Venezuela Falls, Cuba Trembles with Marla Dukharan

0:00It's all Venezuela today. It's all the Caribbean. It's all the Americas. We are going to go to the Caribbean to see what is the immediate impact on the economy, what is going to happen to the smaller countries in the Caribbean as a result of America's massive intervention in Venezuela. We're going to be talking to one of the Caribbean's finest economists, Marla Dukharan in Trinidad. So stick around. That's all coming up in about two minutes time.

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1:46How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And today the podcast is going out on the 8th of January, and we are going to be talking about the reverberations of the American moves in Venezuela. And when I say moves, the kidnapping of, the deposing of, the extraction of Nicolas Maduro, what that means, and the fact that the Americans have left in place, it seems, the existing or the pre-existing regime. but we're going to talk about America, the Caribbean, but mainly we're going to talk about Cuba because it seems that the end of the Cuban regime, which was put in place by Fidel Castro in 1957, 1958, is probably on its last legs.

2:38Why? Because it is the most dependent on Venezuela, number one and number two it is the country that america dislikes most and we're going to go to the caribbean to talk to mara dukaran to get the view from the caribbean john again fascinating days and times we're living oh it's it's like a whirlwind as you were just saying off air there that you know what's going on here is akin to what was going on in europe in 1989 when the wall came down The changes are as big. Well, they could easily be as big. I think you're right. I think it's not a bad way to frame it. Yeah. And you were also mentioning a couple of episodes ago explaining the Monroe Doctrine to me.

3:22Oh, yes. But this now is the Dunro Doctrine. And who knows what that's going to throw up. Yeah, no, no, it's true. But it's interesting. We talk about that as well. It's interesting you mentioned the Berlin War. I remember being in Czechoslovakia in August of 1988, John. And I went there, believe it or not, to see the demonstrations against the Soviet invasions of 1968, the Prague Spring. Oh, yeah. Being a curious little student that I was. I got the train down from East Berlin, very rickety train all the way down through East Germany, and arrived in Wenceslov Square on the evening of, I think, the 22nd of August, 1988.

4:09And at that time, East Germans were trying to escape in their trabounce all through Eastern Europe because the Hungarians had opened up a hole in the Iron Curtain, allowing Eastern European citizens, those living in communist countries, to flee through a gap in the wall. Yeah. And the East Germans took this as the invitation to get out of East Germany in their little trabans, drive down through the Czech Republic into Hungary and out through Austria and back up to West Germany where they had automatic citizenship. Did the trabans make it? Well, they did. The little put-put things. Tuka-tuka, tuka-tuka, tuka-tuka.

4:50And the stink of the engine. I don't know what they used. Yeah, Belgian out. Clouds. Trabans were actually made of cardboard. You can actually rip off. Yeah, they were actually made of reinforced cardboard, right? Wow. Some sort of weird sort of fiberglass and cardboard combination. But anyway, they stank to high heaven. So I'm there as a curious student. And fascinatingly, the regime in Czechoslovakia, which was very hardline, went in to a demonstration in Venselov Square of about 200 people. Yeah. And they mullered the shite out of them, right, with batons and things. And I was so shocked. I've never seen it like that.

5:30So I ran up the street and I ran into a little bar. And when I was in this little bar, there were loads and loads of Czechs there. And actually, they were Moravians from the Moravia part of Czech Republic. And the reason I know this is they were singing Moravian love songs. I was asking what this was. Everyone was a bit, not to me, everyone was a bit scootered. And anyway, I said to them, you know, what's going to happen here? You know, something's happening in Russia. Gorbachev is opening up, blah, blah, blah. And they said, look, this regime has been in place for the last 30 years. It isn't going anywhere.

6:04They have everything tied down. They said of those 200 demonstrators, 100 at least were agents provocateurs from the state pretending to be demonstrators to basically isolate the demonstrators. And they just said, you know, this regime is going to be here for another 10 or 20 years. The regime was gone in eight weeks. The reason I tell you this story is that once these things start to happen, everything is up for grabs. Yeah. Ideas, governments, institutions, individuals who you think were actually so permanent that they are in place get washed away. And this is why I believe that Cuba will be next to go and will go very, very quickly.

