Tony Wood

If every accusation is a confession, then the US State Department report released on 20 July, which describes Cuba as ‘the capital of 21st-century communism’, must rank as one of the most deranged self-denunciations on record. Across its hundred pages, the report paints Cuba as the centre of hemispheric subversion, bent on destroying the United States through a ‘long war of...

The Cuban artist​ Wifredo Lam’s best-known work, La jungla (1942-43), is a riotous and unsettling painting. Measuring nearly eight feet by seven-and-a-half, it features a series of anthropomorphic figures standing amid dense green vegetation. They are long-limbed, with outsize feet and curving buttocks; parts of faces, somewhere between stylised human and totemic animal, float above...

‘Iwatched​ it literally like I was watching a television show,’ Donald Trump said of the US military assault on Venezuela in the early hours of 3 January. After months of covert operations and surveillance, US forces bombed several sites around Caracas to cripple Venezuelan air defences and then kidnapped the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia...

The last seven years​ have brought a string of successes for the right in Latin America. In October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidency. In June the following year, Nayib Bukele came to power in El Salvador, and that November, the Bolivian right seized on an electoral crisis and ousted Evo Morales. In Peru, after the leftist Pedro Castillo narrowly won the presidency in 2021,...

People​ love to talk about writers who once had radical sympathies but drifted rightwards with age. But the political evolution of the Peruvian writer and sometime politician Mario Vargas Llosa has been so startling as to inject life into that tired trope. Although he still describes himself as a liberal, the stances he has taken in recent years have followed a reactionary pattern. In 2018,...