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.
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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.
My current suspicion is that Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland and Iran are Trump putting all the cards on the table expecting the worlds to just fold in response. To use another metaphor, he's blowing his load leaving nothing in the chamber. This feels very demoralizing right now, but if one middle power joins mexico in their attempt to call americans bluff and penetrate the blockade I genuinly thing the world order might shift.
Greenland is not in the same category as the other three. There were no serious US plans to invade, blockade or bomb Greenland. The US was doing joint military exercises in Greenland while Trump was waffling, and they already have a military base there. No one is fighting the US over Greenland.
Mexico is not going to violate the fuel blockade. The US will let Mexico send humanitarian aid, they're not going to let Mexico send Cuba oil until some sort of concession is made by the Cuban government. No "middle power" is going to ship fuel to Cuba.
I view it as a global version of Steve Bannon's "flooding the zone" strategy. If you just keep throwing new bullshit at your enemies, your enemies have to drop your previous load of bullshit and investigate the new load of bullshit. Leaves enemies in constant panic if nothing else.
Does this really work against an enemy with more mapower than you? China can simply assign more people to each event than the USA can.
Well tbh I don't think it's really working all that well even without a Chinese intervention. Trump wants little wins all over the world, and to feel like a winner all the time.
The more thorough foreign policy decisions are crafted by people like Marco Rubio, and I don't think he really got the result he wanted in Venezuela. The Cuba blockade is a revision of what the USA really wanted, which was regime change in Venezuela.
Similar stories elsewhere, like the Iran strikes. The drawback of flooding the zone is you can't control what the water is doing.
but "the zone" has grown to encompass the whole earth. "flood the earth"
wait they're already doing that.
I stated it last time when the US was gearing up to bomb Iran, but I think that China mobilizing it's military seemingly in preparation for an invasion of Taiwan would basically cause the US to abort any Iran operation. I don't think we have the capability to fight those two wars plus whatever it is we are doing in Ukraine.
they aren't and never will
Famous words said before the invasion of Ukraine.
I firmly believe that the US has switched their Taiwan policy from deterrence to deliberate provocation of war a la Ukraine. The US will not be directly involved in the fighting. That will be outsourced to Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines.
In other words, there would be minimal reaction from the US, and I don't think it would affect the Iran situation.
I also think there is a good chance that the US wants to provoke China into their own quagmire, but I don't think the US wants that right now. Taiwan is still integral to chip manufacturing, and I don't think the US is ready to support the logistical requirements necessary to accomplish their goals, which is why I think China mobilizing now would make the US pause what it's doing. The US is not ready to have to fight on someone else's timeline at the moment.
They’ve been trying to provoke China into it for years. It was really intense a year or two ago under Biden. Eased off slightly under Trump
Fighting in Taiwan, if it breaks out, cant be outsourced to Taiwan, Japan, SK or whatever combination of nations you can imagine. Without immediate and major US intervention Taiwan falls within weeks or at worst a couple of months and China brushes off anything any US dog can throw at them at the particular theater. Hell these countries cant throw anything of significance that or cant be placed in an american military base on their soil. Ukraine comparison make no sense. Ukraine is a huge ass country with a larger standing army and more hardware than most of EUrope combained, land borders with their allies and a frothing anti-russian nationalism and an abundance of poorer people that either want to be grinded to rince meat killing russians or can be forced to. There is no "Taiwan quagmire" to be had. Without US intervention China blockades Taiwan from energy inputs and if they are more vicious, food and medicine, and Taiwan folds relatively quickly. Way way way quicker than any economic or trade pain the US can inflict upon China. Japan or SK wont challenge the blockade on behalf of the US and literaly cant challenge the blockade it without the US actively doing so as well.
I made the Ukraine comparison as an example of intentional provocation of war. I don't really expect Taiwan to become a quagmire itself. Their job will be to fire off volleys of missiles targeting the Chinese navy and high-value economic targets along the coastline.
On the other hand, I do think Japan and the Philippines could become quagmires. What is China going to do? Invade and/or blockade all of their zillions of little islands? And the US would likely provide logistical support for them despite the war, using the threat of nuclear escalation as a shield.
Is there any chance of China actually launching an offensive on taiwan? Would it even be necessary?
Only if Taiwan pursues any unilateral moves. It's up to the CPC to determine whether those moves, whether allowing US military occupation, pursuing nuclear proliferation or outright secession, meets its "red line" for action.
Personally, I've always held the view that Taiwan is a big kabuki theater. Talking to geopolitically minded Chinese comrades about it gives you the impression that "Taiwan reunification" is the biggest case of inter-generational blue balls in modern history. Akin to the highly anticipated and fear-mongered, but ultimately merely rhetorical, liberation of West Berlin in the original Cold War.
Pragmatically speaking, China (or rather, socialist China) benefits from the contrast that Taiwan brings. It's the fabled, fantasized alternate "democratic free" China pursuing electoralism and all the Western hurrah words, manifested dialectically in reality. Yet all of that only evidently amounting to a population where a large portion simply wishes they were Japanese instead. All the while being poorer nowadays than many of the likes of their Shanghai or Shenzhen counterparts. It could be said that it's perhaps preferable for the CPC to maintain Taiwan as a reverse East German-style foil and that the CPC ultimately found a way to make lemonade out of lemons through the present state of the Taiwan status quo.
