(Photo: Inside Havana) Cuba expands its limited free-market experiment (Los Angeles Times) Cuban barbershops and beauty salons are now joining a small but growing group of free-market entrepreneurs on the island: the government is allowing owners of these businesses to set their own prices for services rendered—according to the market, of course—and pocket their revenues, […]
The Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL) puts out two highly relevant electronic publications that readers might find helpful and interesting. One, the Chronicle on Cuba, is a monthly compilation of top news items on Cuba, collected from diverse sources. The other, FOCALPoint: Canada’s Spotlight on the Americas, is a broader look at important current issues […]
A thrilling article in this week’s TIME recounts the effort to safely remove highly enriched uranium (HEU) from Chile. The spread of HEU across the globe is just one more cold war legacy that threatens blowback. In order to prevent states with nuclear ambitions from developing their weapons, the nuclear club decided to give HEU […]
{Preface: In my penultimate post I discussed the trends that may allow Argentina and Chile to upend the region’s longstanding natural resource curse. I then pointed to one notable exception—Bolivia. In response to that piece I received a very pithy comment from Roque Planas, an editor at Latin Dispatch. My aim in this post is […]
Senator John Kerry (Democrat – Massachusetts), as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has put a temporary hold on all US democracy promotion programs for Cuba while the State Department conducts a review of these programs so that the Committee can investigate their effectiveness. This is a review that many experts have hoped for, […]
Last night the Mexican state of Baja California was hit by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake, about 10km below the surface at the epicentre of the quake. The closest major city of Mexicali was hit hardest by the quake, albeit only one victim was reported as of this morning local time. The quake was felt as […]
Sean Murphy of FPA’s Global Film Review blog has posted yet another intriguing post on a documentary called Crude (2009) which details evidence regarding a lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador’s Amazon region and the difficulties in achieving justice for those victims of toxic dumping in the affected region in Ecuador. Like judicial decisions in the […]
In recent posts we’ve discussed the future of Communist Cuba after the current generation of leaders is gone, and what might be expected of the next generation. These questions are on the top of the minds of current leadership, and so this weekend’s conference of the Union of Communist Youth fit smoothly into that context: […]
For all the hubbub surrounding President Evo Morales socialist agenda, one element of his political project seems largely overlooked—revanchism. On March 23, Morales headed Bolivia’s Sea Day Celebration, commemorating the end of War of the Pacific, which resulted in Chile annexing half of Bolivia, including its Pacific coast. The fete’s recently adopted slogan—“Motherland or Death: […]
Despite predictions that recent polarizing events would freeze the slow steps of US-Cuba rapprochement, the last week or so has shown more persistence on both sides to overcome differences in favor of continuing productive dialogue on relevant issues. US business representatives and Cuban tourism officials met in Cancún last week for three days to discuss […]
The “vicious circle” is, as Dalia Acosta and others have written, a pattern that has been repeated over and over during the history of Cuba in the last decades: the seemingly inevitable cycle of relaxing and tightening among the governments of Cuba, the United States and the European Union. The reasons for the vicious circle are […]
These are actually by no means “the” answers. But here are mine: Are Communist Party officials a bit overoptimistic when they say, as they frequently do, that “the future of the Revolution is guaranteed”? Overoptimistic yes, but completely off base, no. Many Cubans beyond the so-called “dissident” community are frustrated with the Cuban political and […]
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