By Earl Bousquet

However, Christmas hits visitors smack in their faces -on arrival at the Simón Bolívar International Airport- as Caribbean delegates to a recent international conference in Caracas experienced on October 1, 2025.

Airport stores and restaurants, bars and cafes sparkled across arrival halls, customs and immigration, diplomatic and domestic quarters, with sizeable Santa Clauses, varied Christmas trees, colorful Jingle Bells, snowflakes -and red-nosed reindeers.

The country’s public and private sectors again went all-out to lighten days and brighten nights with inflated giant Santa Clauses atop taller buildings and decorated street and shopping mall showcases offering smart sales and sizeable early-holiday savings.

The International Conference on Colonialism, Neo-colonialism and its Consequences (especially for Venezuela, Latin America and the Caribbean), held in Caracas from October 2nd to 4th, was attended by 137 delegates from 59 countries. It featured scholars, scientists, political activists and social movements examining related topics from various vantage points.

And every day, delegates simply marveled at how-deep the five-month-long Christmas syndrome is driving commerce and generating happiness in Venezuela -quite the opposite to what the world is being told by the mainstream international media.

However, while visitors marvel, Venezuelans are actually defying the distinct possibilities of their country being the starting point of World War III.

Not that they don’t care, but over the past 25 years since Commander Hugo Chavez became president -and particularly since he died in 2013- they’ve developed a high level of political maturity and near-immunity to external threats.

Ordinary citizens have been schooled into a natural capacity to judge political consequences for their homeland of presidential change in the USA. For 12 years, they’ve forcibly learned to adjust to withstanding and overcoming the enormous economic and social pressures effected by a quarter-century of hostility and endless US sanctions.

Like Cuba since President John F. Kennedy in 1959, Venezuela has survived successive hostilities in the 21st Century from administrations led by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden -and Donald Trump (now for a second time).

Those forced by the sanctions’ effects to migrate to the US to seek better lives have now been determined no-longer worthy of special American protection, now instead collectively treated like outcast citizens of an invisible criminal empire who’ve now outlived their political usefulness.

Those who stayed have long concluded it’s better to face the pressure at home -and with better chances of overcoming- than fleeing to shores of an increasingly unwelcome used-to-be Land of Opportunity.

Under President Maduro, Venezuela consistently posted annual economic growth figures averaging seven percent (7%) of GDP during his second term, while also successfully weaning the economy off its overall reliance on Oil & Gas.

Sanctions notwithstanding, Venezuela has defied most odds to turn challenges into opportunities, reorienting its national economic thrust to increase and improve everything from food production and nutrition, to utilization of resources and promoting self-sufficiency and innovation.

The sanctions originally reduced its oil earnings from scores of billions (of US dollars) annually to mere hundreds of millions, over very-short time. But in equal time, Caracas has also been able to gain more international support for its just resistance to external attempts to enforce regime change through Washington’s continuing support for and financing of the political opposition at home and abroad.

Today, after surviving sanctions by over-50 nations pulled together by the first Trump administration and the Biden administration’s equal support for regime change, global support is coming Venezuela’s way from regional neighbors in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), but also from the BRICS+ and Shanghai Cooperation Organization-Plus (SCO+) alliances.

For example, China has helped significantly improve and increase Venezuela’s capacity to extract and export oil and gas; and in early October, it was reported that -for the first time since 2020- oil production had peaked to one million barrels-per-day (1,000,000 bpd).

China and Russia will surely protect their investments and interests in Venezuela and this calculus weighs heavily in Washington, where US generals are dissuading the war hawks at the White House, State Department and Pentagon from instigating an armed conflict in regional waters at this time.

US lawmakers are loudly questioning President Trump’s clear declaration of war without congressional approval.

The penetrating power of American propaganda weighs heavily everywhere too, as the US media and Trump supporters continue inventing ways and means to make the South American nation with the world’s highest certified oil reserves sound like a failed-nation in fear and under lockdown, with a President on-the-run.

Many feel Venezuelans have deserted streets in fear of war, but that’s also a distraction from the worsening situation in the US.

President Trump is under increasing internal pressures -including from his ‘MAGA’ base- while the impacts of his trade tariffs start biting deeper into American citizens’ pockets. But the President is busier trying to qualify for a Nobel Peace Prize, while financing wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Now, President Trump has silently declared war on Venezuela, US missile destroyers and navy helicopters are blasting fishing boats and their occupants out of existence in what most legal and judicial observers consider extrajudicial executions.

But despite it all, Venezuelans have again enthusiastically welcomed their early-Christmas syndrome, while Americans face what will probably be their most-expensive in living memory, thanks to their President’s tariffs.

And while Venezuela under Maduro increases its annual energy earnings and winning more global support, the two sides of the US legislature have (yet-again) conspired to subject Americans to yet-another government shutdown, at a time when Christmas 2025 is shaping-up to be perhaps the frostiest they’ll ever remember.