6:50Yeah. And the reason is the following. the Americans have been wanting to get rid of the Cuban regime since the very inception. At the very beginning, when Castro got into power, well, took power from Batista in 1958, he wanted the Americans to open themselves up to Cuba. He didn't want the Americans to shut down, but the Americans shut them down, imposed sanctions on them, which in a way forced Castro into the orbit of the Soviet Union. And it was only after the revolution that Castro became a communist. He never mentioned communism for about the first year. Oh, really? And then he became a communist.

7:25Yeah. A little bit of history. He regarded himself as the inheritor of a bloke called José Martí. José Martí was a poet who was a leader of the Cuban independence movement against the Spanish colonialists in the last war the Spanish fought in Latin America for the colonies, which is a war in Cuba in 1904. And then the Americans came in and backed the Cuban independence movement on the basis of the Monroe Doctrine, which was that America would always support liberation movements in the Americas over and above European colonists. Jose Marti gets killed, but he becomes the iconic hero of the revolution.

8:14The way that Che Guevara did. the way that Che Guevara did. Exactly the same idea. Iconography, hero worship, cult of the personality, all that sort of carry on. Guevara gets killed in the early 60s, having broken with, ironically, Fidel. Having broken with Fidel in Bolivia. He resigned, went to Bolivia. He gets killed in Bolivia. But to come back, Fidel Castro modeled himself on José Martí. And he thought that he could persuade the Americans that they should back him against the dictatorship of Batista, who was a military dictator who had been president, then had a coup d 'etat, came back. So in a way, although Fidel Castro mightn't have been totally surprised that the Americans wouldn't have reacted with open arms, he was actually shocked at the way in which the Americans, and particularly JFK, reacted in subsequent years.

9:13Now, the reason he thought this was he thought he was doing the Americans a favor by kicking out the mafia, because basically Havana was turned into Las Vegas. Yes, yeah, yeah. This is, by the way, the reason I think that Donald Trump really wants Havana is he sees a Trump Towers, a Vegas-style Trump Towers in Havana. I'm telling you, that's the sort of thing that motivates that guy. Gold everywhere. It's not great strategy. Absolutely. Gold everywhere. But to come back, the reason I'm fascinated with this, as you know, I've been down there a good few times. I have my old mate Desmond when he's passed away, lived down there for many, many years, and he took me around and, you know, showed me the ropes down there.

9:51And we went to parts of Havana and other parts of Cuba that, you know, lots and lots of foreigners didn't go to. Cal went to school down there, all that sort of stuff. But, but, but, if you look at the economic history of Cuba, it has always been an extractive industry island. So the first major industry was tobacco. Yeah. The second major industry was sugar. The sugar, ironically, expertise in sugarcane manufacturing came from the fact that the white sugar planters in Haiti had been kicked out by the first and only successful Black Revolt against colonialism, which was in 1798, John, in Haiti.

10:35Oh, right. Those people moved into Cuba. The Cubans then said, let's cultivate sugar. the problem with sugar it's incredibly labor intensive what do you need for that is labor they had no indentured labor because they'd killed all the indians so they get black slaves from africa which is why you have a large large like in effect havana was a slave colony and cuba was a slave colony so that's why you get a very large black population in havana in cuba like all over the Caribbean. It's a sugar plantation. The Americans then begin to invest in it in the late 19th century. Then prohibition comes in and it becomes a booze center.

11:21So all the American boozers said, well, if we can't get a jar in Florida, we'll go to Havana. We'll jump on the booze cruise. Jump on the booze cruise. So they go to Havana. And of course, what goes with booze? Gambling, chicks, prostitution, late nights. Dato crisps. Exactly. Spice bags, the whole lot, right? But ultimately, ultimately what? The mafia go follow the booze to Havana. So by the 1940s, you have the mafia all over Havana. Lucky Luciano, Mayor Lansky, all those guys are running the show. They're in bed with Batista. All of this is very well documented by Hemingway. You might remember from our intersert, John, the old man in the sea.

