Ah, the sweet, metallic scent of socialist solidarity in the morning—it smells like cordite, stale tobacco, and the crushing weight of inevitable geopolitical failure. Welcome to the latest chapter of the Caribbean’s most pathetic suicide pact, where the Cuban government has once again demonstrated that its primary export isn’t cigars, rum, or rhythmic hip-swaying, but rather the expendable lives of its youth. The recent dispatch from Venezuela, reporting the deaths of thirty-two Cuban troops, isn’t just a tragedy; it’s a receipt. It is the invoice for a decades-long vampiric exchange that has finally started to draw more blood than it can afford to spill.

For the uninitiated or the willfully ignorant—a demographic that seems to encompass the entirety of the modern political spectrum—the alliance between Havana and Caracas is less of a ‘brotherhood of nations’ and more of a mutual-dependency program for failing regimes. Cuba, a country that has spent the last sixty years perfecting the art of turning a tropical paradise into a crumbling museum of 1950s automotive parts, provides the muscle and the surveillance state expertise. In return, Venezuela, a gas station masquerading as a sovereign state, provides the crude oil necessary to keep the lights on in Havana for at least twenty minutes a day. It is a barter system for the damned, a trade agreement between a drowning man and a man on fire.

The death of thirty-two soldiers is being framed by the usual suspects as a ‘strategic risk,’ which is a delightful euphemism for ‘sending people to die in a foreign shithole because you’re too broke to pay your own utility bills.’ These troops weren't there to liberate anyone; they were there as the Praetorian Guard for a Venezuelan administration that is so widely despised by its own populace that it has to import its loyalty from across the sea. It’s the ultimate irony of the post-Cold War era: a revolution that claims to be ‘for the people’ can only survive by hiring foreign mercenaries to protect itself from those very people.

On the Left, we see the usual performance of selective blindness. The ivory-tower academics and professional protestors will ignore these deaths or find a way to blame them on ‘imperialist intervention,’ as if the Cuban military somehow accidentally tripped and fell into a Venezuelan combat zone. They cling to the romanticized image of Che Guevara while ignoring the reality of a geriatric Cuban leadership that is literally trading the lives of its citizens for barrels of heavy crude. There is nothing revolutionary about a military occupation designed to keep a failing autocrat in power so that your own failing autocracy doesn't collapse into total darkness.

Meanwhile, on the Right, the predictable chorus of geriatric hawks in Florida and DC are salivating over the news, seeing it as a sign of weakness to be exploited. Their brand of ‘freedom’ usually involves replacing one flavor of authoritarian incompetence with a more corporate-friendly version of the same rot. They don’t care about the thirty-two dead Cubans any more than the Havana Politburo does; to them, these corpses are just data points to be used in a fundraising email or a stump speech about the ‘evils of socialism’ delivered from the comfort of a country that can’t even fix its own bridges.

The ‘strategic risks’ mentioned by the analysts are, in reality, the inevitable conclusion of tying your sinking ship to a burning oil tanker. Cuba’s involvement in Venezuela has always been a desperate gamble. By embedding its intelligence officers and military personnel into every level of the Venezuelan state, Cuba made itself indispensable to the Maduro regime. But ‘indispensable’ is a double-edged sword. When the host organism begins to convulse, the parasite is the first to feel the vibrations. Thirty-two deaths are just the beginning of the bill coming due.

Let’s look at the cold, hard absurdity of the situation. Havana is a city where the buildings literally collapse from neglect, and the government’s solution is to send its best-trained personnel to a different country to prevent a similar collapse there. It’s like a man whose own house is flooding running next door to help his neighbor bail out a swimming pool. The absurdity would be hilarious if it weren't so profoundly pathetic. The Cuban leadership is mortgaging its future on the survival of a Venezuelan regime that has turned one of the most resource-rich countries on earth into a place where people trade gold flakes for bags of rice.

There is no dignity in this alliance, only the grim persistence of two historical fossils refusing to admit that the world moved on decades ago. The thirty-two soldiers who died aren't martyrs for a cause; they are line items in a ledger of irrelevance. They died for a 'Bolivarian Revolution' that exists only in the fever dreams of propaganda ministers and the bank accounts of the well-connected. They died because their own country is an economic vacuum that has nothing left to offer its people but the chance to die for someone else’s survival.

In the end, this is what happens when ideology is allowed to overrule basic arithmetic. You end up with a pile of bodies and a dwindling supply of oil, and the only people winning are the grifters on both sides who get to write the history books. Cuba will continue to count the cost, and the cost will always be higher than they can pay. But don't worry—I'm sure the next shipment of oil will be worth every drop of blood. Or at least, that's what they'll tell the families of the dead while the lights flicker and the revolution continues its slow, agonizing crawl into the sea.