Cuba

The first scent of trouble came when Cuba’s government ordered all its non-essential workers home. By packing them off (and there are plenty of them, given Cuba is one of the world’s last centrally planned communist states) the government hoped the island’s exhausted national power grid would get a breather. It didn’t work, the main power station crashed, and Cuba went dark. At first, I didn’t think it was a big deal. Power cuts in this all-but-bankrupt state have long been a daily scourge. But it turns out there’s a categoric difference between 20 and 24 hours of blackout. I came to Cuba in 2018 for a three-month stay and here I am, now married with a three-year-old son. Friends call this my ‘Cuban midlife crisis’, which I resent.

Tucker Carlson has been radicalized by a Russian supermarket. There’s a sentence you never expected to read. As part of his tour of Moscow, the week before Putin critic Alexei Navalny “died in prison,” the firebrand commentator visited a grocery store and was stunned by the low prices. “That’s when you start to realize,” Carlson marveled: …that ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought… Corruption… If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a good person or a bad person, you’re wrecking people’s lives and their country.

For over a month, Peru has been in a state of near-constant unrest. In December, as the legislature threatened to impeach President Pedro Castillo for, among other things, allegations of corruption, Castillo tried to dissolve the legislature and “govern through decrees.” By all measures, this was an attempted coup, and it resulted in his impeachment (by a vote of 101-6), arrest, and condemnation from left and right. In his place, Vice President Dina Boluarte was sworn in as president, having denounced her former boss’s attack on the country’s democracy. This was a success in a country that has seen six new presidents in the past seven calendar years. The Congress has repeatedly been at odds with the president, and scandals have rocked administration after administration.

As the dust settled on Jair Bolsonaro’s seismic victory in Brazil back in 2018, one might have spared a thought for those dedicated to the cause of international socialism. Having bathed in the glory of the so-called "Pink Tide" and the commodities boom of the early 2000s that allowed socialist governments such as Hugo Chávez's Venezuela to seemingly prosper, any hopes that Latin America would forever unify in the cause of left-wing anti-imperialism seemed well and truly dashed. In many of the continent’s wealthiest countries, right-of-center politicians had swept to power with a view to restoring their nation’s former glory. These included Bolsonaro in Brazil, Sebastian Piñera in Chile, Ivan Duque in Colombia, and Mauricio Macri in Argentina, among others.

Could the growing tide of protests finally topple Cuba's communist government? Many Cubans are certainly angry: Sunday marked the largest-ever demonstration against the island’s regime. Organised through social media, the protests, which began in a town twenty miles outside Havana, quickly spread across Cuba. Thousands of demonstrators marched along some of Havana’s most iconic streets, chanting ‘Freedom!’, ‘Fatherland and Life’ and ‘Down with the dictatorship!’ Discontent with the regime, which took power in 1959, has been rising for the past year. Before this weekend, the most high-profile protests had been from artists and intellectuals demanding freedom of expression. But this discontent is spreading rapidly.