12:09Yeah, I love that. I love that. I love the film. It was about Cuba. Yeah. It was about an old Cuban fisherman. Hemingway goes there and, of course, loves it. And it's all good times. And then, of course, Batista comes back in the 50s, has a coup, becomes a total dictator. and Fidel Castro, who was a lawyer, Jesuit educated, very clever, parked in the right place, but ironically an interesting thing, Fidel Castro and his brother Raul were the illegitimate sons of a very rich man. And because they were illegitimate, because they were a result of an affair, the very rich man, Castro's dad, had them brought up on the estate, but in the houses of one of the peasants, not of the big house.

13:01And this is something that changed the psychology of Fidel all the way through his life. You know, he had to be the big man, he had to be respected. He was quite a bit of a bully, but an amazingly charismatic man. But once the revolution happens, you see extraordinary, brilliant changes in Cuba from the 60s and 70s, where people are being educated, where they're opening hospitals, where they're opening schools, where the revolution is something to really, really write home about. And the fact that the Americans turned their backs on the Cubans even made the Cubans more romantic in the eyes of the anti-American left, anti-imperialists all around the world.

13:41In effect, for the first about 20 years, Che Guevara, Camille Senfuegos, the other revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, become the sort of icons of anti-American, anti-imperialism. But then in the 1990s, the Russians leave. And when the Russians leave, when the Berlin Wall comes down, exactly as I was saying, the Czech Republic, nobody was thinking that Havana, when Mikhail Gorbachev got into power, Havana would be starved of oil. But that's what happened. So when I arrived in Cuba in the mid-90s for the first time ever, it was a bit like East Germany with mojitos. Right. You know what I mean? It had that gritty, commie vibe.

14:26It had salsa, mojitos, all that sort of stuff, you know? Funky communism. Yeah, funky communism. Communism on the beach. Cuba Libra communism, right? Now, of course, they became highly dependent. First, it was a Spanish colony. Then from about 1900 to 1950, it was dependent on America. Then from 1960 to 1990, they were highly dependent on Russia. and from 1990 to now they've become highly dependent on Venezuela. Yeah, furthermore. So Cuban sovereignty was always compromised by the fact that the system was unbelievably anti-capitalist and anti-innovation, but also because when the Americans tightened the screw on them and declared sanctions, they had to turn somewhere else.

15:19and for the last 15 years or 20 years, that somewhere else has been Venezuela. Yeah. And if Venezuela changes position, as it will now, because it's been run by Marco Rubio, who you pointed out is the son of Cuban immigrants and hates the Communist Party. It's only a matter of time before the Americans take over Cuba in the same way, but they mightn't do it in the same way, but they'll want to do it. But the fascinating thing about Cuba It's the way in which Cuba has been romanticized, lionized, eulogized by what I would call the soft left all over Europe. I remember in 1996 being in Cuba, okay, and there was no food.

16:06Yeah. They had a special emergency. There was very little food. It's the only place I've gone in Hollyers and I was starving there, right? There was no food. There was very, very little oil. so there was nothing moving around the place. Havana was falling down around us, literally falling down. You've seen it, literally falling down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There were hungry children everywhere and I meet these bunch of Dubliners who were members of a trade union and they sat beside me and they were kind of dubs and they said, ah, they said, oh, it's great. Yeah, yeah, it's brilliant here in Cuba.

16:43Fantastic. I'm looking around and saying, it doesn't look brilliant to me, man. I said, you know what? I said, you know what? We're getting here before Fidel dies. I said, really, yeah, before the Americans ruin it. And I'm looking around, and I said, the place is fucking ruined anyway. Fidel is ruined. But it was that sort of bizarre, sort of, I would say, inter-cert communism, you know? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. They kind of loved the romance and the idea of putting the finger up to the man and being anti-American. Meanwhile, after the Soviets pulled out, all that idea of the energy of the good education and the good health system all crumbled with it and they were typical of the nostalgic left who were prepared to actually sacrifice intellectually the welfare of Cubans for the flag-waving ideology that's all very well in Liberty Hall here in Dublin where there's nothing at stake or nothing real at stake but down there people were starving and people were dying.

