For decades, Latin America’s authoritarian regimes were seen as a right-wing phenomenon, with Cuba as the lone exception — a dictatorship born not from a betrayal of democracy, but of revolution. As Washington’s embargo returns to the headlines, this piece asks what that framing has long obscured: that Cuba has never had just one embargo, but two.
Analyses
- 31 July 2019Two months after Rahul Gandhi first offered to resign, the Indian National Congress is still staring at political uncertainty. After a second, humiliating defeat in general elections, the party desperately needs a new strategy, narrative, and leader.
- Andrea Walton 18 July 2019In parliamentary elections taking place on July 21st, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky aims at winning an absolute majority with his TV-born Servant of the People party. If he succeeds, he may shape new domestic and foreign policies for the country.
- Federica Zoja 9 July 2019Journalists, trade unionists, intellectuals, students, professionals active in the corporations of their category: the list of those arrested and those who could be shortly gets longer. So much that in its recent report on the opposition in Egypt, Amnesty International does not hesitate to define the North African country as “an open-air prison”.
- Camilla Pagani 1 July 20192019 will be remembered as a peculiar and unpredictable year in the bilateral relations between Italy and France. Last February, French Ambassador Christian Masset was recalled from Rome to Paris after months of tensions. Quai d’Orsay officials defined the crisis as “unprecedented”, a rupture on a scale not seen since the Second World War.
- Nicoletta Fagiolo 20 June 2019The CFA franc is linked to a history of extreme colonial violence and should by now be part of the past, and therefore of numismatics, and lie in a memorabilia museum like the one on the apartheid era of comic actor and fervent activist Pieter-Dirk Uys.
- Bolsonaro’s new Ministry of Education has spearheaded the anti-intellectualism advanced by the president. Since his election campaign took shape, President Bolsonaro’s persecution and revanchist attitude towards universities and academics have intensified the political division in Brazil.
- Lorenzo Berardi 12 June 2019The EU’s worst paid teachers went on strike one month before the European Parliament elections. Their ongoing protest might have had an impact on the poll results.
- Federica Zoja 7 June 2019Four months before the vote, everything is still in doubt in the complex Tunisian chess game, overshadowed by the Libyan and Algerian news on the agenda of the Western allies.
- Maria Tavernini 3 June 2019India is becoming an increasingly dangerous and inhospitable place for its minorities and is drifting away from the secular character its founding fathers fought for is no longer in doubt. This is something Modi himself must realize.
- Gülay Türkmen 27 May 2019This analysis by Gülay Türkmen investigates how the ‘new wave’ of immigrants from Turkey tackle with the established perception of Turkishness in Germany