On June 18 the National Assembly approved 176 economic measures that, taken together, amount to the most far-reaching market opening Cuba has attempted since 1959. This is a dissection of their scope, the admissions that accompanied them, their immediate consequences, and a conjecture about how Washington is likely to respond to a marketization its own sanctions are positioned to strangle.
World leaders gathered in Évian-les-Bains on Monday for the 52nd G7 summit, where France’s carefully built agenda on macroeconomic imbalances, critical minerals and artificial intelligence was overtaken by the preliminary U.S.–Iran agreement President Trump announced on the eve of the meeting. A news report on what is on the table at Évian, topic by topic — and on the deal that drew a defiant response from Prime Minister Netanyahu and cautious, undisclosed-terms skepticism on Capitol Hill.
On the strategic ledger, the United States fought a four-month war and bought itself a return to where it started — minus the blood, plus a strengthened adversary. Measured against its own declared aims, the celebration is domestic and political, not strategic.
With the Iran war settled, the deferred question returns on schedule. Taking the threat against Havana at face value, this is an attempt to count what a war with Cuba would actually produce — not in the triumphal grammar of Washington nor the martyrological grammar of Havana, but on the ledger where consequences are tallied after the cameras leave. The gravest danger may not be the war the planners fear but the aftermath none of them have planned for.
The United States possesses a legitimate, though methodologically inflated, claim arising from the 1959-1960 Cuban nationalizations. Cuba possesses a substantially larger, legally cognizable counter-claim arising from sixty-five years of comprehensive economic coercion. On a net basis, the equitable balance tilts substantially in Cuba’s favor. The 2026 oil blockade crosses the threshold of collective punishment and eliminates any remaining proportionality defense that Washington could invoke.
A new study confirms that Stonehenge’s six-tonne Altar Stone most likely originated in Caithness, northeast Scotland — and explores whether the last ice age could have helped carry it south. The answer is partial, complicated, and deeply suggestive of a prehistoric Britain more connected than we imagined.
An account of Artemisia II of Caria, the architectural genius of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and how Charles Thomas Newton’s 1856–1857 excavation transported its surviving sculptures to the British Museum.
A documented analysis of Cuba’s military conglomerate GAESA — separating corroborated evidence from disputed claims, and tracing the connections between leaked financial records, U.S. sanctions strategy, and the life imprisonment of a former economy minister.
The oldest undisputed figurative depiction of a human being — carved from woolly mammoth ivory some 40,000 years ago — the Venus of Hohle Fels opens a window onto the symbolic and cognitive world of early Homo sapiens.
A haunting, deeply affecting, and politically urgent masterpiece. Director Adriana Bosch brilliantly weaves the intimate, heartbreaking correspondence of family separation with the chilling macro-tragedy of totalitarian censorship. Supported by Alfred Molina’s profoundly nuanced narration and Arturo Sandoval’s melancholic, evocative score, Letters to Eloisa is not just a historical profile of a silenced literary genius — it is a lyrical and vital manifesto on the necessity of creative freedom.
Written in Greek as a private act of self-examination — never intended for publication — the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius remain, nearly two millennia after their composition, one of the most lucid and consoling philosophical documents ever written. A Roman emperor meditating alone on duty, impermanence, and the conduct of a good life: there is nothing quite like it in all of world literature.
America’s maximum pressure campaign against Cuba has achieved something remarkable: it has made the island’s misery someone else’s problem.