Foreign Policy Blogs

Latin America & The Caribbean

NO: The Rest of the Story

NO: The Rest of the Story

If you have not seen it, you ought to check out the new Chilean movie NO. A fictionalized account of the campaign to remove Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet through a plebiscite, it was one of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. You should be aware, however, that it does not tell the […]

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Cuba’s Little Bird Flies Free

Cuba’s Little Bird Flies Free

Freedom is fundamentally the possibility of standing on a street corner and shouting “There is no freedom here!” — Yoani Sanchez Cuban dissident Yoani Sanchez is fond of comparing Cubans to little birds in a cage – captives who are given free education, food, and water but who are still not free. Thanks to a […]

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Censoring Speech in Haiti’s Most Celebrated Agora (part two of three) – Haiti

Censoring Speech in Haiti’s Most Celebrated Agora (part two of three) – Haiti

Please read part one here first: Censoring Speech  While not the first head of state to politicize Haitian carnival, President Michel Martelly made history with his deliberate attack on civil liberties last February, forbidding Port-au-Prince residents to peacefully assemble and organize their carnival — a decision that not only infuriated citizens, but also a civil […]

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Speaking Freely Volume 5: Hugo Chávez (2008)

Speaking Freely Volume 5: Hugo Chávez (2008)

Now that one of Latin America’s most controversial figures has died, it is interesting to look back at his actions, actions that will reverberate in the western hemisphere for some time to come. This is a short piece (about 52 minutes) that is clearly a love letter from the maker, Cinema Libre Studio. The whole […]

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Finish line in sight for post-Castro Cuba

Finish line in sight for post-Castro Cuba

After 54 years of leadership by one Castro brother or the other, current Cuban President Raúl Castro announced on Sunday that his current five-year term would be his last — thus providing a firm date for the end of Castro rule in Cuba while holding himself to a standard he has oft-repeated: senior officials should […]

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The Devil’s Miner (2005)

The Devil’s Miner (2005)

“The mountain that eats men.” That is what Cerro Rico (“rich mountain”) is called. The mountain in Potosi, Bolivia has yielded a tremendous amount of silver since the Spanish empire began mining it hundreds of years ago. This documentary follows the daily life of 14 year-old Basilio Vargas, who works long shifts in the silver […]

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Censoring Speech in Haiti’s Most Celebrated Agora (part one) – Haiti

Censoring Speech in Haiti’s Most Celebrated Agora (part one) – Haiti

  During a live interview aired on Radio Scoop FM  (107.7) 48 hours before Haiti’s carnival festivities, President Michel Martelly dispelled all rumors surrounding band selections for Cap-Haitien’s 2013 Carnival possession. “It was I, who personally decided to exclude bands from the carnival parade,” declared the president. “The decision to exclude bands, such as Brothers Posse […]

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Port-au-Prince Caves under International Pressure to Hold Overdue Elections

Port-au-Prince Caves under International Pressure to Hold Overdue Elections

Reacting to a United Nations Security Council’s Jan. 28, 2013 press release that cilled on the Haitian government to hold free, fair, inclusive and credible senatorial and municipal elections that are 14-months overdue, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe reiterated his administration’s determination to organize elections this year, an exercise the note stressed “Is important to maintain […]

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The Long Road Back

The Long Road Back

My mother was born in Havana on December 11, 1953, into a solidly middle-class Cuban family. After years of self-driven study and hard work, my grandfather Celestino had been able to launch a successful car import business that allowed him and my grandmother to raise and support a family. They lived on the second story […]

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Kita Nago to Urge Unity among Haitians, Moving Haiti Forward

Kita Nago to Urge Unity among Haitians, Moving Haiti Forward

“Ki bwa li ye, bwa sa; ki bwa li ye, bwa sa,” sang euphoric young men and women, floating in a sea of people embarked on a lengthy pilgrimage to unity. At the end of the unprecedented grassroots movement in Northern city Ouanaminthe — Kita Nago — a half-ton tree trunk that symbolizes Haiti, would have, on […]

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Cuba, Chavez, and the Turn of the New Year

Cuba, Chavez, and the Turn of the New Year

Fidel Castro’s long-declining health and the high average age of his successors are well-worn topics in Cuba discussions. As we turn the page on 2012, Cuba watchers and Cubans alike are now discussing the health of the leader of a different country: Venezuela. Hugo Chávez recently suffered still new complications from his cancer surgery, and […]

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ARGENZUELA

ARGENZUELA

Argenzuela — an invented word that has been on the minds and lips of Argentines for the past year; the jokes that Argentina is following an eerily similar path to that of Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela are no longer funny. The fact that the man who almost single-handedly has destroyed the former economic juggernaut of Venezuela […]

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Super Storm Sandy Exposed Haiti’s Failed Reconstruction

Super Storm Sandy Exposed Haiti’s Failed Reconstruction

Transforming Haiti into a consumer nation, ultimately meant that a short-supplied world would force its population into mass starvation, a recurring nightmare Haitians are currently experiencing amid the recent global food crisis, which caused a wave of sporadic protests to erupt throughout the country last month. Rampant inflation sent food prices hovering well beyond the […]

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What lies ahead: Cuba and Obama’s second term

What lies ahead: Cuba and Obama’s second term

In the recent U.S. election, Cuban-Americans voted for President Obama in record numbers, reflecting in a most convincing way the demographic shift that we have already been watching for years: newer immigrants and younger Cuban-Americans do not prioritize a hard-line U.S. policy toward Cuba, or do not support it at all. In fact, on November […]

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The Socialist Origins of Technocratic Chile

The Socialist Origins of Technocratic Chile

In 1971 Stafford Beer, a renowned British academic, proposed to make Chile the world’s first cybernetic country. In essence, this meant that Chile’s entire economy would be run by a centralized computer network; real time data from hundreds of public utilities, banks, and industrial manufacturers would be rendered into optimal allocations of electricity, automatically set […]

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