Geopolitically speaking, Taiwan has been relatively "worthless" historically. It says quite a lot that in spite of being a strait away from one of the oldest polities in human history, the first group to formally incorporate the island was Spain. The only use of the island is as a base against mainland China, which is why the Ming retreated to the island following the establishment of the Qing (later indeed using the island as an attack vector during the Revolt of the Three Feudatories) and the KMT followed in the Ming's footsteps. In a purely geopolitical stance, China doesn't need to necessarily possess the island itself, only merely prevent any hostile actors (the ROC itself, the West, Japan, etc.) from weaponizing the island as a dagger against the mainland.
The way that the Japanese/American-occupied Ryukyus and the Philippines' Batanes islands juts toward Taiwan like pincers means that possessing Taiwan itself without addressing the former would not fundamentally solve the issue of China's access beyond the "First Island Chain." As such, any war for Taiwan without addressing the wider regional status quo of American control would merely be kicking the can down the road from a geopolitical standpoint.
It's kayfabe. Both the PRC and US saber-rattle, but their strategy is anything but military. The PRC wants to economically integrate the ROC into the PRC without formal political integration, in effect turning the ROC into a SEZ. Meanwhile, the US wants and has been turning Taiwan into a poison pill that they hope the PRC will swallow. And what is the poison? "I'm not Chinese, I'm Taiwanese except sometimes I'm also Japanese" brainworms. If Taiwan gets swallowed up, those separatist brainworms will spread far quicker throughout the Mainland. And southern China is weaker on questions of national unity relative to the north, which Taiwan is very much part of both geographically and culturally.
At the end of the day, the PRC and the people of the ROC benefits most from the current status quo while the US wants an "independent" Republic of Taiwan that they can place nukes on but can live with the PRC forcefully reunifying Taiwan with the Mainland because the separatist brainworms and general cultural confusion of the average Taiwanese owing to Chen's desinofication campaign would undermine Chinese society. Plus, innocent people will inevitably die in any military campaign, so that's more fuel to the fire.
Of course, al Aqsa flood has accelerated things and the kidnapping of Maduro means the PRC needs to greatly militarize in order to protect its allies. However, the domestic population will not consent to any Chinese military intervention (outside of an invasion of Japan in order to settle old scores) without the reunification of Taiwan with the Mainland. "Why is the PLA in X country instead of liberating our compatriots in Taiwan?"
the PLA has already been in several countries without liberating Taiwan. the wars with India, the agressions against the Soviet Union and Vietnam, the anti-communist operations in Afghanistan, the MINUSMA intervention in Mali, the base in Djibouti and propably some other cases that I forgot right now.
India, the SU, Vietnam, and Afghanistan are all countries that border the PRC, so none of them were hard sales to the domestic population. Those are very different than what I had in mind when I wrote that, which is having Chinese military troops in Venezuela, a country that is for all practical purposes on the opposite side of the world from the perspective of China, ready to invade Guyana and overthrow their pro-US regime if the US tries to assassinate Maduro.
A lot of this isn't true. There's no cultural confusion. The CPC purposefully misinterpreted a poll for national propaganda reasons. There are no Taiwanese from a Chinese background that believe they aren't from a Chinese background.
From who, the KMT? They should have done that a LONG time ago!! The CPC would have full legitimacy if they took out the KMT before they could oppress the people living in Taiwan at the time. Way too much time has passed. The people of Taiwan really have zero relation to the CPC. All the CPC arguments for why Taiwan is theirs doesn't hold up. "Taiwanese are Chinese" - I guess they own Vancouver now? Or wherever there are Chinese people.
"The war never ended" ok, might is right but your war was against the KMT, who are from China. That's great, continue the war against them. They're all over 80 years old now. What's the point?
"Taiwanese are closer to the evil Japanese (who committed countless war crimes) than us so they are bad" I guess?
"Taiwan has always been a part of China" no it hasn't. Throughout imperial Chinese history Taiwan was seen as a land of disease and barbarians and of zero use to anyone.
I am all for the returning of the stuff that the KMT stole from China AND the people of Taiwan. No I don't like the DPP and how they go along with US propaganda but the alternative is to go full Yemeni and Taiwanese are way way way too comfortable for that.
“Taiwan” in its current political form is the unresolved remnant of a defeated reactionary regime, preserved by imperialist intervention. It is not a neutral “society that drifted away,” but a Cold War client structure built to block the completion of the Chinese revolution. Most of your arguments quietly erase that history.
This ignores a central fact: the CPC did not “choose” to stop at the strait. In 1950, the PLA was preparing for Taiwan operations when the US intervened directly via the Seventh Fleet after the outbreak of the Korean War. That intervention froze the civil war and militarily guaranteed the survival of the KMT regime. This is not speculation; it is openly acknowledged US policy. Without that intervention, the ROC state on Taiwan would not exist. Blaming the CPC for not completing reunification while ignoring US naval containment is ahistorical.
