2026-07-07 ATS briefing¶

Cuba loses power across nation for third time this year¶

Cuba has suffered its third nationwide blackout in six months, leaving nearly 10 million people without power. The state-run Electric Union claims the cause is under investigation, but the pattern tells a clearer story than any official explanation.

This is not a weather event or a technical glitch. It is the material consequence of a system under siege. The US blockade, tightened further under successive administrations, has strangled Cuba’s ability to import fuel, maintain power plants, or acquire spare parts. The island’s Soviet-era thermal plants are literally falling apart, and there is no capital available to replace them.

But the blockade alone is not the full picture. Cuba’s economy has been in a protracted crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the post-Covid tourism collapse dealt another blow. The government has tried market reforms to attract foreign investment and hard currency, but these have produced uneven results — generating some revenue while deepening inequality and social strain.

What the blackouts reveal is a contradiction at the heart of Cuba’s political project: a socialist state that cannot secure the basic conditions of industrial reproduction — energy — because it remains integrated into a capitalist world system on hostile terms. The US blockade is the primary mechanism of that hostility, but it works precisely because Cuba’s economy was never structurally delinked from global commodity chains.

For ordinary Cubans, this means daily life becomes a struggle for survival. For the revolutionary left, it poses an uncomfortable question: how does a socialist transition survive when it cannot guarantee electricity?

China's H1 Crude Imports Post Sharpest Drop Since War Began¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

China’s seaborne crude imports fell 23% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, with May alone down 47% — the sharpest single-month drop since the Ukraine war began. The proximate cause is clear: the US-Iran conflict over the Strait of Hormuz, which disrupted a chokepoint handling roughly 20% of global oil trade. An interim agreement in mid-June has begun to ease the crisis, but transit remains only partially restored, and freight rates — though down sharply from wartime peaks — still trade well above pre-conflict norms.

What matters here is not the disruption itself but what it reveals about the underlying state of the global economy. A 23% collapse in Chinese crude buying over six months cannot be explained by a few months of Strait of Hormuz disruption alone. China has been drawing down inventories built up during earlier price dips, and its domestic demand — particularly for industrial fuel — has been weakening. The import drop is as much a signal of overaccumulation and slowing accumulation in China’s manufacturing heartland as it is a response to supply-side disruption.

The freight market data confirms the pattern. VLCC tonne-mile demand remains elevated — because ships are sailing longer routes to avoid the Gulf — but the spot market for vessels loading in the Arabian Gulf has already turned oversupplied. That suggests the real demand for crude, not just its transport, is sagging.

For the hosts: the Strait of Hormuz crisis is not a temporary geopolitical glitch. It is the form taken by inter-imperialist rivalry when the world’s two largest economies are both struggling to maintain growth. The question is whether the partial reopening of the strait will restore Chinese imports to previous levels, or whether the demand destruction now visible is structural — a sign that the next phase of the crisis is already underway.

Dry Bulk Market: India's Coal Import Puzzle¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

India’s coal import picture is splitting in two, and the dry bulk shipping market is caught in the middle. Thermal coal imports for power generation fell 12% in the first five months of the year, even as electricity demand rose. The gap was filled by domestic coal and a surge in renewables, which hit nearly 18% of the power mix in May. That is a structural shift, not a seasonal blip. The old assumption that a heatwave automatically means more seaborne coal no longer holds.

At the same time, Russian coal arrivals to India are near record levels. But this is not a simple substitution. Indonesian thermal coal is short-haul, frequent, and predictable — ideal for Panamax and Supramax vessels operating regionally. Russian coal is longer-haul, more complex to execute, and often metallurgical grade for steelmaking, not power. The same tonnage of coal from Russia ties up a vessel for much longer than an Indonesian cargo.

The contradiction is this: total coal imports may fall, but vessel demand may not fall proportionally — and could even tighten in certain positions. The replacement effect is uneven. Short-haul employment in the Indian Ocean weakens, while longer, riskier voyages from Russia absorb more vessel time. For shipowners, the question is not how much coal India buys, but where from and for what purpose.

