Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
Putin just exposed Trump’s Cuba blockade as another bluff. After threatening to stop any country from supplying oil to the island, Trump folded the moment Russia called him on it. iPINIONS contends that this humiliation reaches far beyond Cuba to Iran, NATO, and Taiwan. Read my full take on Substack: https://ipinionsdaily.substack.com/p/putin-defies-trumps-blockade-to-deliver Read more.
Trump starved Cuba into darkness, then started talking as if the island were his to take. iPINIONS argues that Raúl Castro’s smartest move may be to send his own grandson to flatter Trump back toward the very normalization Obama achieved and Trump reversed. Read my full take on Substack:https://ipinionsdaily.substack.com/p/trumps-energy-blockade-has-made-cuba Read more.
Politics at the water’s edge Championing good governance and democratic values was long the hallmark of American leadership on the world stage — or so the myth goes. Once, when American diplomats came knocking, nations understood the package deal: aid came with accountability, alliances with expectations. More to the point, American politicians once took pride… Read more.
As I argued on Wednesday, iPINIONS was one of the few liberals who urged Speaker Pelosi to defy China by visiting Taiwan. I did so because I knew China’s fiery rhetoric was mostly hot air. Moreover, I knew Taiwan’s democracy was doomed if Beijing could bully even the United States into backing down so publicly.… Read more.
I could not have been prouder or more impressed with the way Nikole Hannah-Jones schooled the University of North Carolina when they tried to force her to serve an indentured professorship before getting the tenured position she was entitled to, objectively. When UNC trustees finally came to their senses and caved, she made a public… Read more.
Miguel is following Raúl as Raúl Followed Fidel. With apologies to my Spanish-speaking readers, nothing describes Cuba’s national development quite like the French epigram plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It means the more it changes, the more it remains the same. And that, in a nutshell, is Cuba. Cuba’s National Assembly cleared… Read more.
Ambassador Nikki Haley blasted the United Nations Wednesday in a defiant speech to the 193-member General Assembly before it adopted a resolution calling for an end to the US economic embargo on Cuba. … ‘This assembly does not have the power to end the US embargo. … To those who are confused as to where… Read more.
I know, complaining about President Trump’s hypocrisy is rather like complaining about a prostitute’s promiscuity. Except that the former portends consequences that could destroy a country (even the whole world), which makes those the latter portends seem like nothing more than a genital itch. That said, Trump’s America-First policy towards Cuba amounts to little more… Read more.
Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died Friday… He dominated his country with… Read more.
The Obama administration eased trade and travel restrictions on Cuba Tuesday, granting more economic benefits for the communist-ruled island nation in advance of President Obama’s historic trip… Mr. Obama will start a three-day visit to Cuba on Sunday, becoming the first sitting president to travel there in nearly 90 years… ‘These steps not only expand… Read more.
