet Earth out of this country that has the largest oil reserves on the planet.

11:05 Only socialism can make that kind of thing fail. As despite sitting on the world's largest oil reserves, the country's economic hardships continued and only worsened as international sanctions ramped up against his regime, deemed undemocratic by the US, Europe, and much of Latin America, who declined to recognize both his 2018 and 2024 reelections. These are beautiful countries with beautiful people, and they are being oppressed. Oppressed by people that frankly have far too many friends north of the border. It's not about democracy.

11:41 It's not about the last election. It's because the Venezuelan Bolivarian socialist project did indeed challenge US domination. Venezuela challenged US domination by driving its population into desperate grinding poverty. Just for context, in the 1950s and '60s Venezuela was the fourth richest country per capita on planet Earth. And in the 1920s, Argentina was almost tied with the US in income per capita before the Peronists, another left-wing bunch of barbarians, came in and smashed that country to smithereens. Okay.

12:26 Little graph, you know I love these graphs. This is from Our World in Data. This is GDP per capita. So that is total production in the society divided by the number of people. It is not a perfect measure of of let's say typical income. That would be median income. But those numbers track this actually quite closely. Let's just see. On the top you see the United States and on the bottom this first dot in 1800, the first measure, is Venezuela.

12:56 And as we expand out, what happens? We have the 1800s, we have this consolidation of the country. The beginning of it as a as a true state with a sort of centralized authority. Kind of going flat, going sideways as the US sort of uh takes off. We've got the late 1800s. Really the industrial revolution starting to kick in. Keep on going. Got a little bit of going sideways after the uh financial crisis of 1907 in the US, but we're still kind of keep on going. Venezuela is not really making enough progress here, but now look, as we get into the '30s and '40s, they discover oil.

13:39 They don't go commie, but they do have incredible amounts of production of oil. They get to uh put that to use. They're still a largely free market society. And now we're at 1970, where the politicians at the time, drawing inspiration from the global left, global communists, and their friends in Cuba, start to nationalize.

14:10 You see the divergence. The challenging of the American project, sort of running in place, financial crises, and now we're into the early 2000s, and Chávez Maduro kicks in. Hugo stays in place. He's got a little bit There's a We got an oil price run up here. So, we got a little bit of a bump. He dies, and here comes the full revelation of the Mom Donny communist seize property effects.

14:48 Total collapse. This is the reality of our history. This is the reality of the history of colonialism in the 20th and the 21st century. It is a communist enterprise. Communist colonialism has covered the globe with Marxist monsters. If you liked this clip, you should check out the full video and all the other great content we've got at Dad Saves America. So, be sure to hit the like button, subscribe, and ring that bell so you won't miss our new stuff as it drops each week.