Daniel Rey is the author of 'Checkmate or Top Trumps: Cuba's Geopolitical Game of the Century'. He lives in New York.
Mario Vargas Llosa wasn’t always a liberal. From his youth until his early thirties the Peruvian writer, born in 1936, was enthused by the utopian promises of socialism. He joined a communist cell at university, and in the 1950s spent half his salary on a subscription to Les Temps Modernes, the leftist journal founded by
Douglas Stuart has a rare gift. The Scottish writer, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain deservedly won the 2020 Booker Prize, creates vivid characters, settings and images without letting his literary skill get in the way of plot. His second novel, Young Mungo, has a similar feel and is in many ways a kind of sequel.
On 8 April 1864 an Austrian archduke with a penchant for daydreaming agreed to be emperor of Mexico. As Edward Shawcross describes in his majestic history The Last Emperor of Mexico, the process to install Maximilian of Habsburg began two and half years earlier. The plan was proposed by a determined clique of Mexican Conservatives
England’s wretched performance in the Ashes – which saw the side lose three tests and so the series to Australia last week – has been more abject than even the most inspired pessimist could have imagined. No sane observer expected England to win against Australia, but to lose the five match series little more than
On 7 October 2001 President George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom – the invasion of Afghanistan. The operation sought to bring the architects of 9/11 to justice and reduce the threat of terrorism. Twenty years later, President Joe Biden has pledged to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by 31 August, bringing to a close
In March 2014 Gabriel García Márquez went down with a cold. The man who wrote beautifully about ageing was approaching his end. As his wife told their son Rodrigo: ‘I don’t think we’ll get out of this one.’ In A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, García, a film director and screenwriter, remembers his father and
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!’,
Cricket in Latin America sounds like an oxymoron. Yet in almost every country in the region willow was hitting leather before feet were kicking pigs’ bladders. England vs Australia, first played in 1877, may be cricket’s iconic series, but the Ashes cedes ten years of history to the contest between Argentina and Uruguay — the
If you tune in to the Oscars during the early hours of Monday morning, you’ll note – along with sickly fawning about contemporary motion pictures being high art, beautiful people in beautiful clothes, and the kind of feigned surprise that wouldn’t look out of place in a school production – two glaring anomalies in the
Two millennia ago, in the outer reaches of the empire, the Romans performed a routine execution of a Galilean rebel. Tortured and publicly humiliated in front of family and friends, Jesus of Nazareth was slowly asphyxiated over six hours. The Crucifixion is the centrepiece of Christianity. But artists have long adapted the devotional image of
A death sentence, prison in Siberia, and chronic epilepsy. The death of his young children, a gambling addiction, and possible manic depression. Few writers endure such dark lives or possess such bright creativity as Fyodor Dostoevsky. His incomparable experiences inform many of his novels’ most powerful scenes, from accounts of innocent suffering and crazed revolutionaries
Many books claim to describe junctures that changed the world but few examine ones as consequential as Conquistadores: A New History. Hailed by the Romantics as courageous explorers, the Spanish conquerors are increasingly seen as violent and rapacious exploiters. That, says Fernando Cervantes, oversimplifies the complexities of the early modern period. Cervantes, a Mexican historian,
Britain’s judicial system may be about to give $1 billion (£770 million) to one of the world’s most notorious dictators. Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan strongman, wants access to gold reserves held by the Bank of England. The leader, internationally condemned for chronic mismanagement of the economy and facilitating vast corruption, says he’ll use the funds
Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to developers, the countryside is ingrained in our collective consciousness as our unspoiled national haven. It is Albion’s Garden of Eden, with its Holy Trinity of village church, local pub and cricket ground. Englishness itself, as
This year’s Turner Prize has four winners rather than one. In a letter to the jury, the artists claimed that it would be wrong to adjudicate between the social causes championed in their art. So in the end, they split the spoils between them. The judges had one job: to judge. Instead, they acquiesced to
I’m an Oxbridge graduate in my twenties and a native speaker of a Romance language. I’m a citizen of nowhere rather than somewhere, and two years ago I moved to the United States. I could be the illustrated dictionary’s definition of a Remoaner. And I am. So why is it that, whenever I have a
More than 120 years ago, Winston Churchill sailed to Cuba. While there, he dreamt of a country ‘free and prosperous…throwing open her ports to the commerce of the world, sending her ponies to Hurlingham and her cricketers to Lords.’ Now, in spite of Cuba’s communist revolution, the British government seems to have the same optimistic
