Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 29 of 29 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

¿Vamos Bien?

Eric Hershberg: Cuba and America, 28 May 2009

Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos 
by Louis Pérez.
North Carolina, 333 pp., £32.95, August 2008, 978 0 8078 3216 5
Show More
Cuba in Revolution: A History since the 1950s 
by Antoni Kapcia.
Reaktion, 208 pp., £15.95, September 2008, 978 1 86189 402 1
Show More
Show More
... claim that the revolution avoided personality cults, Havana is full of billboards showing Che, Hugo Chávez and, above all, El Comandante – my favourite has him dressed in full olive drab regalia, gazing out benevolently, saying ‘vamos bien.’ But is Cuba doing well? Kapcia is right to say that the ‘sheer fact of survival’ is a remarkable ...

Why stop at two?

Greg Grandin: Latin America Pulls Away, 22 October 2009

Leftovers: Tales of the Latin American Left 
edited by Jorge Castañeda and Marco Morales.
Routledge, 267 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 415 95671 0
Show More
Show More
... Tierra del Fuego’. Latin America’s conversion to free trade was short-lived, however. In 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela, and Latin America began another turn to the left. In one country after another, self-described socialists, from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Evo Morales in Bolivia and ...

Plan Colombia

Malcolm Deas, 5 April 2001

... neighbours are sometimes apprehensive, they are not participants in its troubles. Even President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (about whom Richard Gott has recently written in the LRB) has done no more than strike an occasional ‘Bolivarian’ populist attitude. Few countries in the last two centuries have been as little involved as Colombia in ...

Diary

Tony Wood: Chechnya, 22 March 2007

... we learned that the elderly passenger had lived in Venezuela for a year. The driver chipped in: Hugo Chávez, he said, was his hero. The mood stayed light until talk turned to Beslan: the elderly man’s granddaughter was one of the school hostages; she survived the assault on the building but was injured and lost an eye. He said he didn’t blame the ...

But I wanted a crocodile

Thomas Meaney: Castro in Harlem, 4 February 2021

Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s 
by Simon Hall.
Faber, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2020, 978 0 571 35306 4
Show More
Show More
... are unlikely to be assassinated in the vicinity of Wall Street and Rockefeller Centre. In 2006, Hugo Chávez delivered free heating oil to the South Bronx and ostentatiously paid off the debts of Hispanic NGOs in the city. For Castro in the 1960s, Harlem was a useful place to expose American injustice. He made a point of inviting the hotel’s mostly ...

Diary

Ben Ehrenreich: Who killed Roque Dalton?, 24 June 2010

... conference circuit, sitting on panels with former heads of state. When a reporter needs a quote on Hugo Chávez or Iraq, Villalobos is there to help. As many of his compatriots have noted, the life Villalobos leads today resembles the one promised to Dalton by the CIA in 1964, ‘a life with all the possibilities’. Villalobos’s apostasy is an extreme ...

You say embargo …

Tony Wood: The Cuban Model, 1 July 2021

The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times 
by Anthony DePalma.
Bodley Head, 368 pp., £9.99, July, 978 1 78470 822 1
Show More
We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World 
by Helen Yaffe.
Yale, 363 pp., £18.99, February 2020, 978 0 300 23003 1
Show More
Show More
... as a whole. Credit for this is commonly given to the support Cuba enjoyed from the government of Hugo Chávez – as if the island had exchanged reliance on the Soviets for Bolivarian dependency. But Venezuelan oil is only part of the story. Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, the Cuban economy was reshaped by a turn away from sugar: once the ...

For the Love of Uncle Enver

Thomas Meaney: Albania after Hoxha, 23 June 2022

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History 
by Lea Ypi.
Penguin, 313 pp., £9.99, June, 978 0 14 199510 6
Show More
Show More
... parties and factions across the globe, with hardline groups in New York and London and Stockholm. Hugo Chávez got his start in a Venezuelan platoon putting down a group of Hoxhaist rebels; an offshoot of the Hoxhaist party in Ecuador holds the provincial government of Esmeraldas. In Berlin, where I live, there are certain protests where the old ...

Diary

R.W. Johnson: World Cup Diary, 22 July 2010

... Germans? Unlikely. In Latin America the only leader who seems to believe in continental unity is Hugo Chávez, which is to say someone whom most other people do not wish to unite with. Often Latin Americans give the impression that language is still the key, so if their own team goes out they would side with Spain or Portugal; a problem in the ...

Diary

Richard Gott: Paraguayan Power, 21 February 2008

... and ancient peasant struggles against the landlords. The process that began with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela nearly ten years ago, and continued with the emergence of leftist presidents at the head of indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, may yet produce a surprise result in Paraguay’s elections. Fernando Lugo, a 58-year-old ...

In Tegucigalpa

John Perry: The Honduran Coup, 6 August 2009

... forces and to produce ethanol from sugar cane. So Zelaya turned instead to another regional power, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. From 2007 onwards, Chávez began to deliver subsidised petroleum and to invest in the development projects that Zelaya wanted to promote. In 2008, Zelaya raised the minimum wage to the ...

Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity

James Meek, 18 February 2016

... Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... and prices reacted accordingly (amid some agitation among traders regarding the ascension of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and deteriorating US-Iraq relations). Rising oil prices in 2000, and the bursting of the Wall Street high-technology bubble, doubtless fed the perception that oil was scarce and economic recovery might be compromised. But rising ...

Forgive us our debts

Benjamin Kunkel: The History of Debt, 10 May 2012

Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order 
by Philip Coggan.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £20, December 2011, 978 1 84614 510 0
Show More
Debt: The First 5000 Years 
by David Graeber.
Melville House, 534 pp., £21.99, July 2011, 978 1 933633 86 2
Show More
Show More
... of foodstuffs, it stood on the brink of a commodities boom, and also had the friendship of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, who financed his fellow left populists in Buenos Aires on generous terms. Whether or not class struggle is the motor of history, it rarely goes by that name. Coggan attempts to stay above the fray: ‘Economic history has been a war ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences