When Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido was briefly detained by Nicolas Maduro’s intelligence agents last month, many observers saw an operation bearing the hallmarks of another repressive Latin American regime — Cuba This is no coincidence — for many years, Venezuelan citizens and political figures have protested against what they suspected was Cuban interference in their country’s […]
Sixty years ago, while thousands of Cubans were celebrating the fall of the regime of Fulgencio Batista, a fevered atmosphere filled with a mixture of hype and hate was taking over Havana. Few foresaw what was coming next. On January 1, 1959, the Republic of Cuba was killed. Not many wept for her loss — […]
On December 1, veteran leftwinger Andrés Manuel López Obrador finally took office as Mexico’s new president, having been elected in July with 53 per cent of the vote. With that victory the man known to his compatriots as ‘AMLO’ broke with nine decades of conservative and centrist governments to put his Movimento Regeneracion Nacional in […]
More than 60 years ago, in March 1957, Kwame Nkrumah proclaimed the independence of the British Gold Coast. Nkrumah, educated at British and American universities, was convinced of two things: first, that only independence would allow African peoples to succeed and second, that the ideal vehicle to do so would be a special kind of […]
In recent decades, the new left has undertaken a rewriting of recent history to systematically misrepresent the classical liberal tradition and suggest that we live in a “neoliberal world order”. In both academia and the media, wildly inaccurate claims are made. Some even claim that classical liberalism has caused at least as much suffering as […]
For the first time in more than two decades, Brazil has a right-wing politician as its head of state. Jair Bolsonaro’s victory is not just a devastating defeat for the Worker’s Party (PT), which has won four consecutive presidential elections since 2002 — it represents the ascent of Brazil’s “new right” (labelled by some as […]
After the first round of voting this weekend, we now know that the next Brazilian president will either be the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro — who received 46 per cent of the vote on Sunday — or the socialist Workers’ Party candidate, Fernando Haddad — who won 29 per cent of first-round votes. Brazil’s election […]
After more than six decades of rupture, the Vatican and China took the first step to improving relations this weekend with the signing of a provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops — one of the major causes of tensions between the two states since they broke off relations in 1951. However, the settlement has […]
While Venezuelans live with an unprecedented and recurring shortage of food and medicines, and an economic crisis punctuated by the highest inflation in the world and the lowest wages in the region, President Maduro continues to send millions of barrels of subsidised crude oil to Cuba. Venezuelan oil production is plummeting. The government lacks the […]