This is a useful reminder that aggregate trade figures can obscure real shifts in the geography and composition of commodity flows. For the dry bulk market, the devil is in the origin and the coal type — not the headline number.

Japan-linked vessels exit Strait of Hormuz after months stranded in Gulf – reports¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

Ten Japan-linked vessels, including six very large crude carriers holding 12 million barrels of Middle Eastern oil, have finally exited the Strait of Hormuz after months stranded there. Their departure follows an interim peace agreement between Washington and Tehran, which ended a joint U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran that began in late February. Benchmark oil prices have since fallen back to roughly $70 a barrel, down from a wartime spike above $110.

This is not simply a story of resuming normal trade. The Strait of Hormuz carries a fifth of the world’s oil. Its closure was not an accident of war but a deliberate rupture in the circulatory system of global capital. The immediate crisis — an energy-driven inflation wave and central bank rate hikes — has been averted for now. But the underlying contradiction remains: the U.S. and Iran are still at odds over control of the strait, Iran’s nuclear programme, and the war in Lebanon. The framework deal is a truce, not a resolution.

The stranded tankers are a vivid snapshot of capital frozen in motion — 12 million barrels of crude, loaded in February and March, held hostage by geopolitics. Their release signals a temporary de-escalation, but the strategic rivalry that produced the blockage has not been resolved. For the working class, the return to $70 oil is a reprieve from the immediate cost-of-living squeeze, but the structural fragility of energy supply chains remains. The next rupture is only a matter of time.

H1 2026: The Moving Target of Maritime Sanctions Compliance¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The maritime sanctions regime has entered a new phase. The question is no longer simply who is sanctioned, but what — a specific cargo, a refinery, a terminal, a transaction date. This shift reflects a deeper contradiction: the major powers need to enforce restrictions on Russian and Iranian energy exports without triggering the supply shocks that would destabilise their own economies.

The EU’s January 2026 refined-products ban is the clearest example. A diesel cargo loaded in India may now be prohibited if it was processed from Russian crude. Compliance teams must trace the commodity back through the production chain — a task that assumes refineries can segregate crude streams and prove it. Where Russian and non-Russian crude are mixed in the same tank, the documentation becomes a political claim, not a technical fact.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of short-term General Licenses from OFAC — for Venezuela, Iran, Russia — reveals the underlying pressure. These temporary authorisations are designed to prevent sanctions from breaking the market. They are concessions to reality: the Strait of Hormuz reopening, volatile energy prices, the risk of disruption at chokepoints. But they create a fragmented regulatory landscape where the same cargo may be legal under US rules and illegal under EU or UK rules.

The expansion of infrastructure-linked sanctions — targeting terminals like Karimun in Indonesia, or Chinese teapot refineries processing Iranian crude — signals that the enforcement apparatus is chasing the shadow fleet’s support network. This is not just about tankers flying flags of convenience; it is about the entire logistics chain that makes sanctions evasion profitable.

For compliance teams, the practical burden has intensified. But for a Marxist analysis, the key point is this: sanctions are not a coherent strategy. They are an attempt to manage inter-imperialist competition while preserving the flow of energy that capitalism requires. The growing complexity of the rules reflects the impossibility of that balancing act.

Patrimonial Bonapartism¶

Source: Tempest

Patrimonial Bonapartism¶

Anthony Teso argues that Trump's regime is best understood as "patrimonial Bonapartism" rather than fascism or populist authoritarianism. The distinction matters for how the left thinks about strategy.

The fascism label has been tempting. There's contempt for legal procedure, a leadership cult, paramilitary symbolism, mass deportation machinery. But fascism in the Marxist tradition means something specific: a mass petty-bourgeois movement, organised outside parliament, fused with capital to crush a working class facing revolutionary crisis. That's not the US today. The working class isn't organised for revolution. The petty bourgeoisie lacks extra-parliamentary units. Capital isn't suffering the profitability crisis that drove German and Italian industry toward fascism.