17:48And not only were they dying, they were dying trying to get to America. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the reality of life in Cuba seemed to me to be so far away from the romantic notions that many people, particularly in Europe, suggested was the reality of life in Cuba. That if the regime is toppled, many, many millions of Cubans will celebrate. For example, two and a half million Cubans have emigrated since 2020. In five years, they've lost a quarter of their population. Wow. Those people will come back. It's amazing. It's amazing. So let's now see what people in the Caribbean feel about what is going on.

18:34So let's go and talk to Marla Dukaran in Trinidad. Now, on Tuesday, we got the perspective from Latin America on Venezuela. If there are two regions in the world which are affected immediately and profoundly by what the United States is doing in Venezuela, one is, of course, Latin America. The second area is the Caribbean. And now we're going to our resident Caribbean correspondent, Marla Ducaran, one of the great, great economists that I've managed to meet over the last 20 odd years, obviously from Trinidad. But interestingly, Marla has a Venezuelan mother-in-law and her children, therefore, have a Venezuelan granny.

19:21And of course, this shows you just how proximate and how linked Trinidad, the Caribbean, the Venezuelans all are. We're going to talk about that and then we're going to broaden it out. Marla, lovely to see you. How are you? Happy New Year to you, your family, John, you and yours and all your listeners. Thanks for having me again. Listen, wonderful to have you. Now, tell me, tell me, just set the scene, your relationship with Venezuela before we move on. Well, let me take you back a little bit further. So when I was a child, so I might have been, I don't know, seven, eight, nine, You know, my mom and her sisters and, you know, all the girlfriends, when they want to go on a girl's shopping trip that, you know, people say, oh, let's go to Miami for a girl's shopping trip.

20:06It was Caracas. And they would come back with suitcases full of, you know, clothes and shoes. Caracas, Venezuela, was wealthy. It was very densely populated. The first subway I ever rode was in Caracas. You know, the infrastructure in Venezuela was unsurpassed in a Latin American context, certainly in a Caribbean context. And so this is a country that, you know, 35, 40 years ago was very, very prosperous. OK. I remember the airlines having, you know, silver cutlery. OK. Yeah. I mean, this was, of course, this is a petro state. OK. And then, you know, with Chavez's election and the Bolivarian revolution, which I'm sure you talked about on earlier podcasts, you know, which supposedly was supposed to bring prosperity to all people as opposed to just the elite.

21:11And so it sounds very nice because it's all socialist and egalitarian. You know, that just didn't work out. And we can talk about how Venezuela devolved over the past 20, 30 years at the hands of Chavez and then Maduro. And so you've had more and more economic migrants in the first place who saw more opportunity outside of Venezuela than within. and many of them ending up in Trinidad and Tobago, in Guyana and Suriname, by the way, which are also considered Caribbean, but they are in South America. And that just continued to devolve until it was no longer economic migrants. And it was, as you said, I mean, the word refugee is what is commonly used now to describe people, the exodus of people.

22:03I mean, a quarter of the country left of the population of Venezuela. Which is extraordinary. Of course it is. And have you heard in the past 20 years how much noise was made about this and about this massive exodus? You've heard so many people lament Syria and Yemen and Ukraine and all of these countries. And yes, of course, they all have problems. But you hardly ever heard anybody lament what was happening and the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. How is it that a system which starts saying we're going to be socialist, egalitarian, we're going to do this, that, and the other, we have the most resource-rich country in the world, how is it that this system delivered 8 million refugees?

22:50Well, I guess, David, we have to distinguish between what was the intent versus what was the outcome. I mean, if we believe that truly the intent was to create more equality and prosperity for all Venezuelans as opposed to the elite, which is what, by the way, the revolution in Cuba was also about, right? And I guess almost every revolution, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's assume the intention was pure. You know that there is this age old saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. Perhaps that's what happened. But there are those who would suggest that the intention was never pure.

