The Meaning of Maduro in Metropolitan Detention

I traveled all day to get there, to the prison where the leader of the Bolivarian process is held hostage. It was early January, only a week after Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were kidnapped from Caracas, Venezuela and flown to the prison where they are still held in the Empire State. It has taken me more than a month to write and rewrite this, struggling to distill meaning and method from this madness and mayhem which in today’s world runs the risk of appearing almost mundane – nothing to see here folks! Just another entry in the archive of outrages. But there’s so much to see, so much to understand, and I fear we are at risk of missing it. Jose Marti’s warning from 1894 is still ripe:

Hatred and misery are posing a threat and being reborn, and the man who keeps this to himself instead of speaking out is not complying with his duty…. the obligation of knowing the truth and spreading it.

In this prophetic essay, Marti wrote that “in Our America it is imperative to know the truth about the United States.”[1] The kidnapping of Maduro and the cell which holds him have become classrooms for the whole hemisphere, in teaching the truth about the USA. But we can’t leave it to chance or fate to spell it all out; some pedagogy is required to fulfill our duty to our fellow Americans who live from Alaska to Argentina, and who need to know what this means for them. My method is unconventional: part polemic, part panegyric – a mix of analysis and invective, launching perhaps too late and landing maybe too soon; a report and a rallying call to the next chapter in American history.

(I read Simon Bolivar’s “Carta de Jamaica” on the bus, along with Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry about New York City, and some old essays by Jose Marti, while listening to Serenata Guayanesa. Sure I’ve also read the news, listened to the radio, and watched the talking heads on the tube. But these older sources have so far proven more reliable than the steady stream of titillating headlines and the long line of pundits ready with their liquid crystal displays to predict the future.)

Perhaps the new mayor of New York is a socialist, but it still smells like sulfur here in Brooklyn, outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, where the damned of the earth have been tortured and killed in recent memory[2], and where a President and First Lady of Our America are held as prisoners of war. What’s going on here? The facts are so outrageous they call for more than a chronicle, and more than mere condemnation. That’s what might justify my unorthodox method of telling this story: the need for a deeper and more holistic understanding of what’s happening. These are not only buildings and streets – they have names and meanings and histories. As Lorca wrote

No es el infierno, es la calle.
No es la muerte, es la tienda de frutas. [3]

It’s not hell, it’s the street. It’s not death, it’s the fruit shop. This is no longer just any building, this jail no longer just any jail. Inside is not just a husband and wife – nor are these only men in uniform standing guard, dressed to kill. Lorca found it in the same poem “under the multiplications… under the divisions…  under the sums,” and understood. An altered destiny is set in motion with consequences beyond our comprehension or control.

I know the holiday is long over, but at the risk of seeming ridiculous, what first came to mind there on the cold streets of Brooklyn, at dusk, surrounded by police, outside of the building where Nicolas Maduro is held hostage, is the Christmas song of Ivan Perez Rossi.[4] I couldn’t get it out of my head:

Donde esta Nicolas?
Suena la campana, suena sin cesar,
triste al oirte, se pondra a cantar.
Los ninos pobres preguntan, donde esta Nicolas?

Where is Nicolas? The bell rings, rings without ceasing. Saddened to hear you, the poor children ask, “Where is Nicolas?”

Y los ninos ricos juegan, los ninos ricos juegan
Felices en Navidad.

And the rich children are playing, the rich children are playing, happy on Christmas. Where is Nicolas? The poor children of the world ask, and they are answered. The rich children are playing with the Christmas of his capture, getting ready to stuff their stockings with oil.

Suena la campana, suena sin cesar.

The bell rings, rings unceasingly. It won’t stop ringing in our ears, like the shrieking whistle that pierced the Caracas skies before dawn on January 3. And yet, just like in the song, this ringing is not only a sound of sadness:

Armoniosa suena sin cesar…
Su tañido trae la dicha,
y un mensaje de esperanza
a la humanidad.

