No separate queue for Cubans
‘We’re leaving,’ my Cuban friend N. told me in November. ‘We’re building a raft.’ I was shocked, partly because he planned to leave, partly because of the way he planned to do it. I consulted another friend, who’d spent several months in a coastguard team, hauling people out of the water when their rafts fell […]
Forget Fidel Castro’s policies?
This letter to the Guardian, below, is in response to a piece by Zoe Williams, Forget Fidel Castro’s policies. What matters is that he was a dictator. Zoe Williams’ usually excellent judgment has let her down when she says of Fidel Castro that “What matters is that he was a dictator”, because she forgets the […]
The Last Soldiers of the Cold War
A review of the book by Fernando Morais On February 24, 1996, three small planes set off from Florida, planning to enter Cuban airspace over Havana and drop propaganda leaflets. They were piloted by members of Brothers to the Rescue, one of the many anti-Castro organisations that were then not only trying to reverse the […]
The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Several books on my recent reading pile might broadly be categorised as being about ‘exiles’, and few exiled people have been in a worse position than those who left their homelands to avoid the Central American guerilla wars of the 1980s. This applied especially to combatants, but almost equally at risk were left-wing sympathisers or […]
Overland from Cuba to Texas
Thawing relations between the United States and Cuba have brought an upsurge in Cubans trying to leave the island. They’re worried that they may lose their favourable US immigration status, becoming no more welcome than any other Latino who fancies life in the US. Since 1995, the ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy has deterred people […]
Ten days in Honduras
Ten days in Honduras: a TV reporter and a cameraman, a radio reporter, a trade union leader, the head of an indigenous community fighting forest destruction, two transsexual activists, two bodyguards of the director of the agrarian reform institute and a lawyer were all murdered. The daily political killings are rarely investigated. Even if they […]
Call for President Obama to revoke his Executive Order against Venezuela
Over 120 organisations have signed a letter to President Obama instigated by the Alliance for Global Justice, calling on him to rescind his executive order which imposes sanctions on officials in Venezuela and describes the government of Nicolas Maduro as an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States’. […]
Guantánamo – time to end the lease
Those who would protest that only regime change and full recognition of human rights in Cuba should precede any deal have surely had their arguments demolished. This month marks the 112th anniversary of the signing of the lease for the Guantánamo base between the Cuban and US governments. For at least half this period the […]
Kill the messenger
In January 1983, police in Los Angeles arrested frogmen bringing 400 pounds of cocaine ashore from a Colombian freighter. But they missed their main target, the drug importer Norwin Meneses, who may have been tipped off by officials. In August 1986, a US Customs informant, Joseph Kelso, told his handlers that Drug Enforcement Administration officials […]
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 […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on