Today’s anti-imperialism suffers from a debilitating fragmentation. While theoretically it’s understood that rejecting empire means affirming the inherent cultural agency and diversity of all peoples, today’s Western “left” movements often isolate their critiques into silos. One section fights sanctions; another decries military occupation; a third critiques Hollywood. This division, however, is a strategic liability made evident by Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl 60 performance.
On February 8, 2026, Bad Bunny became the first Latino solo artist to headline the halftime show. His performance was a meticulously coded act of cultural testimony. Opening in a sugarcane field, a direct reference to the monocrop economy that scarred Puerto Rico under Spanish and American rule. He was accompanied by jíbaro farmers in pava hats and elderly men playing dominoes. Famed Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin performed “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawai’i,” Bad Bunny’s song explicitly warning that the colonial fate of Hawaii (annexation, exploitation, cultural dilution) awaits Puerto Rico. He waved the flag of the Puerto Rican independence movement and declared, “Together, We Are America.”
Since then, there’s been a plethora of thoughts and opinions around the performance, the platform from which it occurred (the NFL Super Bowl), the choice of featured artists (Zionist Lady Gaga), the role of celebrity, and the significance (or cooptation) of representation. The discourse has taken on a myriad of directions. However, how should anti-imperialists understand the performance?
The Three Limbs of Empire: Economic, Military, Cultural
While military and economic forms of U.S. imperialism are readily identified and condemned, contemporary dominance is sustained through a less discussed, yet pervasive, cultural imperialism. This is the process by which the United States and the West more broadly, primarily through their mainstream and social media, disseminate their values and ideology as both “entertainment” and the dominant global norm. It is a strategic deployment of superstructural institutions to secure the economic base of late capitalism. To be effective, anti-imperialists must understand that economic coercion, military domination, and cultural influence are not separate phenomena, but integrated limbs of a single imperial organism. In order to do this, it is important to adopt a holistic framework rooted in the Marxist concepts of the base aka economic mode of production and the superstructure aka the cultural, political, and ideological forms that arise from that base.
The economic base of the American empire historically has been direct colonial extraction, and the structural power of the dollar and its attendant institutions. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have operated as enforcers of the “Washington Consensus,” not as neutral development agencies. When nations require financial assistance, they receive loans denominated in dollars, contingent on forced deregulation, privatization, and slashing of public services – the architecture of the debt trap. The case of Iran, which nationalized its oil in 1979 and has faced four decades of sanctions, or Venezuela, with heightened sanctions designed to cripple the economy and create suffering to foster instability and regime change, illustrates that challenging the financial base of the empire invites immediate military retribution.
This leads directly to the military superstructure. The United States’ system of global combatant commands – which includes AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, etc. – functions as the coercive shield for its economic interests. The proposed reorganization of these commands, streamlining them to focus on hemispheric domination under a revived “Monroe Doctrine,” demonstrates how military posture adjusts to protect the economic base, not abstract notions of “human rights.” The military does not solve the instability caused by economic extraction but instead manages the human wreckage of it, often training the very coup leaders who eventually overthrow the governments it claims to support. The military base is the economic base by other means.
But what of culture? In this framework, the base is the capitalist economic system. The superstructure is media, education, and the predominant culture. In this instance, the superstructure is tasked with normalizing this system to prevent working-class consciousness. Therefore, cultural imperialism is the globalization of this dynamic. U.S. dominance is no longer reliant on territorial conquest, but maintenance by ensuring that global populations internalize American consumerism and individualism as “common sense.”
Culture as a Weapon: From Said to Cabral
In his 1993 seminal work, Culture and Imperialism, Palestinian-American professor and political activist Edward Said articulates that Western culture was not merely a backdrop to empire but an active participant in its construction and maintenance. “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”
Culture and empire are deeply intertwined, and by examining cultural works, we can see the often-unacknowledged foundations of imperial power. Today, the superstructure operates through a meticulously layered apparatus. It is not limited to the blatant spread of Hollywood and celebrities. It operates through the digital infrastructure of social media and influencers, who do not merely sell products but sell desires, lifestyles, and definitions of success that are fundamentally aligned with consumer capitalism.