Harmoniously it resounds without ceasing. Its sound brings luck, and a message of hope for humanity: Yes, this too is happening here on the cold streets of Brooklyn. There is a counterpoint of harmony which coalesces from the cacophony. This too needs to be explained: the reason to celebrate on this long cold night.

Every new minute that Nicolas and Cilia are held prisoner, the demand for their liberty gathers momentum. Every new hour that this outrage continues, the fall of the regime which made them prisoners draws nearer. And every new day that they are prisoners, their stature grows – every night they go to sleep bigger heroes. By bombing Venezuela, kidnapping its president, and locking him up in the Metropolitan Detention Center of their Empire State, the government of the USA has put Maduro on a parallel historical position to Montezuma, when captured by Cortes. (Or like as Atahualpa, when captured by Pizarro.) Maduro didn’t ask for this: it is an empire which has put him in this position. It is the cabinet of Trump which speaks without fear or shame about carrying on the legacy of colonialism. Every time they speak of their right to own and dominate the hemisphere by force, they drive this point closer to home. Every day that Maduro and Flores are held prisoner, the unity of the Americas accelerates.

Friends have told me that this comparison is off; they explain how Maduro’s government had already sold out before, or that the Bolivarian process was never really revolutionary, or just that Maduro wasn’t fairly elected. While these points have all been argued, as long as Maduro is locked up, they don’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you personally believe – the mythos is bigger than the pathos. Nobody cares whether Montezuma was really anti-Spanish, or really represented all of Tenochtitlan, or whether the Inca emperor presided over a just mode of production. Their place in history was determined neither by their personal characteristics nor by their respective forms of government, but by the fact that they were both victims of conquest. Nor was the collapse of Spain obvious at the height of the conquest, but if we have studied history then we can recognize a pattern; the tragedy and the farce.

The Trump cabinet speaks of the Munroe Doctrine! They don’t know what they’re talking about – nor whom they’re messing with. A decade before the Munroe Doctrine was published, Simon Bolivar wrote his famous Letter from Jamaica, in 1815, 211 years ago today. So much of this document sounds and resounds still, like that bell, with sadness and hope; a clarion convocation to the whole continent:

The veil has been torn, we have seen the light and they want to return us to darkness, the chains have been broken; we have been free and our enemies pretend to enslave us again.[5]

The veil has been torn, Mr. Narco Rubio! The veil has been torn, Dr. Donroe! Do they understand that it’s the president of the Bolivarian Republic that they have locked up in there? They’ve barely heard of Bolivar. But we who know what Bolivar means to Nuestramerica, must pay tribute to his prophecy, that “the USA seems destined by providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom.”

Nicolas and Cilia, like Atahualpa and Montezuma – trophies of conquest, prisoners of war! People in the USA may not grasp quickly what this means for the rest of the hemisphere. As Bolivar wrote in that letter, “even though some of the statistics and revolutions of America are known, I dare to assure that most of it is covered in darkness.” Neither the Trump cabinet, nor their opposition in the Democratic Party, nor many US citizens who think they are the only ones to call themselves Americans, have become fully aware that nearly seven hundred million souls south of the Rio Grande are free and will not surrender.

Of course there are a few people who did celebrate the invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its head of state. They were duly televised: the rich children celebrating, naughty niños of the Americas, happy to get coal for Christmas. Don’t believe the hype – these sinverguenzas are a small minority of Our America, as Chavez unforgettably described them, los escualidos. Most have direct predatory appetites in the fire sale of their homelands. Others, alas, have just not yet learned the truth about the United States – neither Biden’s senility nor Trump’s pathology have yet been able to shatter their faith in the American Dream. They continue to aspire towards the systems and values of el Norte, and like Narco Rubio are impatient to shoulder the white man’s burden. Marti described this phenomenon:

With some people, an excessive love for the North is the unwise, but easily explained, expression of such a lively and vehement desire for progress that they are blind to the fact that ideas, like trees, must come from deep roots and compatible soil in order to develop a firm footing and prosper, and that a newborn baby is not given the wisdom and maturity of age merely because one glues on its smooth face a mustache and a pair of side burns. Monsters are created that way, not Nations.

