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/ 25 October 2008
Many have called Cuba many things — a progressive beacon, a quixotic underdog, an oppressive tyranny — but no one has called it lucky, until now.
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/ 12 October 2008
Record numbers of tourist developments have threatened the Galapagos Islands’ endangered plant and animal species.
French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt freed from Farc rebels after six years
Rory Carroll and Sibylla Brodzinksy report on <i>Nothing But the Truth</i>, a Colombian gameshow that takes reality television to an excruciating new level.
Johan Vega knows the Havana Golf Club well. Too well. He has played every bunker, green and fairway thousands of times and the course has become monotonous. Golfers like to tackle different courses but the club is Havana’s sole golf course and Vega (37) is Havana’s only golf instructor.
Cuba is changing. In the past few weeks the government has announced and enacted a series of reforms unimaginable under Castro. It is now legal to buy cellphones, computers and DVD players. Cubans may now rent cars and stay at hotels previously reserved for foreigners. More significantly, farmers can cultivate idle state land and buy equipment without special permission.
At first they are just a blur, tiny figures by a river in Peru’s Amazon jungle. Then the plane descends, the camera focuses, and you see them: 21 people outside palm huts, the apparent remnants of an uncontacted tribe. They gaze up at the intruder, itself a blur of noise and metal, and a woman carrying arrows gestures aggressively.
The plane door opened and the elderly visitors, all visually impaired and in some cases blind, shuffled out slowly and carefully into Venezuela. Disease, age and poverty had stolen their eyesight, but now they were in the land of Hugo Chávez and that was about to change.
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/ 18 February 2008
It was the 1980s and Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution was captivating hearts and minds around the world. The olive-uniformed guerrillas had overthrown the hated Somoza dictatorship and were trying to build a more equal society by empowering women, giving peasants land and teaching the illiterate to read.
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/ 5 February 2008
What Natasha does on the bed in the dingy room with flaking orange paint so shames her she cannot bring herself to use the word. She calls it "so and so" and sells it here from midday to midnight, six days a week. On a very good day she makes £45. With each 30-minute session earning £2,50 that works out at 18 different men, many drunk, some violent. She tries to forget the very good days.