the government is not a business. taxes are not supply and demand. in modern mixed economies, government is supposed to do what businesses would be unable to do in a market, due to market failure.
at one point, under chavez, venezuela sold huge amounts of oil to the united states, and was using that oil wealth to pull it's people out of poverty, after decades of extreme inequality resulting from unregulated crony capitalism. before chavez, venezuela was a banana republic, where the elite profited immensely by exploiting largely imported labour to service the us economy. chavez tried to balance that out a little at the expense of us business interests and the venezuelan upper middle class that facilitated the exploitation and grew rich from it.
then, in an attempt to destabilize the venezuelan government, the united states stopped buying venezuelan oil and tried to blockade exports of venezuelan oil. this decreased oil exports, idling production. the chinese did not pick up the slack. it just stopped.
oil prices went up, canada was asked to make up the difference, and everybody was worse off. but it was supposed to lead to uprisings in venezuela that would topple the government, and it didn't. if anything, it strengthened their position, as venezuelans understood that the bolivarian revolution was necessarily on hold until they could find some other export market.
so, a game of chicken set in - venezuela had no way out of this mess until the americans fucked off and either started buying again or at least lifted the blockade. maduro notably made no attempt to start a conflict with washington, he just sat on his thumbs and waited it out.
as a raving anarcho-socialist, i have had two broad criticisms of bolivarianism and of chavez' economic policies:
1) socialism in one country does not work. socialism needs a global revolution. you have to accept that you can't really have socialism in a country like venezuela until you have it in the united states, first. you can at best have something like lassalleanism, which is certainly preferable to free market capitalism, or to the banana republic they had before chavez. but, chavez wanted socialism in one country and made a number of mistakes due to that wrong-headed approach.
2) chavez understood that venezuela sold everything to america. it sold food to america. it sold oil to america. the conflict between chavez and washington was consequently largely political theatre; venezuela had no interest in destroying it's own market. venezuela did not shift exports out of america, america blockaded it to try to strangle it to death, and it didn't work.
then, ten years later (is this a ten year economic plan, don coyote?), after halting or reversing the progress made by chavez by idling the oil fields, the americans kidnap his successor in the middle of the night and claim they want to get the oil moving again via us tax money, presumably in the forms of loans made to the venezuelan government. but the supposed point of shutting this all down was to change the government in venezuela back to a banana republic.
underneath this mess is actually an admission that the blockade was a failed policy that hurt the united states as much as it hurt venezuela and a series of backtracks to undo that failed policy. maduro should go home and let the party move on. if the end result of this is that the party can pick up where chavez left off before he died, the outcome will help venezuela move on, but it will also prove that maduro was right to just wait it out, without making any kind of move as, in the end, the americans just caved and coughed up the capital to undo the damage they caused, without making any sort of substantive change.
venezuela's greatest fear would be the return to a banana republic, which is what the monroe doctrine created. if it stays united, that won't happen.
so, keep your head on, venezuela. and look at the bright side - the blockade appears to be lifting. you can't have socialism in one country, but you can use the state to redistribute wealth, and you have the infrastructure in place to do it, if the economy can get going, and the party doesn't decide it's decision makers are more equal than others.