Andrés Pertierra

Exclusive | CBS News taps Adam Rubenstein — once ostracized at NY Times for liking Chick-fil-A — as new deputy editor Sources expect Rubenstein will effectively run the Free Press now that Weiss will be busy steering the editorial direction of shows like “60 Minutes,” “Face The Nation” and …

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

(Also, obviously, explaining perspectives =\= validating them or defending them, they’re just helpful to me in understanding how various factions and parties saw themselves and their opponents)

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

On Cuban Elections and Dissidence On the Mehdi Hasan interview of Cuban Vice Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío

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...

Btw, this isn't me implying that the 1-5k figure is also going to collapse. That figure honestly sounds much more reasonable. It's the eye watering 20k figure that made me skeptical.

If we're talking hundreds or low thousands, it wouldn't surprise me at all

Back when the story first came out a few weeks ago, I urged caution around the 20k figure because it seemed really, really high.

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!

Might be something to pitch to Audible if Bloosmbury lacks interest or infrastructure to do it, since Audible will take a bigger cut if they make the audiobook exclusive version but will also provide another way people can access it.

Either way, looking forward to reading it! I'll bring one to Berl

Super exciting! Will there be an audiobook version?

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...

Like with Cuba, you also have the despair of all the suffering to bring about a revolution being made worthless

One man who worked as a carpenter all his life sets himself on fire in the 90s as his life savings goes from being worth a really nice car to a new pair of boots and a funeral wreath

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

Obviously this doesn’t counteract the magnitude of the losses to Cuba’s economy in the 90s either

Even at the island’s “loneliest” following the loss of billions in annual Soviet subsidies, it was never truly alone in terms of foreign assistance period

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….

I would be surprised if the Cuban government knew and gave explicit blessing to this, rather than a 'don't ask don't tell' sort of policy, but I'd also be surprised if an operation this big was going on and they didn't know about it, regardless of whether they gave blessing

Fourth & finally, none of the players in this are disinterested, so I am not endorsing this uncritically or suggesting anyone else do so.

What makes this newsworthy to me are not just the alleged allowance of recruiters to operate in Cuba but that claims seem specific/verifiable

Third, one of the key allegations is that hacked Russian emails of a recruiter allegedly say he was given go-ahead to recruit, presumably by someone representing Cuban gov

This is a huge claim that changes quite a bit if true, but I'd also need more reporting to confirm this bit

Second, enough specific cases are available that I think the claims in this piece are at least verifiable rather than vague allegations that may or may not be true, which is always a good sign for a blockbuster report.

Lots of specific Cubans identified as joining the Russians

First, the figure of 20k Cubans recruited as mercenaries in Russia is built on an extrapolation of a fragmentary dataset, so I recommend extreme caution about bandying it about uncritically. Maybe it gets confirmed or surpassed later, but we're not there yet

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

Thanks!

"Yet if Weimar needed anything, it needed rational politics. [...] Not all the trouble lay with the unpolitical; many who had been unpolitical adopted politics of a kind that makes one long for a little apathy."

"It was strange: the pundits who proudly proclaimed that they had outgrown or [...] 'overcome' the traditional labels of liberal politics, "left" and "right", generally ended up on the right." - Robert Gay's Weimar culture: the Outsider as Insider (1968)

Arguing with Fringe Ideas The Breakdown of the Boundary between IRL and Very Online Discourse

Wrote some thoughts on the pros and cons of engaging with fringe ideas re: Cuba

I do so less and less, because often it’s not worth it, but I still think it’s valuable given how often crank and campist views worm their way into public discourse

open.substack.com/pub/pertierr...

Fidel even counseled Allende to learn from Cuba’s mistakes and slow his roll on various policies Cuba (that is, he) had been too quick to implement

Apparently there’s even a law laying this out