Empire’s Crossroads: A history of the Caribbean from Columbus to the present day
There are many histories of the Americas that begin with Columbus’s landing in what were to become known as the West Indies, but this is perhaps one of the few accessible accounts which focus on the Caribbean itself, and which follow through right to the present day. Carrie Gibson’s thesis is that the Caribbean was […]
Five out of five
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 […]
Freed member of the ‘Cuban Five’ visits Masaya
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 […]
Cuba’s housing in photographs
Not all of Cuba’s housing could grace a picture postcard like the shot above, but the good and the bad are fairly reflected in a photo competition being run by website The Havana Times. Here are some of the entries, starting (below) with my own shot of flats in Cajalbana, Pinar del Rio, on washing […]
Undercover and under-paid
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 […]
The United States of South America
Creating the USSA was the driving ambition of Latin America’s ‘Liberator’, Simón Bolívar. According to his biographer Marie Arana, it may well have been in London in 1810, in conversations with Francisco de Miranda, that he first conceived of a federal power in the southern continent to match that in the north. He spent the […]
A Cuban diary
At a dull moment in the baseball match between Pinar del Rio and Villa Clara, I turn to look at the Cubans in the seats behind me. It’s easy to imagine them as a crowd in a stadium almost anywhere in Latin America: everyone well-dressed and apparently well-fed. Vendors wind between the rows of seats […]
Cuban residents trained to rebuild homes destroyed by hurricanes
In the space of ten days in 2008 Cuba was hit by two of the most powerful storms in its history, causing $9.7 billions of damage to homes and infrastructure from which it is still recovering. Worst affected was the western province of Pinar del Rio. Hurricane Gustav arrived with such force that it wiped […]
‘One of the most ridiculous things that has occurred in the history of the United States’
A review of Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean by Alex von Tunzelmann The words quoted above come from Cuba’s Fidel Castro. This was how, looking back at the incident, he described the abortive invasion at the Bay of Pigs in March 1961, planned and funded by Jack Kennedy and […]
The Once Great City of Havana?
The US journalist Michael Totten has written an article for World Affairs about the Cuban capital, Havana. Titled The Once Great City of Havana (no question mark) it pours scorn on Cuba’s efforts to rehabilitate what is by far the biggest surviving old colonial city in the Americas. Anyone who has been there knows there […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on