Tony Wood

Any attempt at a coherent portrait of this teeming excess seems doomed to failure. There are too many people with too many stories, too many sights, sounds, smells, too many historical epochs mingled together, too many possible books to write.

What most people in the US call an ‘embargo’ – meaning the sweeping trade restrictions first imposed in 1960 and ratcheted up many times since – is known in Cuba as el bloqueo, ‘the blockade’. One term suggests targeted trade measures; the other implies all-out economic warfare. The same applies to the word ‘revolution’: it is either a single event that occurred in 1959 or, for supporters of the Cuban model, a process that is still unfolding. Analysis of Cuba can seem to operate in parallel universes, depending on where you stand.

As Navalny points out, Putin’s private domain is more than thirty times the size of Monaco. But unlike Monaco, it is protected by a no-fly zone and a naval security order requiring ships to stay two kilometres from the shore. Navalny’s team nevertheless managed to float nearby in a dinghy and launch a drone over the estate. The sweeping aerial views make clear not only the scale of the project but the pointless extravagance.

By any sensible definition, what took place in Bolivia on 10 November was a coup: Morales was forced out of the country at the prompting of the army, two months before the end of his third presidential term. What happened next confirmed that his opponents wanted not just to suspend constitutional democracy but to strangle it.