23:34And there was always the intention to seize power for the sake of power. And the fact that, for example, Chavez's daughters, you know, run around very wealthy with offshore bank accounts. Switzerland just announced yesterday that they're freezing Maduro's accounts. Obviously, these people who have amassed significant personal wealth are not egalitarian. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I think that there has been an enormous amount of misinformation coming out of Venezuela, misinformation that the Americans have used, misinformation that the European left have used, all that sort of thing. But all the while, and this is always the thing, is that the people of Venezuela have suffered enormously, right?

24:19And I saw that in the streets of Trinidad, where you were saying, look, these people are Venezuelan. They have got nothing. They might be staying here. This might be a staging post for them to go on. But all the while, you see the people have suffered. Now, can we just flip over? Because geopolitically, it seems that the country that's most likely to be affected by this is Cuba. The Cubans and the Venezuelans threw their lot in with each other. The Chavismos and the Fidelismos threw their lot in with each other. What do you think is going to happen in Cuba? Because Marco Rubio said very, very clearly the other day, look, you're in our sights.

24:55Americans have always had them in their sights. But now without Venezuelan oil, without Venezuelan support, it seems that Cuba is completely isolated. Yes. And, you know, Venezuela has been a savior to Cuba in many ways over the past couple of decades. I mean, Cuba used to receive around 100 ,000 barrels a day of oil that is from Venezuela roughly for free or if not significantly subsidized. And a lot of the oil that was received by Cuba from Venezuela was re-exported. And so refined and re-exported. And so that means that Venezuela single-handedly was responsible for most, if not all, of Cuba's foreign exchange earnings and therefore its overall economic activity.

25:51So the fact that, I mean, over time, this level of subsidization and the oil injections, if you will, into Cuba had declined based on Venezuela's own oil production declining. So Venezuela has had rolling blackouts and all kinds of economic problems based on Venezuela's own decline. And that is only going to intensify. And do you think now, I know you've gone over, we've chatted about this loads of times. You've been to Cuba. You've also been to Cuba as an economist, not just as a visitor. You've actually tried to understand what's going on there, how the economy works, how it doesn't work. Do you think this is the end of this Cuban experiment that started with Fidel in 1957?

26:35Well, I think the experiment ended some time ago, David. I mean, I feel like right now, Cuba is just much less idealistic than they are practical. You know, when I was there, say, maybe 10 years ago and had a meeting with the central bank, and I asked the question, you know, what's the level of your foreign exchange reserves? Because in the Caribbean, we calculate something called import cover. How many days can you survive? How many months can you survive if you don't export in any foreign exchange? And they said, this is a state secret. We don't reveal this because we are at war. And so Cuba has considered itself to be at war with the United States for the past almost 60 years.

27:15And so their whole economic structure, their whole culture, their whole, you know, we use the word ideology, they are a people who feel every single day they are fighting a war. And I don't think that's going to change, right? But the experiment in terms of socialism, I mean, really with the introduction of the embargo, I feel like then how can you consider this a socialist experiment when this is a country that has faced the longest and most severe embargo ever in history? That is what precipitated its economic collapse, not the socialist ideology. Really? Do you not think that there's a little bit of both in this?

28:01That, you know, if you decide to take all market economics out of your economy, that this is not going to have the effect such that even in the last five years, a quarter of Cubans have left. In the last five years since 2020. I mean, you can't blame the Americans. I mean, you can, but I'm not sure it stands to reason that you blame the Americans for everything. Because obviously the Cubans understood that when in the early 60s, they decided that America was their number one enemy. And as Fidel, I always said, a revolution needs an enemy. Our enemy has to be America. And then they switched to Russia supporting them.