U.S. capital controls the physical infrastructure (base of the superstructure). Six major corporations control 90% of U.S. media. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube, backed by U.S. control of internet root servers, monopolize global distribution. This creates a center-periphery dynamic where developing nations are structurally dependent on Western technology and content, draining their cultural autonomy, operating as a “cottage industry” of Western and non-Western influencers alike performing an “American” (read U.S.) identity to feed U.S. culture wars for profit. The influencer represents the ultimate evolution of this colonization where today’s cultural imperialism is less about direct propaganda and more about the imposition of a form that hollows out indigenous cultural production from within. And as we know, the U.S. military directly collaborates with Hollywood and game developers to frame interventionism as heroic and brands like Coca-Cola package consumerism as “freedom”—cultural products are engineered vessels for ideology.
The base/superstructure model forces a synthesis. The IMF debt trap (economic base) requires the threat of military intervention (political coercion) to be enforced. In turn, both require a cultural superstructure that normalizes this domination as inevitable or benevolent. When Western media frames sanctions as “pressure” rather than an “act of war,” or when celebrities advocate for humanitarian intervention, they are performing the superstructural labor of legitimizing the base.
In The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence, founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Amílcar Cabral, understood imperial domination requires the negation of the dominated people’s historical process. Cultural imperialism achieves this negation by controlling the story, deciding whose history is told and how. This is a fundamental act of power. In the context of imperialism, this means that Western narratives about the colonies (in novels, histories, and reports) become the dominant, and often only, version of reality. This power actively blocks colonized peoples from forming and expressing their own narratives, effectively silencing them and justifying imperial rule as a natural or even benevolent process. And in the case of Bad Bunny, entertainment.
The Limits of Cultural Resistance
Bad Bunny’s performance was undoubtedly a powerful act of symbolic decolonization, but it was not national liberation. It did not change the fact that Puerto Rico remains a colony of the United States, subject to the whims of Congress and hedge funds. He asserted cultural sovereignty while operating within the infrastructure of the U.S. cultural apparatus underpinning the spectacle. This is the fundamental limitation of cultural resistance when it lacks a political-economic base. This is the precise mechanism Said speaks to and Cabral warned against. However, Western imperialism persists in this attempt through the efficient process of commodification.
The relationship between culture and productive forces is not one of simple economic determination, but of dynamic interplay where culture actively shapes material realities. This is precisely why the role of the anti-imperialist is to counter cultural imperialism, not abandon mass culture—the very terrain where hegemony is produced. As we have seen, culture is a productive force in its own right, capable of preparing the ground for economic exploitation and manufacturing consent for imperial domination. The recuperation of spectacle into the machinery of consent reveals precisely why a Marxist approach to national culture is a dialectical advancement. It moves beyond a simplistic view of culture as a mere reflection of the economy and instead recognizes mass culture as a contested space where dominant narratives can be both reinforced and resisted. By engaging with these cultural forms dialectically, anti-imperialists reclaim the power to narrate and transform the very tools of consent into instruments of liberation.
The spectacle of Puerto Rican reggaeton stars signed to major labels backed by Zionists while the PROMESA board dictates the island’s austerity is evidence that imperial capital has attempted to sever that pride from its material foundation in collective labor and anti-colonial struggle, not evidence that national pride has been exhausted. Therefore the task is not to cede the terrain of national sentiment to corporate multinationalism but to reveal and heighten the contradiction between the vitality of the people and stunted liberation. A population that consumes imperial culture will eventually consent to imperial policy. The base determines the superstructure, but the superstructure stabilizes the base. The pivot requires a rigorous materialist analysis of what, in any given national context, constitutes the progressive elements of popular culture.
As Cabral warned, “those who lead the movement must have a clear idea of the value of culture in the framework of the struggle.” Until culture is backed by the force of productive power—until the artist is also the owner—the result will remain a beautiful, fleeting flower planted in concrete. Cultural imperialism is the quiet engine of (western) U.S. hegemony and the primary tool for maintaining the economic base by shaping the superstructure of global consciousness. The task of the anti-imperialist is to redirect.