This historical process culminated in the first month of this year with the celebrations of the escualidos de Nuestramerica, cheering the neocolonial conquest of their homeland. Jose Marti in 1894 premeditated Antonio Gramsci in 1930s: “the old order is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Another translation states it more directly: “Now is the time of monsters.” [6]

Little monsters. Rich children playing with stolen toys, and breaking them. Two hundred years ago Bolivar counseled Europe to dissuade Spain from its course of conquest:

Europe would do good to Spain to dissuade it from its obstinate temerity; at least it would save expenses and blood; if it focused on its own territories, it would found its prosperity and power on bases more solid than uncertain conquest, precarious commerce, and violent extractions from remote and powerful enemies.

So would the USA save money and blood and even oil, by abandoning this crazed mission of relaunching Manifest Destiny at the very hour that its moral and economic bankruptcy is most grossly revealed. Meanwhile, Europe is as unlikely to reign in the predation of the USA in the 21^st century as it was to check the colonial appetites of Spain in the 19^th. Honor among thieves! For example, Mike Carney, acting as Prime Minister of Canada, can in moral and market terms condemn a threatened invasion of Greenland, after presiding over an actual robbery of Venezuelan gold as Governor of the Bank of England. This is not hypocrisy but supremacy. The tender is rendered, unto Caesar. To the extent that the USA stays the course of merciless plunder and arrogance and greed, then the outcome is certain: the pride comes before the fall. They pretend to impose an empire which has already fallen. They will wind up like Spain, with nothing to show for their conquest but debt and deserts and undying shame.

What else can we say about the diabolical powers that drive this empire to rise and ruin? Are we at a loss for words when faced with people who proudly personify the absolution corruption of power? What can we say to these rich kids and their death squads?  I am nostalgic for the eloquence of Chavez when he spoke to the devil: “You’re an ignorant donkey, a sick, immoral, cowardly, lying, genocidal, childkilling, drunk, ridiculous man. Oh Mr. Danger, you messed with me.”[7]  But I am not poetic enough to describe this scenario. So I recall Lorca, and his poem of New York:

I denounce all the people
who ignore the other half
the irredeemable half
which raises up their mountains of cement
where the hearts beat
of the little animals which are forgotten
and where we will all fall
into the final festival of drills.
I spit in your face.
The other half hears me…

The other half hears, the poor children hear, and they know where Nicolas is. As Bolivar invited his contemporaries in 1815: “Open our ears, and we will observe a struggle that is simultaneous in the immense extension of the hemisphere.”

A simultaneous struggle unites the hemisphere. But a thick cloud of desperation and fear clouds our collective consciousness. Every poor child in the Americas is in the cross-hairs of these crackers. The Bolivarian government, under siege and surrounded at nuclear gunpoint, hangs on. Rumors ripple and the turbulence gathers momentum. “Any idea of the future of this country seems adventurous,” wrote Bolivar. But he insisted:

Just because successes have been partial and alternating, doesn’t mean we should lose faith in fortune… When success is uncertain, when the state is weak and when endeavors are remote, all men hesitate, opinions divide, passions are agitated and enemies encourage them, to triumph by that easy means.

Bolivar’s counsel from over two centuries ago cuts like a sword through the tangle of geopolitical rumor. What are the internal dynamics of the Venezuelan state? The details are beyond me – no doubt they are fraught with storm and stress, and plans within plans within plans! But at night outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, these details seem far less relevant to the future of the Americas than the drama which is brewing here in the Empire State, where the Cartel of the Gringos is going to put the first Bolivarian couple on trial for narcotrafficking and possession of firearms. It is a savage irony, given that the Delta Force which carried out “Operation Absolute Resolve” stands accused on both counts.[8]Marti could explain that here we have a case study, a perfect lesson about

the crude, uneven and decadent character of the United States, and the continuous existence there of all the violence, discord, immorality and disorder blamed upon the peoples of Spanish America.

