Venezuela Falls, Cuba Trembles with Marla Dukharan

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.5 • 692 Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Washington moved on Venezuela, and the shockwaves are racing across the Americas. Oil, refugees, collapsed regimes, back-room deals: this may spell the beginning of the end for Cuba’s 65-year experiment, and the most dramatic geopolitical reset in the region since 1989. We head to the Caribbean to ask who wins, who loses, and who has been quietly complicit all along. Economist Marla Dukaran joins us from Trinidad with jaw-dropping numbers: Caribbean states racked up debts to Venezuela worth 20–50% of their GDP, many of them “off the books,” even as 8 million Venezuelans fled their country. While leaders preached morality, they were bathing in subsidised oil. If Venezuelan oil disappears, and U.S. power reasserts itself, Cuba loses its lifeline. Could that trigger regime collapse? Could stability finally return to Venezuela? Or are we entering a new era where great powers carve up weak states and call it humanitarian? Think Monroe Doctrine 2.0, only faster, harder, and happening right now.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	It's all Venezuela today. It's all the Caribbean. It's all the Americas. We are going to go to the
0:05.8	Caribbean to see what is the immediate impact on the economy. What is going to happen to the smaller
0:11.7	countries in the Caribbean as a result of America's massive intervention in Venezuela?
0:16.7	We're going to be talking to one of the Caribbean's finest economists, Marla Dukaran, in Trinidad.
0:23.3	So stick around. That's all coming up in about two minutes time.
0:27.8	To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.
0:34.0	This podcast is powered by ACAST.
0:40.3	How are you doing there?
0:41.8	It is time for the podcast, and today the podcast is going out on the 8th of January,
0:47.7	and we are going to be talking about the reverberations of the American moves in Venezuela.
0:55.3	When I say moves, the kidnapping of, the deposing of, the extraction of Nicholas Maduro,
1:02.7	what that means and the fact that the Americans have left in place, it seems,
1:08.1	the existing or the pre-existing regime, but we're going to talk about
1:12.8	America, the Caribbean, but mainly we're going to talk about Cuba, because it seems that the
1:20.9	end of the Cuban regime, which was put in place by Fidel Castro in 1957, 1958, is probably on its last legs. Why? Because it is
1:34.6	the most dependent on Venezuela, number one, and number two, it is the country that America dislikes
1:42.4	most. And we're going to go to the Caribbean to talk to Mara Dukaran to get the view from the Caribbean.
1:49.2	John, again, fascinating days and times we're living in.
1:52.8	Oh, it's like a whirlwind.
1:54.4	As you were just saying, oh, fair there, that, you know, what's going on here is akin to what was going on in Europe in 1989 when the wall
2:02.7	came down. The changes are as big. Well, they could easily be as big. I think you're right. I think
2:08.1	it's not a bad way to frame it. Yeah. And you were also mentioning a couple of episodes ago explaining
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from David McWilliams, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of David McWilliams and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.