28:43And the Russians collapsed in the 1990s. Then they switched to Venezuela supporting them. But all the while, the industry, the economy, which could have been opened up to other people, has collapsed largely because of, it seems to me, the internal policies as well as the sanctions. Well, I guess, you know, we would have to get the empirics to debate which one was more responsible. But I just want to go back to your point about, you know, the removal of market forces. I mean, just yesterday I was reading an update on the economy of Cuba and they've switched to a basically a managed float for the exchange rate, you know, which means demand and supply is determining the exchange rate.

29:25And that's just one most recent example. The Cuban economy has become and has evolved much more into a market driven economy than people really understand. than it started out as, you know, based after the revolution 50 plus years ago. So there has been, you know, reform over the last few decades, especially since, you know, Fidel and his brother are no longer at the helm. And yes, you can say, well, it was too little, too late. But I think that that is a misconception where there is no market determination of anything in Cuba. That is, you know, we do have some of that. I think it is a dangerous presumption to make, to discount heavily the effect of an embargo.

30:15That means that, for example, a ship that ships goods to Cuba cannot then leave Cuba and dock in the United States. You have significant legal constructs in the U.S. and laws that prohibit various kind of logistic and shipping and trade and financial flows. between Cuba and the United States and using the US dollar. So I feel like to discount the effect of the embargo would be unfair. So I feel like maybe you and I have to agree to disagree. No, I suppose it's not discounting the effect of the embargo, but it's just saying, look, if you have a regime, that the regime has chosen its own survival over the welfare of its citizens.

31:03And it's dressed this up under the banner of socialism, and it's dressed us up under the banner of an eternal fight with the United States, right? This idea that we're at war. But it's bizarre that we're at war with the country that a quarter of its people are choosing to go and live in. So, you know, there has to be some culpability of this rather adolescence flag waving. When you can wave all the flags you want, but your people are suffering as a result of your flag waving. Yes, understood. And you're right. The ideology is not going to help us, right? Clearly. But I just want to share two examples of what we might call socialism, but of course they don't call it that because that's a taboo word, where we're from.

31:48But you have countries like Barbados in the Caribbean that, by the way, has more loss-making state-owned enterprises per capita than does Cuba. And if that is not socialism, I don't know what is. You have the Cayman Islands that has a higher level of fiscal spending per capita than anybody else in the Caribbean and actually rivals Singapore. Yet, you know, the government does not provide as many services to its people as the government of Singapore does, for example, transportation and housing and so on, but still a massive fiscal spending per capita. So we do have in the Caribbean examples of large states that really, you know, dominate the economy and spend a lot.

32:36And that is one way one can classify you as a socialist. And yet their economies are not doing badly. So, you know, I don't think that the ideology in the case of Cuba is the main culprit. I really do. I really do believe it was the embargo. Okay, no, look, I get it. I think that there is a silver lining here, that if the regime in Cuba goes as a result of this, there is a possibility or a probability that Cuba will grow phenomenally as a result of American capital going in, as a result of European capital going in, as a result of capital flight, which has happened to Cuba over the last 50 years, reversing.

33:24I think the Dominican Republic is probably a better example because it's a bigger country. It's probably broadly similar population-wise to Cuba. And that place has grown immensely over the last 20 years. Dominican Republic has been the most steadily growing economy in the Caribbean and Latin America for the past 10, 15 years. The only country that's growing faster now is Guyana. And that's a whole different story. That's an oil exporting country. So, yes, I hear you. And I think that you're right. I think if stability is maintained, Cuba could really prosper. But that's true of any country. One would just hope that, I guess, the fundamental ideals of the revolution and I guess of any decent human being is that any kind of regime change and then influx of foreign capital does not result in massive inequalities and displacement of Cuban people, which is not what we would want to see, which is what existed before the revolution and prompted the revolution.

34:25So when you're looking at this as a Caribbean, right, when you're looking at what's happening in Venezuela, when you're looking at what that signals to Mexico, what it signals to Colombia, what it signals to Cuba, what's your feeling? I mean, honestly, David, my gut feeling and my assessment and knee jerk of all of this is that we have a global justice system that doesn't work. OK, people are up in arms and protesting. Oh, how can America do this? How can they invade? You know, this this breaks so many international laws and treaties that yada, yada, yada. Yet you have the same international justice system, the International Criminal Court, for example, that was investigating the Venezuelan regime.

