Earlier this year a bunch of foreign companies had their bank accounts frozen indefinitely; they cannot take their money out of Cuba. This measure has now been extended not only to foreign companies generally but even embassy bank accounts. Unclear when/if money will be back t.co/RU4xqvdYji

Today is the anniversary of Franco's death, which feels like a good excuse to share the story of when Communist Cuba decreed 3 days of official mourning for Spain's anti-Communist caudillo 🧵

I've never felt more 'Latin' culturally than being in Germany where I have to constantly explain to people that joking around and being absurdist or exaggerated is just a sign of affection and intimacy and not a dig at them or whatever

Cuba made headlines for 1/10 (10%) leaving the island, then again for 1/5 (20%), but now as many as 1/4 (25%) have left and many who remain are just trying to figure out how to get out. Insane. Unprecedented. Depressing as hell. www.economist.com/the-americas...

Nobody is beyond redemption but I genuinely do not understand how you can carry on an affair with someone you are covering as a journalist, fail to disclose it, get exposed, and then get another job.

The more I learn about Cuba holding the Panamerican games in 1991 the more surreal it is. The country is going bankrupt and preparing for total economic collapse, but spend a ton of hard currency and invaluable construction materials that they have to import on a one off stadium

Even if Trump left office tomorrow and someone who was actually capable and interested in bringing back students replaced him, imho a lot of the damage is done. It's reputational. It's about stability and can't be easily fixed. And Americans who were getting subsidized by foreigners will suffer

The latest episode of my podcast on the history of Cuba is now live. This one focuses on the way that our sources and scholarly debates change from the pre-colonial to the early colonial periods, in an attempt to make it accessible. And look! It's short! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

I'm most of the way through this book on the parallels between cult strategies, political extremism, and 'totalitarian systems'. I think parts of it are helpful but also kind of wary of a lot of the key args

The Soviet fleet was only 12th biggest in the world by 1961 per Oscar Sanchez-Sibony's Red Globalization This recontextualizes, for me, how much of the fleet would be tied up in shipments to Cuba for sugar that the USSR and its allies didn't even need in the 60s

Wrote a short post on the alleged spy scandal in Cuba involving the former Minister of the Economy; probably the highest ranking spy scandal since 1959, *if true* pertierra.substack.com/p/spy-story-...

"It is estimated that from the end of [WWII] until its fall, the Soviet Union offered a total of $68 billion in economic aid, of which about $41 billion had been delivered before the fall; this is about the same as the United States provided Israel alone during the same period."

I knew the economic situation in Bolivia was getting dire, but I didn't realize that despite being an important gas exporter in the 00s and 2010s (the fossil fuel underwriting expanded gov social spending), at present Bolivia is *importing* gas t.co/ueAfEiZxL8

Finally got around to reading this and am about halfway through. Honestly, pretty important book imho. Certainly important for moving past the false idea of capitalist vs socialist world economies in the Cold War and super helpful for understanding how Soviet trade strategy worked

Wrote a short post on the Venezuela-Libya analogies that are going around. pertierra.substack.com/p/the-proble...

NEW EPISODE - The German Democratic Republic The Rise and Fall of a #ColdWar State with @historyned.bsky.social & @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social Listen here 🎧🎧 coldwarconversations.com/episode428/ #eastgermany #GDR #DDR #berlinwall

Finally getting around to reading something more in-depth about Libya. About a quarter of the way through and, honestly, it is making me more skeptical of Libya comparisons for Venezuela rather than more. There's some points of similarity but feels apples to oranges

The former Cuban Minister of the Economy, who was unceremoniously removed from his post without explanation in early 2024, has been accused of corruption and (even bigger news) espionage www.dw.com/es/cuba-acus...

Kind of insane story I came across while reading for the dissertation: Apparently one of the main players of a major Cuban exile terror org defected in the early 1990s, revealing himself to be a double agent for Cuban intelligence, saying they gave him supplies www.nytimes.com/1992/11/11/u...

A rare case of a journalist actually documenting how congresses/parliamentary meetings in Cuba are choreographed theater. This from Oppenheimer's "Castro's Final Hour", on the 1991 Cuban Communist Party Congress, that was set to debate reforms to economy and political system

So excited for this! 4pm today—Hope to see you there!!

"It doesn't make sense to create islands of efficiency such as tourism or biotechnology in an economy that is globally inefficient. We have to be able to invest the proceeds of our showcase industries [...]. Otherwise, we're throwing money into a bottomless barrel." - Cuban official circa 1991

🇨🇺NEW EP🇨🇺 We take on both parts of Steven Soderbergh's epic of revolutions triumphant and disastrous, CHE, with historian of Cuba @andrespertierra.bsky.social! You have no idea how much reading we did for this. Really special episode, check it out! podcastyforme.com

Honestly, even if the Sandinistas had won the 1990 elections, it sounds like they were looking down the barrel of economic collapse anyway bc of hyperinflation combined with the imminent loss of most of its supply of oil from the USSR and Cuba

Reading something else entirely I tripped across Gabriel García Márquez saying, on the record, back in in the early 1990s that he had personally been behind the freeing of over 2k "political prisoners". Gabo isn't exactly a CIA agent or enemy of the Left, so maybe hearing it from him helps ppl

Some quick thoughts on NYT piece that Trump authorized the CIA to act inside Venezuela 1) seems insane he's announcing this before results rather than after 2) unclear what operations will look like, but seems likely to help solidify gov coalition vs foreign attack www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/u...

