Ukrainian intelligence reports reveal that Cuban women are among the foreign and female recruits serving in Russia’s war in Ukraine, raising new questions about recruitment networks and human trafficking.
country: Cuba
Stay updated with comprehensive news on Cuba from Worldcrunch. Discover insights on Cuban politics, economic strategies, societal issues, and cultural landmarks with translations from top international sources. Highlights include Havana, Cuban history, and cultural events like the Havana Biennial.
Cuba has long been a country where very few people work, the fields do not produce, and it is one of the most aged countries in Latin America. A revolution that is no more.
Europe’s long flirtation with anti-immigrant rhetoric is coming back to haunt it — this time with its own citizens in the crosshairs. With reports of Europeans facing detention at Guantánamo, the line between “us” and “them” begins to blur in the cruelest of ways.
Erdogan and Macron’s strange interaction at a recent summit in Albania is a good opportunity to look back at some of the weirdest hand-to-hand encounters between world leaders.
Certainly things don’t work in communist Cuba, but this neither justifies the embargo that has all but strangled it for decades, nor the obsession with sweeping a singular experiment in governance and social welfare into the globalized banality of our time.
Launched in the 1960s, USAID was effectively about exercising political control in Latin America and other countries. So why the fuss now that U.S. President Donald Trump has done away with the agency? We should be more concerned about what’s coming next.
In another sign of changing power relations in the ‘post-Western’ world, the BRICS group of emerging economies could frustrate the United States’ bid to sink communism in Cuba by strangling its economy.
As Nicaragua’s weakened opponents expend themselves in jail or exile or in rivalries, communist strongman Daniel Ortega has amended the constitution yet again, to lock himself and his family into perpetual power. Could Donald Trump’s reelection become a miraculous glitch in his plans?
Cuba’s current energy crisis is a dramatic illustration, symbolic and otherwise, of the overall downfall of a country that could have followed the successful models of its Asian cousins. Faced with a socioeconomic dead-end, record numbers of Cubans are fleeing the country.
Cuba is approaching a state of economic collapse and has turned to the UN for food assistance for the first time in its history. While Havana blames the U.S. embargo for its economic woes, the reality is quite the opposite.
Venezuela’s elections this year took a very different course than Nicaragua’s in 2021. In both Latin American countries, an authoritarian leader wanted to stay in power and committed electoral fraud to do so. But in Venezuela, the opposition was able to create resistance to Nicolás Maduro.
Foreign condemnations and sanctions will not force Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to abandon power after losing the recent presidential elections. The army could, but with a security system designed by Cuban advisers, it is firmly under regime control.
Recent Cuban protests over fuel and food swiftly turned against the communist system but unlike the past, the state, which is asking the UN for food aid, refrained from giving a crushing response. Venezuela is no better off, and the age of symbiosis for Latin America’s leftist regimes is long gone.
Milk shortages are not new in Cuba, where the state pays producers less for their milk than what they can make by selling it on the black market.
A democracy is not just the vague and dangerously malleable promise of popular rule. It is instead an institutional regime or “republic” that defines and protects the rights of the people, and of individuals.
Between breastfeeding, playdates, postpartum fatigue, birthday fatigues and the countless other aspects of mother- and fatherhood, a Cuban couple tries to find new ways to explore something that is often lost in the middle of the parenting storm: sex.
Noel, a Cuban engineer who had to emigrate to the faraway island of Saint Lucia, tells about the Cuban government’s systematic intimidation techniques and coercion of its professionals abroad. He now knows he can never go back to his native island — lest he should never be allowed to leave Cuba again.
In the island nation, Rizo Libre (free curl) seeks to rescue Afro-descendant roots on the island.
For the first time, Cuba’s prestigious annual cigar festival recognized a woman, Alsogaray, owner of an iconic cigar shop in Buenos Aires, as the top representative of this celebrated lifeline of the Cuban economy.