35:20But guess what? They only started investigating in 2021. A full 20 years after we have evidence of humanitarian breaches and wrongdoing by the regime in Venezuela. So this same justice system, legal system that people are trying to invoke to protect against what the U.S. is doing is the same justice system that failed the people of Venezuela. And so my point is, yes, there are lots of people across the Caribbean that are making a ton of noise about the U.S.'s action. But who, in fact, allowed the Venezuelan economy and society to crumble the way it did such that it precipitated an invasion like this?

36:10That's the first thing I want to say. And, you know, the second thing is when you look at the U.S.'s action, of course, it's about the oil. Of course, it's about the resources. But why didn't somebody else come in before you get to the point of invasion? You have China, for example, that has invested massively and lent massively to Venezuela. and China, I understand, was promised from Chavez a million barrels a day in return. But why didn't China, if you were so concerned about the resources, but also the people of Venezuela, why didn't you intervene on a humanitarian level to stabilize the situation in Venezuela?

36:55Nobody cared about the Venezuelan people. And all of the Caribbean leaders and people in the Caribbean who are up in arms against the United States and their intervention. These are the same countries under a Petro-Caribe agreement received a lot of free and heavily subsidized oil from Venezuela under Petro-Caribe and immorally, in my view, were bathing in oil, bathing in Venezuelan oil while Venezuelan people are suffering and fleeing in droves. And so when I calculated back in 2012 or 2013 what these countries owed to Venezuela, and when I say these countries, countries across the Caribbean, Antigua, Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St.

37:45Kitts and Nevis and Suriname, only Suriname owed less than 20 % of its GDP to Venezuela. All of these other countries owed 20 % or more of their GDP to Venezuela. From Dominica at about 20 % to Jamaica at the time, 50 % of its GDP was owed to Venezuela. And by the way, those debts were not carried on the books, were not reflected in debt to GDP statistics. These were off-the-book debts. And so, of course, there is loyalty to the regime because these people kept you afloat for many, many years. so it's hypocrisy as well lots of hypocrisy all around so hold on this is this is a fantastic insight because i haven't heard this before that lots and lots of the political elite in the caribbean was in effect hand in glove with a system that not only allowed but actually resulted in the humiliation of the venezuelan people and now they're all up in arms about the americans but in actual fact, they were complicit.

38:52Complicit, 100 % complicit. And when you say that in Trinidad, when you say that, because I know you do, because I know your persona non grata in many places down there. When you say that face-to-face in the Caribbean with leaders who say one thing on one side of their mouth and say the other thing on the other side of their mouth, how do they react? They don't want to hear this. They don't want to be reminded of the debts that they owed to Venezuela learned that they were complicit in the absolute destruction of that country and that society. But I just want to quote something here that the Dominican Prime Minister Skerritt once said, and I quote, he said, I know of countries today because of the global crisis are using the funds from Petro Caribe to pay the salaries of public officers in these countries.

39:39I know of countries today that are using the resources to make their debt payment that they are unable to meet on a monthly basis. And then from Jamaica, Jamaica had reportedly accessed the Petro-Caribe Development Fund for recurrent expenses not limited to debt servicing. At the time, Wesley Hughes, the chairman of the Petro-Caribe Development Fund in Jamaica, said, and I quote, we have analyzed that initially the impact would be about U.S. $50 million a month or$600 million U.S. dollars per annum that we would have to find as a balance of payment impact. Now, these are significant amounts. And you see, because these debts were off the books, it's not easy to cite those statistics and say, oh, you owe Venezuela 50 % of your GDP, 80 % of your GDP in debt.

