Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. July 13, 2021 Cubans Take To the Streets After thousands of Cubans protested on Sunday, commentators are a bit stunned, given the rarity of Cubans organizing to criticize their government in public.
At GZero Media, Carlos Santamaria summarizes the problems that have generated angst: an economic decline (GDP dropped 11% in 2020) along with shortages of food, medicine, and Covid-19 vaccines. Trump-era US sanctions, meanwhile, have squeezed Cuba's oil supplies from Venezuela and have made it difficult for Cuban Americans to send remittances to the island country.
For the first time since 1959, Cuba is led by someone other than a Castro, after Raúl (younger brother of Fidel) stepped down as communist-party head in April. It's unclear how President Miguel Díaz-Canel will respond in the medium term, Santamaria observes, but for now he has urged his supporters to "combat" protesters in the streets, and Frida Ghitis writes for CNN that "brute force" looms as an option—though it's not certain that would work out well for the government.
"Demonstrations of this magnitude have not occurred in decades," Ghitis writes. "The last time, back in 1994, [Fidel] Castro let off the pressure by allowing Cubans to leave"—and some 35,000 did, fleeing in boats and rafts to the US. "But simply opening the door would not work now," Ghitis writes, "because in 2012, the government lifted the decades' old" requirement that citizens acquire "exit visas" to leave the country.
"Millions of Cubans had never seen anything like the angry street protests that erupted in Havana and other Cuban cities over the weekend," Cuba chronicler Anthony DePalma writes for The Washington Post, citing an "incompetent" response to Covid-19 by the communist regime. "Then as now, a motivating force was the realization that they lived in mortal danger from their own government." England's Loss, on and off the Field When Italy defeated England to claim the European soccer championship on Sunday, the win was even sweeter after a difficult pandemic year, the Financial Times' editorial board writes. But for England, the paper writes, the story is quite different: "Rather than celebrating a first tournament victory in more than fifty years, the headlines are about racist abuse of England players who missed crucial penalties in the shootout that decided the final. Sadly, in defeat, the evil demons that have stalked English football for decades—racism and hooliganism—have resurfaced. The ugliness of the social media reaction was so bad that both the prime minister and the heir to the throne felt compelled to speak out."
Which is a shame, the paper concludes—and a reversal. Many English fans had supported their rising team "as a microcosm of a nation seemingly more enthusiastic about its evolving identity as a more tolerant, multiracial and multi-ethnic society than is often suggested," Rory Smith wrote for The New York Times—including, as The Economist points out, in the face of criticism by Conservative lawmakers aimed at the team for its starting-whistle knee-taking to oppose racism. Headlines about the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse haven't captured the scale of the country's turmoil.
It's not clear who's in charge, as the Prime Minister and a successor appointed by Moïse but not yet sworn in each lay claim to authority. But political legitimacy was already scarce, scholar and analyst Georges Fauriol tells Global Americans, given that only 18% voted in the last election, a dispute has simmered over constitutional reform, and both "Haitian public governance" and "any notions of a national consensus" have suffered a "collapse." Perceptions are split over whether international aid has helped or hurt Haiti, Fauriol says, but the international community's next steps will be "critical," and Haiti may need "some form of an international peace-keeping force."
Violence has raged as gangs operate with relative impunity, Malick Ghachem writes for Americas Quarterly, assessing the Biden administration's call for elections as partially right, given that Haiti first needs "the conditions in which elections can be meaningful and possible. ... Beyond elections, Haiti needs something closer to a complete political and constitutional reboot combined with a new social contract in which international institutions support rather than ignore the country's least well-off citizens." The US economy has been rebounding enthusiastically from the Covid-19 crash, but Karen Petrou writes for The New York Times that recovery dynamics favor the rich.
At the start of this year, the gap between the wealthiest 1% and the bottom 50% reached its widest-ever mark (since the statistic's inception in 1989), Petrou notes, while the Fed's low interest rates and expansive balance sheet of assets (acquired through rounds of "quantitative easing" after the 2008 crisis and during this one) favor stockholders over those who save their money in bank accounts. All of which suggests to Petrou that the Fed should shift its focus from the well-being of markets to that of everyone else. |