American and Southwest Airlines have been refusing to allow Cubans on board flights if they’ve been blacklisted by the government in Havana.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has managed to cling to power after an allegedly rigged 2018 presidential election. He did so with the help of Cuba, having enjoyed “working relations” with Cuban intelligence for decades.
Since Cuba reopened its borders last December after COVID closures, the number of people leaving the island has gone up significantly. Migration has been a constant in Cuban life since the 1950s. But this article in Cuba’s independent news outlet El Toque shows just how important migration is to understand the ordeals of everyday life on the island.
Blackouts were common across Cuba during the 1990s. Today, the country is once again in the midst of an energy crisis as power shortages push Cubans’ patience to the limits, and remind many of the decades of government failings.
The Cuban government has once again jailed dissenting artists or forced them to flee. But anger at the 60-year dictatorship has spread far beyond artistic circles and the regime no longer has the power to silence people.
Most Latin American countries fear civil conflicts more than international invasion. A regional union is the best way to assure stability and lawfulness in a troubled but culturally cohesive continent. The EU shows us what that would look like and how to make it happen.
There is little understanding of gender fluidity worldwide, and in Cuba there is no legal recognition of their identity. Journalist Ernesto J. Gómez Figueredo meets Félix and tries to explain the world from the point of view of gender fluidity.
Like other intellectuals of his time, the celebrated Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez admired Cuba’s Fidel Castro. What’s just been revealed, however, is also, as one text reveals, the Sandinista rebels who have stifled Nicaraguan democracy in past years.
While Cuba has historically been praised for its health care system, the pandemic has struck the population hard, even those not infected. Among the victims are those suffering from psychological ailments whose prescriptions couldn’t be filled because of closed borders and economic crises.
People used social media to help organize the large, anti-government protests that took place on the island last July. And yet, unlike their counterparts in China, Cuban authorities are loath to prohibit access to such sites. Do the math.
Sympathizers of the Cuban communist regime tend to justify Cuba’s violence on protesters and present it as a victim of Western imperialism.
Cuba’s dissident artists are challenging not just the communist state’s repression, but also its claim to be the socio-cultural guide for the nation.
With Trump now out of the picture, Cuba and Venezuela — both in economic shambles — are once more toying with piecemeal liberalization, Clarín’s international affairs chief explains.
As the world is distracted by COVID-19 and regional leftists turn a blind eye, the Cuban regime relaunches its secretive practice of civil-society repression.
The island nation hasn’t had a free election for more than 70 years. And yet, as millions take to the streets across the region, the Cuban regime keeps getting a pass.
On this day 90 years ago, one of the world’s most famous revolution figures was born. OneShot commemorates Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s birthday with a photo taken at the funeral for the victims of the La Coubre explosion, on March 4, 1960 — a picture that stresses the intensity of his gaze and poise and that is recognized worldwide. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/Pm7ca1HxE3s expand=1] Guerrillero Heroico — (Alberto Diaz Korda/OneShot) OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot: [rebelmouse-image 27068863 original_size=”320×320″ expand=1][rebelmouse-image 27068864 original_size=”174×174″ expand=1][rebelmouse-image 27068865 original_size=”128×128″ expand=1][rebelmouse-image 27068866 original_size=”227×227″ […]
With Castro’s retirement as Cuban President, Cuba is left to face ongoing issues of the communist party — primarily the shambling economy.
An Afro-Caribbean religion dating back to the days of slavery, Santería has adapted to both Catholicism and Socialism and is a major contributor to Cuba’s particular cultural identity.
Cuba is restoring its colonial architecture in Havana and beyond, and promoting the national heritage among young Cubans, ahead of the 500th anniversary of Havana’s foundation.
The origins of this particularly powerful Caribbean storm can be traced back to an El Nino no-show.
It’s taken a few days to accept, but Cuba’s less-than-ideal WiFi situation may be a blessing in disguise for one Argentine visitor.