40:35And they don't want anybody to know this because guess what? There's also no accountability for these funds that they received from Venezuela and what they did with it, how was it appropriated or misappropriated. So again, a bunch of hypocrisy all around. Just, okay, so last thing, right, last before we go. So if Venezuela now is changing, so let's park our perception of Trump, our perception of what the Americans did last Saturday night. But if it leads to a change in the way Venezuela is governed, what are the implications for all these Caribbean countries that have actually lived reasonably high on the hog on free Venezuelan oil if they're going to have to pay for this stuff?

41:20Well, for the past couple of years, I mean, Petro Caribe didn't last forever. Many of these countries, they were weaned because Venezuelan just didn't have enough oil to send to them at one point because their refineries were falling apart, as you know. So I don't know that they're still drunk on Venezuelan oil. However, I would suggest to you that it represents tremendous opportunity. If there is regime change, and by the way, it doesn't matter to me, the regime wants there is stability. Socioeconomic stability, I feel, is what is absolutely critical and has been for two decades and has been elusive for two decades.

41:59Once you have socioeconomic stability in Venezuela, there is massive opportunity for neighboring Guyana, Suriname, because they're all oil exporting countries, and mining countries. My own country has, in Trinidad and Tobago, has a shared cross-border gas field. Venezuela does not have gas expertise or infrastructure. And so there was an agreement that Trinidad and Tobago will monetize this gas. It would be a tremendous opportunity for my country, again, all dependent on stability. And furthermore, the countries that don't have oil and gas and can't benefit directly from an oil and gas play with Venezuela, once there is socioeconomic stability and there is investment coming in and there is less of a refugee or illegal migrant flow, less human trafficking, less drug trafficking, less weapons trafficking, the whole region will be safer and more prosperous.

43:01And I hope that that's where we all end up. Are you saying you think that this is broadly a good thing, the last seven days? You know, I guess it depends on whether or not we end up with greater levels of socioeconomic stability. If we do, it is a good thing. It doesn't matter whether it's American or Venezuelan or whoever. If it's from Mars, I don't care. But if the people of Venezuela can live in a stable society where they are not arrested arbitrarily, they are not impoverished, then yes, I am in support of this. Marla as always an absolute pleasure to talk to you and I'll talk to you again very soon likewise thank you for having me it always a joy guys enjoy thank you so much

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45:26marla certainly wasn't pulling any punches there uh was she when she was oh she's great she's brilliant but you know she slapped out a few stats there that kind of surprised me and maybe you shouldn't surprise me but you know when she was saying that for a lot of the caribbean countries you know it's kind of between 20 and 50 percent of their gdp is owed to venezuela so no No wonder if Venezuela was, you know, going down the tubes. And a lot of the leaders in that region were complicit in what was going on in Venezuela. Yeah, I think that Venezuela was used by Russia and China as a thorn in the side of the United States in that area.

46:12Yeah. And they didn't give a damn what was happening to the Venezuelan people. But what Marla was saying was also interesting, was that the elites in the Caribbean were happy to take Venezuelan money and look the other way because the cost of that money was the destruction of Venezuelan society. And then when they are all hand-wringing about, oh, look at Donald Trump and the Americans, aren't they awful? None of them raised a finger or did anything to help the Venezuelans when they were really in trouble. So that's a fascinating, I haven't heard that argument before. I haven't heard those statistics before.

46:52I think that, again, what happens as we talk to the top, John, when these things change, you know, big things, whether it was Gorbachev in Moscow or Trump in Washington, Trump marked two in Mar-a-Lago rather than in Washington, actually, because it's all coming out of Florida. Yeah, yeah. And the base in Florida is Hispanic, and it's Cuban immigrants in the main, and Marco Rubio is a son of Cuban immigrants, there is no way the Caribbean is going to be the same in a year's time than it is now. And I would say the very first casualty of that, to Marla's point, which is if it happens and Venezuela remains stable, this will be a good thing, the very first casualty of that will be the regime in Cuba.

47:39And depending on how it happens, I think there'll be many millions of Cubans celebrating the end of the experiment, which started in 1958 and is probably going to come to an end in 2026. Yeah, and there'll be a lot of mojitos drunk that night. A triple mojito over here, please. We'll talk to you on Tuesday.

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