Bonapartism, by contrast, describes a recurring form of capitalist rule where the executive achieves real autonomy from the dominant class while serving its general interest. Marx developed this analysing Louis Bonaparte: a bourgeoisie too divided to rule directly, a working class strong enough to threaten but not to take power, and an executive stepping into the vacuum. Trotsky extended it to Weimar's pre-Hitler regimes. Poulantzas saw it becoming permanent in advanced capitalism.

What Teso adds is patrimonialism: Weber's concept of rule through personal loyalty rather than bureaucratic procedure. The combination captures something specific. Trump's executive concentrates power, parliamentary mediation breaks down, and state administration becomes personal. But unlike fascism, this isn't a mass movement destroying working-class organisation from below. It's an emergency form of rule from above, inherently transitional.

The strategic implication: Bonapartist regimes point either back toward parliamentary normality or forward into something worse. The working class isn't the object of destruction but the potential subject of an alternative. That changes how you organise.

US budget slashing risks losing global scientific edge to China¶

Source: Al Jazeera

The Al Jazeera piece reports a familiar anxiety: US budget cuts are ceding scientific leadership to China, which now outspends America on R&D and graduates more STEM PhDs. This is presented as a national competitiveness problem — a race the US is losing.

But the framing obscures a deeper contradiction. The US state is not cutting science budgets because it has lost interest in technological supremacy. It is cutting because the fiscal crisis of the capitalist state has become acute. Decades of military spending, tax cuts for capital, and repeated financial rescues have left the federal budget strained. Meanwhile, the private sector — which benefits most from state-funded basic research — is hoarding cash or returning it to shareholders rather than reinvesting in long-term innovation.

The real story is not that America is falling behind China, but that the capitalist state is increasingly unable to perform the functions capital requires of it. The US has long relied on public investment to socialise the costs of foundational research while privatising the profits. That model is breaking down under the weight of its own contradictions: overaccumulation in the financial sector, ballooning debt, and a ruling class unwilling to tax itself.

China’s advantage is not simply a matter of spending more. It reflects a different political logic — one where the state can direct resources without the same fiscal constraints imposed by bond markets and shareholder primacy. This is not an endorsement of Chinese state capitalism, but it does reveal a real asymmetry: the US state is increasingly hamstrung by the very class it serves.

For revolutionary politics, the implication is clear. The crisis of US science is not a policy failure to be corrected by better budgeting. It is a symptom of a system that can no longer reproduce its own conditions of dominance. The question is not whether America can catch up, but what happens when the global hegemon can no longer afford the illusions that sustain it.

What US assets are held overseas?¶

Source: FRED Blog

The FRED Blog’s breakdown of US assets held overseas is a useful snapshot of how the rest of the world stores value in American paper. As of April 2026, equities make up nearly 60% of foreign-held US financial assets, with long-term Treasuries a distant second at 20%. Corporate and agency bonds, plus short-term Treasuries, fill out the rest.

The historical shift is telling. Before 2008, equities and Treasuries each accounted for roughly a third of foreign portfolios. The financial crisis sent a flight to safety, pushing Treasury holdings to a peak of 36.5% in 2009. Since then, the balance has swung back sharply toward equities. This is not simply a return to normal. It reflects a world awash in liquidity — central bank money printing and low yields have pushed capital back into risk assets, searching for returns that productive investment cannot provide.

What this really shows is the deepening dependence of global capital on US financial markets as a store of value. Foreign holders are not buying US equities because they believe in American productivity growth. They are buying because there is no credible alternative. The dollar remains the least bad option in a system where every major economy is struggling with overcapacity and stagnant demand.

The implication is that any serious disruption to US financial markets — a crash, a debt crisis, or a geopolitical rupture — would ricochet through the entire global system. The interpenetration of capital is now so complete that crisis in one centre means crisis everywhere. For revolutionary politics, the point is not to cheer for collapse but to recognise that the system’s stability rests on increasingly fragile foundations.