Imperialism Ain't What It Used to Be: Cuba, Venezuela, and the Return of the Colonial State w/ Andrew Smolski

Andrew Smolski returns to the podcast to continue ouron going conversation on US imperialism and Cuba, recorded September 11, 2026. We discuss labor and neoliberalization in Mexico, the Cuban economy from the Special Period to the present, the new sanctions on Cuba and the US oil agreement with Venezuela, and the return of a nineteenth-century colonial politics in the hemisphere.

Andrew Smolski is an assistant professor of rural sociology in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at the Pennsylvania State University and a coordinating editor of Latin American Perspectives. His research examines imperialism, development, and agrarian change in Cuba and Mexico. 

Links

• Part 1: "US Imperialism and Cuban Development w/ Andrew Smolski" (July 2026) 
• Joana Salém Vasconcelos, Agrarian History of the Cuban Revolution (Brill 2023 / Haymarket 2024) 
• Hannah Garth, Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal (Stanford University Press, 2020) 
• Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics (2025) 
• Christopher Chase-Dunn et al. "Trade Globalization since 1795: Waves of Integration in the World-System" (2000) 
• Current issue of Latin American Perspectives 
• US State Department, "Further Sanctions on Cuba's Elites, Financial Channels, and Resource Exploitation Apparatus" (September 3, 2026)

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