Whither Venezuela – is Venezuela withering? They are surrounded by a military blockade which costs US taxpayers over $30 million per day.[9] What should the Venezuelans do at gunpoint, with their leader hostage? Can Delcy be trusted? As Bolivar predicted, when success is uncertain and the state is weak, opinions are divided, passions are agitated, and the enemy delights. We can debate it all year until the chickens come home to roost. But the destiny of the Americas is another story.

Bolivar quotes Montesquieu: “It is harder to take a people out of servitude than it is to subjugate a free people.” It’s easy for the empire to shock and awe; to bomb and kidnap and negotiate at gunpoint. But the harder work has already been done: for generations the people of the Americas, and Venezuelans in particular, have been organizing themselves, fighting and overcoming centuries of colonialism. And shock is not the same as subjugation. The hard won work of generations is hardly undone with a bombing and a kidnapping. For the last 30 years, Venezuela has provided a haven and a motor for a revolutionary process which transcends nation states. As Bolivar imagined:

Later, when we are strong, under the auspices of a liberal nation, which can give us its protection, you will see us cultivating the virtues and talents that lead to glory.

Chavez and the movement which created him provided this: a liberal constitutional revolutionary process, which lifted hundreds of thousands out of poverty and involved them in active self-governance…. and which from the beginning has been accused of Dictatorship, by Republicans and Democrats, perhaps precisely because it is a real democratic republic.

This period may be closing. That’s at least one possible meaning of yet another night that Nicolas and Cilia spend in the American nightmare. The tremendous, unprecedented reductions in poverty which were achieved in the first decade of the Venezuelan revolutionary process have been hugely compromised by the most recent decade of sanctions. Bolivar wrote his letter from Jamaica at a similar moment of defeat: first independence, then reconquest, and exile. He described Venezuela at that time:

In terms of the heroic and unlucky Venezuela, its events have been so rapid and its devastation such as have reduced her to an absolute indigence and a scary solitude… without exaggeration it can be assured that a quarter have been sacrificed, for land and sword and hunger and disease and migrations… all the result of war.

Fast forward to the 21^st century sanctions, the economic war, the media war, the emigration, and the invasion… History spirals, repeating itself in more complex iterations, doing itself over and over until it gets it right.

And if the liberal state is destroyed, the communal state is in the wings, ready to carry forward what Bolivar imagined next:

then we will proceed on the majestic march toward the great prosperities which are destined for meridional America, then the sciences and arts which were born in the Orient and which Europe has illuminated, will fly to a free Colombia, which will invite them to take asylum.

This prophecy shines with a new light as the whole world re-Orients itself to a world-system centered in Asia. Some say that Maduro isn’t the man for the job – that he just isn’t at the level of Chavez, or even that he has betrayed the Chavez legacy. For anyone who cares to investigate it, what Maduro meant to the Americas was very clear to Chavez himself. In his last ministerial meeting, Chavez spoke to him directly: “Nicolás, I entrust the communes to you as my own life.”[10] Chavez explained that the destiny of the Venezuelan revolutionary process was in the anticolonial and decentralized commune movement, and he left the rudder in the hands of his most trusted ally. He could find no one better than Maduro to uphold and defend the communes from a position of government. But Chavez did not expect Maduro only to play the role of President of Venezuela. The geopolitical legacy he entrusted to Maduro is vast and requires renewed reflection:

But Nicolas, come here. I am not telling you that you will simply be at the head of a government, that you will be the President of a country, because I am sure that the People, under that situation, would elect you. What I’m telling you goes well beyond that. You would not only be the President of Venezuela, but you would also be called to lead a Socialist Revolution that will have an impact on all this continent and beyond, throughout the world. As Foreign Minister for so many years, you have known more than anyone that we must achieve the liberation of all peoples. That this isn’t an issue of one country, not even of one region or continent; that our enemy is the most powerful empire that has existed, and hat it is the most perverse and oppressive system conceivable. We can’t fail, and you would have to take on that role comprehensively if I were not longer here. [11]

