Silvio Sirias comes from a Nicaraguan family who brought him up initially in the United States, but clearly bequeathed him a strong interest in finding out about the story of the region from which the family came. His latest novel is based in Panama, where he now lives, and I’ve yet to read his first,…
On the morning of 17 December, schoolchildren in Coralito assembled under the Cuban flag to sing the anthem before starting lessons. Early sunshine picked out five palm trees on the roadside opposite the school. They were planted in support of the ‘Cuban Five’, agents sent to Miami to disrupt anti-Castro plots by Cuban exiles in…
New measures requiring private landlords to check the immigration status of prospective tenants started to come into force on 1 December. CIH policy adviser John Perry explains why we are working with a range of organisations to assess the impact. The question in the title of this blog was posed by ‘accidental landlord’ Victoria Whitlock…
Under pressure from Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in February 2003, Tony Blair conceded that the number of asylum seekers coming to Britain was too high and pledged to halve them by the following September. The promise was widely derided, but Blair had done his homework: officials had assessed the impact of Labour’s 2002 Asylum Act,…
Fernando González, the second of the Cuban Five to be released from prison, has been in Masaya as part of the campaign on behalf of the other three, who have been incarcerated since 1998. On Saturday afternoon a small room packed with about 300 people saw him receive the freedom of the city from the…
Last week a fracking company was refused permission to drill in the South Downs National Park. Celtique Energie is considering an appeal to Eric Pickles to overrule the decision. He might be reluctant to cause a furore in West Sussex, but would he feel the same if aggrieved companies could sue the government for lost…
The US State Department is in a fix. It confronts an intransigent foreign government. The long-standing policy aim is regime change. Past attempts at assassination, sponsoring an armed invasion, allowing dissident groups to blow up an airliner, hotels and discotheques, have all failed. Economic sanctions seemed to have strengthened not weakened the regime. US agents are…
Over ten days in June 1954, a decade after the D-Day landings, the CIA sent twelve planes to drop bombs and propaganda on towns in Guatemala in support of a coup against the elected government of Jácobo Arbenz. They did only minor damage at first: one plane bombed the wrong radio station, another ran out…
Some years ago, in an article about unwritten books that people would like to read, someone selected the yet-to-be-written “Prison Memoirs of Henry Kissinger”. Now aged 90, the chances of Kissinger being tried for his war crimes, much less sent to prison, are rapidly diminishing. However, he has outlived Christopher Hitchens, one of his accusers,…