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persist, regimes thought isolated and yet federating. Cuba first. Sixty years of American embargo, the collapse of its principal Soviet patron in 1991, a structurally strained economy: and yet the Republic of Cuba still exists. For the Global South, this survival is not anecdotal. It is a proof of concept— the demonstration that a small state can resist American pressure indefinitely if its political leadership remains resolute. Cuba has paid this choice with a considerable human cost that its supporters have too often obscured. But its very existence has become a geopolitical argument that its adversaries cannot erase. Chávez’ s and Maduro’ s Venezuela carried this logic to the scale of a significant oil-producing nation. Chávez deployed petroleum revenues to build Petrocaribe— an energy assistance network binding some fifteen Caribbean and Central American nations to Caracas— and to weave a Bolivarian axis uniting Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba. Despite the economic collapse of the 2010s, despite coup attempts and the most severe American sanctions imposed on a Western Hemisphere country since Cuba, the Maduro regime survived— sustained by Cuban logistical support, Chinese financial backing, and Russian political cover. Its survival, like Cuba’ s, sends a message: the American pressure machine no longer commands universal compliance. In West Africa, the rupture is more spectacular because it is more recent. Between 2021 and 2023, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger each experienced military coups that resulted in the expulsion of French forces, an explicit rejection of the Western security architecture, and the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States— an unprecedented regional bloc signing cooperation agreements with Russia, establishing relations with Iran and China, and publicly embracing an anti-hegemonic orientation. This movement does not arise from nowhere. It is rooted in a long history of postcolonial grievances, French military interventions perceived as protecting regimes rather than peoples, and structural adjustment policies imposed by Western financial institutions that impoverished the middle classes. But it also articulates with a new offer: that of a concrete multipolarity, where Russia supplies mercenaries and weapons without political conditions, where China invests in infrastructure without demanding democratic reforms, and where Iran offers an anti-imperialist rhetoric that resonates.
Flashmag! Edition 171 Avril 2026
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