On PetroCaribe: Petropolitics, energopower, and post-neoliberal development in the Caribbean energy region

This article examines PetroCaribe; a regional oil trading bloc spearheaded by Venezuela and Cuba. PetroCaribe has been an attempt at establishing an anti-imperial energy region in the Caribbean, enabling post-neoliberal development. We argue that two complementary modalities of power—petropolitics and energopower—have operated through PetroCaribe as a territorial-infrastructural energy region. Petropolitics frames PetroCaribe as a means for geopolitical manoeuvring around the supply of oil, enhancing the regional influence of Venezuela while empowering the Caribbean island-nations vis-à-vis oil exporting states. Energopower defines energy not as a geostrategic commodity but as a relation that binds places together, shaping political possibility, identity, and social relations. As an exercise of energopower, PetroCaribe has been motivated by visions of post-neoliberal development and anti-imperialism, seeking to reconfigure historically-entrenched power relations within the neoliberal petropolitical paradigm. In these terms, the article traces Venezuela's long and ambivalent relationship with oil, Cuba's efforts to secure oil for its socialist revolution, and the development of the Greater Caribbean as an energy region. It examines how PetroCaribe has been operationalized through oil and medical infrastructure. Even as PetroCaribe and Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution are in decline, the trade bloc prompts us to conceptualize energy and oil as generative of subjects and space.