6 August 2020 — Tricontinental Greta Acosta Reyes (Cuba), Neoliberalism, 2020. Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Beirut, mon amour. Those shattered mirrors once were The smiling eyes of children, Now are star-lit. This city’s nights are bright. and luminous is Lebanon. Beirut, ornament of our world. Faces decorated with… Continue reading

30 July 2020 — Tricontinental Frew Kebede (Ethiopia), Shimutt, 2018. Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. On 23 July, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the world now has 15 million people infected by COVID-19. ‘The pandemic has disrupted the lives of billions of people.… Continue reading

23 July 2020 — Tricontinental Utagawa Kuniyoshi (Japan), Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre, 1849. Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. On 18 July, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres posted the following tweet: ‘COVID-19 has exposed the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all, the fiction… Continue reading

16 July 2020 — Tricontinental Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Too little has been made of the fact that countries like Laos and Vietnam have been able to manage the coronavirus; there are no confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in either country. Both of these Southeast Asian states border… Continue reading

9 July 2020 — Tricontinental Luis Peñalver Collazo (Cuba), America Latina, Unete! 1960. Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has released its June 2020 update. The prognosis is bleak. Global growth for 2020 is projected at -4.9%, 1.9% below the IMF’s forecast from… Continue reading

25 June 2020 — Tricontinental Arpita Singh (India), My Mother, 1993. Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Alarming news about the COVID-19 disease comes from Brazil and India, where the infection numbers are high, and the death count grows steadily. It appears that a million people are now infected in Brazil… Continue reading

18 June 2020 — Tricontinental Jorge González Morales (Mexico), Capitalism, 2020 Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. In 1974, the United Nations General Assembly passed a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which was driven by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The resolution laid out a clear plan for the… Continue reading

11 June 2020 — Tricontinental Deborah Jack (St. Martin), The water between us remembers, so we wear our history on our skin, long for a sea-bath and hope the salt will cure what ails us, 2016.   Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The United States government has… Continue reading

Last year, I walked with Mariela Machado in her housing complex known as Kaikachi in the neighbourhood of La Vega (Caracas, Venezuela). After Hugo Chávez was inaugurated president in 1999, a group of working-class residents of the city saw an empty piece of land and occupied it. Mariela and others went to the government and said, ‘We… Continue reading

28 May 2020 — Tricontinental Antún Kojtom Lam (Mexico), Ch’ulel, 2013. Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The coronavirus continues its contagious march across the planet: almost 350,000 known deaths and over 5.4 million people infected. Meanwhile, in the Bay of Bengal, Cyclone Amphan makes its fierce landing, its immense… Continue reading

21 May 2020 — Tricontinental Chittaprosad (India), Call for Peace, 1952.  Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. On 23 March, the UN Secretary General António Guterres called for a ceasefire. ‘The fury of the virus’, he said, ‘illustrates the folly of war’. In a recent report, the Armed Conflict Location &… Continue reading

14 May 2020 — Tricontinental Kanat Bukezhanov, Coronavirus, 2020 Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. On 21 April, the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) David Beasley said that the world was experiencing a ‘hunger pandemic’. That day, the Global Network Against Food Crises and the… Continue reading

7 May 2020 — Tricontinental Kalia Venereo (Dominio Cuba), Nunca Más, 2020.  Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. I admit upfront that this is a hard newsletter to read. It is about debt. There is a bloodless quality to the way that we talk about the debt of the poorer… Continue reading

30 April 2020 — Tricontinental Li Zhong, Medical workers putting on their gowns to fight the ‘evil’ virus, 2020. Dear Friends, Greetings from the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. On 30 June 1958, Mao Tse-tung read in Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) that schistosomiasis – or bilharzia – had been eradicated in Yukiang (Jiangxi Province). He… Continue reading

23 April 2020 — Tricontinental Ha Manh Thang, Not Memory no. 1, 2009. Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that the Great Lockdown, which has no end date, could very well lead to a loss of $9 trillion to global Gross Domestic Product over the entirety… Continue reading

16 April 2020 — Tricontinental Gontran Guanaes Netto, O povo da terra dos papagaios (The people of the land of the parrots), 1982 Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Burkina Faso, in the Sahel region of the African continent, has been struck hard by the global pandemic; officially reported deaths from… Continue reading

Days, weeks, months, an indeterminate amount of time as the world seems paralysed by the journey of SARS-CoV-2. The lack of certainty increases the anxiety. This virus, as Arundhati Roy writes, ‘seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow [of capital]. It has mocked immigration controls,… Continue reading

26 March 2020 — Tricontinental Li Zhong (China), Paintings for Wuhan, 2020. Dear Friends, Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. It is hard to remember that just a few weeks ago, the planet was in motion. There were protests in Delhi (India) and Quito (Ecuador), eruptions against the old order that ranged… Continue reading