The Betrayal of the “Zone of Peace”
If Bad Bunny is speaking conceptually to “Nuestra América,” then we must emphasize the call for a “Zone of Peace in the Americas,” recognizing the interconnected struggles across the hemisphere to break the concrete. This concept did not start or end with a Super Bowl halftime performance. “Zone of Peace” was iterated in 1979 by Grenadian Prime Minister and political activist Maurice Bishop, and again as a 2014 declaration by the heads of state and governments of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) declared Latin America and the Caribbean should be seen and respected as a “Zone of Peace.”
While this declaration from government representatives marks a significant political stance, it has yet to manifest as a genuine, people(s)-centered movement across the region. For instance, Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s recent posture represents a fundamental bastardization of the historical principle of the “Zone of Peace” as understood in the Caribbean. Rather than upholding this legacy, Persad-Bissessar has publicly dismissed the Zone of Peace, framing it as a seemingly dangerous alignment with Venezuela’s government and a threat to Trinidad and Tobago’s national interests. This rhetorical hardline pivot serves to validate and prop up a never-ending U.S. SOUTHCOM presence in the region. By explicitly thanking the U.S. administration for its security role, Persad-Bissessar has effectively tethered Trinidad and Tobago’s security apparatus to Washington’s whims, inviting a modern iteration of gunboat diplomacy back. This stance reached its logical culmination at the recent “Shield of the Americas” summit in Miami, convened by Donald Trump, where she joined a dozen other regional leaders to form a “counter-cartel coalition” that implicitly endorses an expanded U.S. military and security role in the hemisphere under the banner of the so-called “Donroe Doctrine.”
This overt embrace of U.S. military interventionism is a profound affront to the historical legacies and culture of a region that has long defended the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention, particularly in support of Cuba. This betrayal occurs against a backdrop of intensifying U.S. hybrid warfare across the hemisphere. The Trump administration has tightened the economic noose on Cuba, orchestrating an oil blockade by pressuring Venezuela and Mexico to halt shipments, actions described by Cuban leadership as “criminal” and “genocidal.” From the ongoing U.S.-installed political tumult in Haiti to the broader campaign of subversion against Venezuela and Nicaragua, the region finds itself in an existential battle against the hegemon’s geo-strategic interests.
Transforming a declaration of a Zone of Peace into a popular demand—specifically, that the Americas be free from externally-imposed state violence—is more urgent today than ever. From the assault on democracy in Haiti to the subversion and illegal sanctions directed at Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the nations in Latin America and the Caribbean continue to find themselves in an existential battle against the geo-strategic interests, expansion, and maintenance of the hegemon to the U.S. determined to treat the region as its backyard.
As noted in “Nuestra América and the Black Radical Peace Tradition” by the Black Alliance For Peace Haiti/Americas Team:
“In building collective power, we see it as critical to link the unifying compass of Martí’s ‘Nuestra América’ with the militant struggle of the Black Radical Peace Tradition, and the fire of Dessalines’ call to avenge the Americas. ‘Nuestra América’ is the call of revolutionary forces in the Americas to rally all the historically oppressed peoples of the region against colonialism and imperialism by claiming one contiguous land mass stretching from Canada to Chile. In understanding the political, social, and economic position of working class Black/African peoples in the United States as united with the working peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America, we take inspiration from ‘Nuestra América’ and push for the liberation of ‘Our Americas.'”
Ultimately, the spectacle of artistic expression is not a substitute for dismantling the physical and ideological barriers of militarization, imperialism, and division that fragment Latin American and Caribbean communities. Celebrity bad? Yes. Empire bad? Yes. Yet, it is not enough to simply criticize; the people must be moved. Today, the U.S./NATO Out of the Americas Network, a network of grassroots organizations and individuals across the Americas, is the material component of the symbolic gesture, embracing national and cultural identity to move towards a collective “togetherness” fighting the beast of U.S. imperialism.
Only through the concentrated efforts of the people of the Americas will the region free itself of the “anti-human, anti-democratic and violent policies that Western imperialist subversion and militarism” have brought to the peoples and nations in the Americas. True sovereignty will not be granted; it must be built from the bottom-up. This requires honing in on the culture and history, moving beyond symbolic gestures, such as the powerful imagery of “Nuestra América” displayed during a halftime show, and investing in the material organization and political education needed to turn imagery into a lived reality.