John Saxe-Fernández, the anti-imperialist lion

On electricity “You don’t play. You can’t put even a part in the hands of foreign companies, and even less in companies that operate from US jurisdiction; it is a serious risk. Electricity is a human right,” recalled John Saxe-Fernández in one of his last interviews before dying due to heart failure, on the night of February 5, at the age of 86, at his home in the Desierto de los Leones. Today, the United States government is suffocating Cuba’s source of electrical energy with the blockade of Mexican and Venezuelan oil exports. Currently, the concept of the “imperial presidency” that John Saxe-Fernández developed is more relevant than ever to characterize the power that is generated from the White House and that causes the tense regional geopolitical situation in the Caribbean Sea ( Terror and empire2006).

At the UNAM Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, the class had to be prepared as punctually and clearly as possible on the method and sociological imagination of the thinker Wright Mills. It was the first methodological part of the degree seminar that the research and teaching assistant had to give to the students of the last two semesters of the degree in international relations. A week later, the students joined John’s graduate class on the subject of geopolitics and the geoeconomics of capital.

John’s pedagogical scheme, as he himself recalled in the tribute-conversation organized by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities (CEIICH) with students on January 22, 2025, was the same one he learned in his critical theory classes from the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

John’s intensity – and sometimes explosiveness – when analyzing the topics of study impacted students and the public who listened to him. It was like witnessing someone who had lived and knew the innards of the “military industrial complex” of the US empire.

John’s paternal family was of Russian origin and professed Judaism; he had migrated from St. Petersburg to New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Some time later his mother and father conceived him in Cartago, Costa Rica, where at the age of 18 he joined the National Liberation Party of José María Figueres as a member. John’s grandfather worked at the electrical company in Costa Rica. Hence its tenacious inspiration in energy administration as a state policy.

As John recalled at that meeting at the CEIICH, his great-aunt, who lived in New York, had encouraged him to study in the United States. At Brandeis University in Boston he encountered the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse. In that program, the assistant taught the first class and 15 days later it was Marcuse’s turn. That was the same way John worked with his team at UNAM. He trusted his people, colleagues, friends and ideological coreligionists.

“Indignation is an act of love,” John once snapped. That phrase crossed his youth when he learned, at the age of 14, of the tragic story of the dispossession of more than half of the Mexican territory by the United States as a consequence of the war between 1846 and 1848. In 2002, already as a research professor at UNAM and a naturalized Mexican, he published one of his essential works, The sale and purchase of Mexicowhere he did a sociology of the elites of both countries in the process of accumulation of neoliberal capital. Thus, in the international arena, one of John’s notable contributions has undoubtedly been the link between the analysis of this “military-industrial complex” and its application not only in Latin America in the second half of the 20th century during US interventionism, but also in the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The United States still thinks that Latin America is its farm from which it can extract natural resources,” John commented last year while the war between Russia and Ukraine continued, in the midst of the genocidal attack against the Gaza Strip and when direct threats against Mexico and Venezuela began. In that interview, he expressed that capitalism is in an extreme crisis, sharpening the class struggle and increasing the order of probability of more wars. Inspired in part by Paul Sweezy, for John the phase of capital accumulation that provoked United States interventions in other regions of the world during the 20th century was explained by the development of monopoly capital that extracts fossil fuels and that in recent years has promoted climate change denialism. It thus imposes the power relationship with an “aggressive unilaterality”, in the context of the hegemonic crisis of military power. “We are being brutally threatened (by the United States) and it offends us all (…) It is a historic moment; we are in the middle of an imperialist aggression,” John explained expressively and firmly, as if wanting to bite the empire’s jugular.

In nearly 14 published books and in his interventions, John placed special emphasis on the imperial orbit and its materialization in the United States Northern Command, whose geography includes Mexico and Cuba. Today, as Luis Hernández Navarro has narrated in these pages from Havana (11/2/26), the policy of blocking oil to the Caribbean island threatens the lives of sick people and children in hospitals and clinics. Now we see and feel the effects of this strategy without masks and with the erosion of international law.

In his last article in The Day“COP30: shadows and lights,” John criticized the extreme enrichment of plutocracy and subservience to fossil fuels, within the context of what he called “ongoing anthropogenic climate collapse.” A few years ago, John had joined Morena due to a certain affinity of strategic principles regarding national energy policy. However, in an interview published by Pepe Sobrevilla (6/20/25) he protested: “We have silences that are not convenient to have. I do not receive information from the party about what the international legal logic is that will be used in this transformation (Q4).” Now that there will be negotiations to replace the USMCA, it is important to monitor, question and even prevent the delivery of any millimeter of sovereignty, independence and freedom in Mexico.

Venezuela’s hydrocarbon exports have already returned to the US imperial orbit and the threat looms over Mexico. The people of Cuba are in energy asphyxiation. Today, even when it comes to deserts and political parties, it is necessary to continue turning to old John, even if in solitude one has to wait almost 100 years to be as wise as a lion in the vast anti-imperialist oasis.

* Research and teaching assistant to John Saxe-Fernández (2007-2008); He is currently a professor at the University of New Mexico.