The CPC is not a bloodline or a cultural club. It is the ruling party of the Chinese state that emerged from a popular revolution. “Relation” here is political and historical, not sentimental. The majority population of Taiwan is Han Chinese (with roots generally in Fujian) whose families largely arrived during Ming–Qing settlement or with the KMT retreat. Their language, kinship networks, religious practices, and economic ties are overwhelmingly Chinese. That does not obligate them to “like” the CPC, but it does make the claim of “zero relation” incoherent.
More importantly, this argument quietly treats the KMT state and it's successors as the natural representative of Taiwan’s people, when in reality it was a settler regime imposed under martial law for nearly four decades, during which Taiwanese political identity was violently suppressed. The DPP did not emerge from some ancient Taiwanese nation; it emerged from contradictions within that ROC structure.
This is a category error. No serious CPC argument claims sovereignty based on ethnicity alone. The PRC’s claim is based on state succession and territorial continuity: Taiwan was returned to China after Japan’s defeat (Cairo and Potsdam Declarations), and the ROC lost the civil war. Vancouver was never part of the Chinese state. Taiwan was. Equating diaspora communities under capitalism with a disputed postwar territory is either ignorance or bad faith.
Wars are not annulled by age. The Chinese Civil War ended militarily on the mainland but was frozen internationally, not resolved. The ROC continued to claim sovereignty over all of China for decades, occupied China’s UN seat until 1971, and functioned as a forward base of US military power. The “point” is not personal vengeance against old men; it is the unresolved question of sovereignty created by imperialist containment.
This is half-true and therefore misleading. Taiwan was not always tightly administered, just as many frontier regions in premodern states were loosely governed. That does not mean it was “outside China” in the modern sense. Qing sovereignty was real, if uneven. More importantly, modern sovereignty does not rest on how much an island was romanticized by imperial officials centuries ago. In the modern age it rests on post World War II settlements and state succession. After 1945, Taiwan was returned to China. The dispute since then is not ancient history; it is Cold War geopolitics.
This is a strawman. The serious critique is not cultural affinity but colonial legacy. Japanese rule materially reshaped Taiwan in ways that the KMT later exploited, while suppressing indigenous and working-class agency. Pointing that out is not moralizing about “bad people”; it is analyzing how colonial layers produced today’s contradictions.
Good post thank you comrade. I was surprised to see so much made up speculation on the bear site
Unfortunately not unusual for people to have warped views of China and Chinese matters even in leftist spaces often due to personal or environmental reasons.
Coolusername lives in Taiwan and has understandingly ingested too much green media.
That makes sense so in this case it was a mix of the environment and personal connection leading to a twisted understanding
Don't the KMT want reunification too? Xi is possibly meeting with the leader of the KMT next month after a successful CPC-KMT think tank a few days ago. We will have to wait and see if developments come out of it
I think you need to stop watching green media.
GOOD post
Most likely not anytime soon. I also think they would be more inclined to do some sort of embargo and/or blockade first to show Taiwan what life without the mainland is actually like.
Right now? No. But there are opportunities that will present themselves in the coming years.
I dunno much about taiwan politics but from what I heard, anti china politics are losing power. even current dpp government supporters think curent government is too aggresive against china and dpp seems to lose to more pro-china party kmt next election. I don't think china will do any military act before next election
I have said no until today, but with Japan wanting to remilitarise I would no longer rule it out as something China would do in preparation for conflict with Japan.
How did I forget japan electing a fashie that wants to kamikaze the entire country against china smh
I don't think China will allow them to remilitarise. I believe China would go to war with Japan pre-emptively to stop it. And before they do that, they would want to secure Taiwan first.
I don't think this is even a controversial take, there is NO WAY China is allowing Japan to build up again into the kind of country that did what it did to China last time. They absolutely will not allow it.
Japan is militarized. the constitution is a rag for the US to wipe its ass with.
and if i had a grain for every militaristic escalation against China the CPC did not answer with war i'd have like, 4 heaps by now
Purchasing 147 * F35s is in a completely different league to what Japan currently is and that's just as a start.
besides that they're not going to receive that anywhere near on schedule
they already have 47, plus 200 f15s, and 80 f16s. that's a heap of modern fightercraft
i appreciate the fashy PM is expanding the "JDF" but we should include the context that the "JDF" has had a leading military arsenal for decades, one the CPC has been accounting for for decades.
I don't think she's up for it, you guys aren't taking into account that the US is telling countries what to do, or else they get the stick. Trump recently said SK wasn't doing their part against China. This is a CLEAR tell that these countries aren't acting on their own accord.
There is always a chance, yes. Especially if Taiwan or the United States make any concrete moves against the One China policy. The PRC is mostly content with the status quo regarding Taiwan, but if the status quo changes (which seems to have in recent months!) that likelihood goes up.
That is true. Hoping it doesn't get to that if anything the libs are gonna be insufferable about it.