Havana to Beirut: Architectures of nostalgia, aesthetics of ruin

 Al Jazeera English

I spent the month of February in Havana, Cuba, where – before a bloody run-in with a hole in the pavement put a temporary halt to the arrangement – I went for daily jogs on the Malecón, the city’s iconic seaside promenade. Each morning, I passed an elegantly crumbling building that, without fail, threw me through a psycho-geographical loop as I became momentarily convinced that I was in fact in Beirut – one of my regular pre-pandemic stomping grounds and a metropolis that boasted its own iconic seaside promenade and fair share of holes in the pavement.

This particular building evoked the Lebanese capital for various reasons, not only its colonial-style architecture and Ottoman-esque windows but also the fact that one of its sections was fully collapsed – a common architectural repercussion in the formerly relentlessly celebrated “Paris of the Middle East”. Following its so-called “golden age” in the mid-20th century, Beirut had gone on to host, inter alia, a 15-year civil war (1975-90), brutal Israeli military assaults backed by the United States, vast post-war demolitions in the interest of historical amnesia and ever-savage elite enrichment, and the Beirut port explosion of August 2020. In that final landmark event, a significant portion of the city and numerous inhabitants were blown up thanks to wilful state negligence – a form of war in its own right.

In Havana, itself incidentally once dubbed the “Paris of the Caribbean”, contemporary warfare has primarily consisted of the longstanding de facto US war on Cuba. This began in the wake of the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution, which spelled the tragic end to imperial plunder of the island under the charitable supervision of US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista – who, as US author TJ English puts it in Havana Nocturne – relied on “torture squads” as well as “government-sanctioned terrorism”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

How to get a Cuban COVID jab in 1,000 easy steps

 Al Jazeera English

On Valentine’s Day 2022 in Havana, Cuba, I received the Soberana Plus booster shot, one of the island nation’s five homegrown COVID-19 vaccines. The jab had been a long time coming.

For the past year, I had been fixated on the idea of being injected with a made-in-Cuba coronavirus vaccine. While obviously not offering protection against the imperial machinations of my homeland and Cuba’s chief antagonist, the United States, the Cuban serums were at least being developed in the interest of global public health rather than pharmaceutical profit or “vaccine apartheid”, as World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has described it.

Having inadvertently taken up residence in Mexico at the start of the pandemic in 2020, I had initially determined to fly to Havana in April 2021 to await vaccine availability. This plan underwent seemingly infinite adjustments, as the pandemic-induced suspension of straightforward air trajectories between Mexico and Cuba – normally a two-hour trip – left me with flight options like Mexico City-Cancun-Vancouver-Heathrow-Frankfurt-Havana and Mexico City-Cancun-Panama City-Bogota-Madrid-Havana.

The search for flights was rendered all the more enjoyable thanks to interference by the US – which, in addition to subjecting Cuba to a debilitating 60-year-long embargo for the crime of refusing to submit to capitalist tyranny, has also ensured that travellers wishing to peruse flights to Cuba on the website of the Mexican airline Aeroméxico cannot do so without being bombarded with warnings about US restrictions on travel to the country. Required to certify that I qualified for one of the permissible motives for visiting Cuba as a US citizen, I selected “support for the Cuban people” – as if this has ever been a real concern for the global superpower that has since the 1960s literally schemed to starve the nation into submission. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

A hitchhiker’s guide to humanity

Al Jazeera English

One sunny afternoon in September 2006, my friend Amelia and I hitchhiked from the Lebanese capital of Beirut to the south Lebanese city of Tyre. It was a month after the end of the July War – the 34-day Israeli assault that killed some 1,200 people in Lebanon, the vast majority of them civilians – and swaths of the country had been converted into rubble.

We had thumbed our way to Beirut from Turkey via Syria – the latest in a series of international hitchhiking expeditions that had commenced one evening in 2003 in Greece, when the bus was taking too long and we wanted to get to the bar....

After Lebanon, Amelia and I would continue intermittent hitchhiking excursions for another four years. And while the simple humanity that was extended to us time and again was not always as mind-blowingly ironic as when a Lebanese teenager whose house has just been cluster-bombed invites you to move in with her and her family, one thing was consistently clear: there were a lot of good people in a world that was terribly unjust....READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Business as usual in Munich: White men rule the world

 Al Jazeera English

In February 2020, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace produced a report on “Who and What Was and Wasn’t at the Munich Security Conference” – an annual event attended by political, military, and business leaders and marketed on Twitter as “the world’s leading forum for debate on international security”.

According to the Carnegie dispatch, the “Who” at the 2020 conference included “a lot of old white men among the hundreds of invited attendees, but a lot of other people too”. Among the “What” that allegedly wasn’t there, meanwhile, was the very theme of the conference itself: “Westlessness”, defined on the website of the European Council on Foreign Relations as the “growing uncertainty about the fate of the transatlantic alliance” between Europe and the United States. . . .

Fast forward to the 58th Munich Security Conference this year, held February 18-20 at the city’s Bayerischer Hof hotel, and it seems that there is still a persistently “Westful” community of shared values – at least in terms of commitment to, like, white patriarchy.

Though the event’s organisers took care to stress that 45 percent of the speakers were female, a photograph of a CEO lunch at the conference suggests that “a lot of old white men” are still running the show. The photo features some 30 monochrome males seated around a long white table with bottled water and wine (and no face masks, I might add – so much for “security”). READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.