In mid-February, a court in Holguin, Cuba, about 500 miles east of Havana, handed down sentences of up to 20 years in prison to 20 people convicted of sedition the previous month. Their crime, and that of the hundreds of others like them still awaiting verdicts elsewhere, was to have participated in widespread protests last summer, some peaceful but some violent, that took the Cuban government—and the world—by surprise. As shocking as those protests were, they didn’t come out of the blue. Right now, Cubans are enduring the worst economic and social crisis since the 1990s, when the collapse of [...]
Almost 6,500 miles separate Caracas from Kyiv, but the protracted political crisis in Venezuela, with its attendant humanitarian emergency, is not immune to spillover from the war in Ukraine. As if Venezuela’s challenges were not already sufficiently hard to resolve, the progressive build-up of geopolitical tensions over recent years has produced a fresh layer of complexity, highlighted as never before by Moscow’s threat to expand its presence in the Americas in retaliation for NATO moves in Europe. But can foreign powers, despite their deepening adversarial stance elsewhere, somehow harness their efforts to facilitate a solution in Venezuela? In January, as [...]
To the casual observer, Barbados appears to be the latest country to fall prey to increasing Chinese influence. Two years after signing up for China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2019, the Commonwealth nation declared itself a republic, replacing Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state. Connecting these dots, the prestigious Sunday Times of London ran an article titled, “How Barbados went from Little England to Little China.” The piece noted that Barbados was flush with cash from China and implied that dropping the queen as head of state was the condition Beijing had set for further financing. A pharmaceutical salesman in Bridgetown, the [...]
