John Perry

Visitors to Havana see thousands of old colonial houses, many abandoned when the rich fled to Miami after the revolution, now occupied by ordinary habaneros and most in disrepair. A slow transformation has begun: the core of the city now looks splendid and restoration of the long, wave-battered Malecón is underway. But there is still a long way to go. On the World Affairs blog last week, Michael Totten poured scorn on the efforts to rehabilitate the biggest surviving old colonial city in the Americas, saying it’s still worse than wartime Beirut or Baghdad. He prescribes free enterprise as the remedy: the economy would then ‘go into supernova’.

One of the parties contesting Sunday's election in Honduras has seen 18 of its activists murdered in the last 18 months. The LIBRE party’s presidential candidate is Xiomara Castro, the wife of the former president Manuel Zelaya, who was deposed in the military coup of July 2009. Despite the intimidation, LIBRE shows signs of breaking the cronyism of Honduran politics. Since the end of the dictatorship in 1982, the National Party and the Liberals, both products of the traditional oligarchy, have traded the presidency without disrupting the dominance of the 13 families that run the country. (Zelaya was a Liberal; the incumbent, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, is a Nationalist.) The current Liberal candidate is well behind, but the last opinion poll (they are banned in the month before polling day) gave the National Party’s Juan Orlando Hernández a one-point lead over Castro. The oligarchy is clearly rattled.

Bill de Blasio, the Democratic candidate in the New York City mayoral race, is way ahead in the polls, despite his allegedly radical credentials. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story on his support for the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s and a trip he made to Nicaragua in 1988.

De Blasio was a relatively late arrival on the scene. I went on the first solidarity tour from the UK in 1984, by which time the trail south from the US was well established.

Twenty years ago, I spent a week working in one of Santiago’s poorest barrios. It was only three years since Pinochet had left office; people guardedly expressed a mixture of relief, anger and continuing apprehension. At the end of the week I was invited to a middle-class wedding in Valparaíso. Talking to the bride’s aunt, I incautiously referred to the country's having emerged from dictatorship. She took a step backwards. ‘Dictatorship?' she said loudly. Everyone turned to look at us. 'Dictatorship? There has never been a dictatorship in this country, only firm government.'

Today we overshoot ourselves. We've used up in less than eight months the resources that the earth provides in a year. In 2012 it took us until 22 August. Only ten years ago we were able to make do for an extra month. We already treat the earth as if it were 50 per cent bigger than it is. And if everyone lived as we do in Britain, the planet would need to be 3.5 times its present size.