I made my way through all of War and Peace but halfway through the epilogue I felt so sad at what Tolstoy considered happy endings for characters that I never finished it

For years Cuba's peso was equivalent to 25:1 dollar at official rates and around 30-40 on the black market exchange. Recent inflation shot official exchange to 125:1 dollar and unofficial rates to 300-400. Then it stabilized just short of 400 for a while. It's now up to an eye watering 460:1 USD

Tomorrow is my book's official pub date! I'm celebrating by tackling a whole new social media platform and hosting an #AskMeAnything on Reddit! Join me and ask me anything about my book, the Cuban Missile Crisis, my hobbies, publishing...whatever! @uncpress.bsky.social @sonyabonczek.bsky.social

German when I arrived: zero German by end of month 1: a handful of words German by end of month 2: very basic phrases, can buy at stores in very simple language Hopefully by end of month 3 I’ll be able to actually communicate outside of very scripted conversations

Trump admin is basically doing the meme meant to show that correlation is not causation but totally unironically

Downside of a solo trip to Worms is that I can’t make dad jokes like “wow! This ‘Kein Trinkwasser’ guy is commemorated everywhere, weird I haven’t heard of him”

Turning up the dial labeled “tarrifs” and looking at the audience like The Price is Right

I hope that the luxurious feeling of getting to drink an espresso at heart of the historic platz/square of a centuries if not millennia old European city doesn’t just fade and become normal. At the very least not anytime soon

It was two OUP books.

Was told that northern Germans were called “fish heads” and that this term was not a pejorative but have to say that after using it in conversation half a dozen times and seeing the reactions I’m not sure “it’s not offensive at all” is how most “fish heads” see it

Climbed a small mountain and took photos of a small Rhine spa town from the ruins of a medieval castle owned by some robber baron who lived off extracting tolls from river traffic

Speaking to European academics who have to submit academic applications, articles, books, etc, in English even when English has nothing to do with their actual topic of expertise beyond how central it is to research worldwide really makes me feel lucky to be a native speaker

It pisses people off but I don’t think it an especially high bar for entry re: Cuba for people to adhere to basic, patently obvious, facts rather than being able to perform a Cuba that is rhetorically useful to whatever point they want to make

crazy that one of the most storied institutions in american journalism is going to be run by two people with basically no experience to do it

A little over halfway through the recent insider history of Israel-Palestine negotiations, Tomorrow is Yesterday I don’t know if the book will provide actual solutions in the latter half, but it’s been really helpful so far in understanding both perspectives & why previous negotiations failed

Wrote a short post over on my substack on Mehdi’s recent interview of the Cuban deputy foreign minister Interview was great but I wanted to add context which further solidifies Mehdi’s claims open.substack.com/pub/pertierr...

Not the central point of this Reuter's piece, but it seems significant to me that the Cuban mercenary presence in Russia's invasion of Ukraine is currently being pitched by the US gov as 'up to 5,000', a fourth of the original 'up to 20,000' figure in Ukraine's estimate t.co/nC88z11q5d

Jesus Christ. DHS has held this guy in the hospital handcuffed to a bed and under constant guard for over a MONTH without ANY warrant or even ANY steps taken towards putting him into the removal system!

35 years ago today, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist and its territory was absorbed into the Federal Republic. If you want to learn more about the rise and fall of the GDR on this auspicious #TagderEinheit, you can check out my new book: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/german-de...

One of the things that I keep coming back to as I make my way through this excellent oral history of everyday life the USSR is not just how Cuba may produce a similar one but how some of the very arguments are already present in Cuba They even had their own ‘éramos ricos y no lo sabíamos’ myth

Cuba got almost half of all Spanish aid anywhere between 1980-1992, even as the total amount of aid Spain donated abroad multiplied geometrically From Joaquin Roy’s book La Siempre Fiel (history of Cuba-spain relations)

Worth watching this interview for Mehdi’s pushback re: criticisms of Amnesty International’s reports on Cuba t.co/0WKDtDb07T

While Franco's continued diplomatic relations with Cuba are still the exception, it seems that from 1969 there was a sort of thaw re: Eastern Bloc Orella, José Luis. "The Ostpolitik of Francoist Spain". Przegląd europejski 2017 (46), 4 (2017): 98-117. doi.org/https://doi.or….

Now that a more mainstream pub has published a story on this, I think I can start discussing it with more confidence: The Russian recruitment drive of Cuban mercenaries appears to have continued despite the alleged busting of a recruitment ring back in 2023 on the island 🧵 t.co/MykQ7icylL