Maduro has now taken on this role comprehensively as a prisoner of war in the Empire State. Nicolas and Cilia are individuals – just like Bolivar – straws in the storm wind of history. Plowers of the sea! But what Trump and his troglodytes don’t grasp in this case is what Bolivar explained: “individual cases can produce general results: above all in revolutions.” The revolution in question here, as Chavez made clear to Maduro, and Trump has made clear to the rest of the world, is global.

The bell rings. It tolls for empire.
The rich children play and the poor children question.
The bell carries sadness, and a message of hope.

By declaring an imperialist war on the whole hemisphere, the fascists at the helm also convoke something much greater: a second war of independence. To finish the work Bolivar began – to free and heal the Americas from the misery which the USA has brought it in the name of liberty. To kick out the  the corporations and the NGOs and the military bases – all the hard and soft powers by which one country in America dominates all the others. So in a way, we gathered outside that prison in Brooklyn, and we will continue to gather there, not only to condemn, but also to thank the empire, for the unity which their terrorist action inspires. They are two sides of the same coin – rendered back unto Caesar: the increasing repression, and the resistance it generates. Marti recognized in the United States “how democracy is being corrupted and diminished, not strengthened and saved from the hatred and wretchedness of monarchies.” History moves through contraries. The degeneration of the empire and the unity of the American continent accelerate together. “Success will crown our efforts,” Bolivar confessed his faith, “because the destiny of the Americas is irrevocably fixed.”

Destiny may be on the side of Our America, and the Christmas bell may carry a message of hope to the future. In the meantime, Maduro and Cilia might die in there. And we might die out here – we could fall by hook or crook under the multiplications, under the divisions, under the sums – any or all of us could get lost in the outrage archive, easily. The bell tolls for us all. And so for now we gather outside this prison to hold vigil during a long dark night of the world soul: Dawn will come.

For now, in the darkness we take our stand with the the rest of the poor children, at the mercy of monsters, to condemn the calamity, and to make a record of our outrage. For now, we dream like Lorca to denounce with poetic agony the unbearable quietude which blankets this brutalist building in Brooklyn, and the sickness of the city which surrounds it, shamelessly spilling its imperial superprofits into the night sky; to cry out against all this and throw ourselves up in revolt upon the machine gears of the delirious diabolical empire:

I denounce the conjuring
of these deserted offices
which don’t radiate the agonies
which erase the programs of the forest,
and I offer myself up to be eaten by the crushed cows
when their cries fill the valley
where the Hudson gets drunk with oil.

Notes.

[1]    https://readingtheperiphery.org/marti/

[2]    https://afsc.org/newsroom/what-happened-brooklyn-jail-part-deeper-human-rights-crisis-0

[3]    “New York: Oficina y Denuncia” por Federico Garcia Lorca, translation by QS

[4]    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXdAZUM1DmE

[5]    https://web.seducoahuila.gob.mx/biblioweb/upload/carta_de_jamaica.pdf, translation by QS

[6]    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/the-time-of-monsters-everyone-is-quoting-gramsci-but-what-did-he-actually-say

[7]    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyHqFe20WcA

[8]    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxbW0CCuT7E  / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fort_Bragg_Cartel

[9]    https://www.csis.org/analysis/ongoing-military-operations-around-venezuela-cost-31-million-day-28-million-unbudgeted

[10]  https://mronline.org/2025/10/22/on-anniversary-of-chavezs-strike-at-the-helm-speech-president-maduro-touts-20000-communal-projects/

[11] Chavez and the Irreversibility of the Bolivarian Revolution, by Jorge Arreaza Montserrat, translated by Manolo De Los Santos, Published by 1804 Books, March 2023

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