Venezuelan opposition politicians and their allies in the U.S. frequently decry Cuba’s alleged influence on the Venezuelan government. Ironically however, there seems to be an important and growing nexus between the Venezuelan opposition and the anti-Cuba lobby in the U.S. Cuban-American lawmakers recently introduced sanctions legislation targeting Venezuelan officials that appears to be designed to push U.S. policy toward Venezuela in the same direction as policy toward Cuba.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on the Venezuelan opposition’s ire for Cuba and the role it has played in the ongoing protests in Venezuela:

Enraged as they are by their nation’s leaders, many of the protesters who have spilled onto Venezuela’s streets have their eyes fixed on another government altogether, one they resent perhaps just as bitterly as their own: Cuba’s.

…

Their rancor is echoed by the Cuban opposition, which has thrown itself behind the Venezuelan protesters’ cause with gusto, sharing photos and videos of protests and police abuse on Twitter, urging Venezuelans to resist and even rapping an apology for what they call Cuba’s meddling.

The Venezuela protests have “energized” members of Cuba’s opposition, reports the Times. Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, an anti-Castro blogger in the U.S., told the Times, “The fate of Castro-ism may be at play in Venezuela…What we were not able to topple in Cuba, we may be able to topple there.”

Yet despite near constant claims from the Venezuelan opposition that Cuba is in control of their country (for instance, when it was announced that Venezuelan congresswoman Maria Corina Machado would be investigated and possibly stripped of her position, she responded that “It’s clear to me that it was the Castro brothers who gave the order”), the Times notes that:

Such convictions are held by critics in both countries, although they offer little hard evidence to back their suspicions. And while some former Venezuelan military officers say that Cubans are involved in decision-making in the armed forces, some protesters go further, professing to see what they call “the hairy hand” of Cuba everywhere: saying they have detected Cuban “infiltrators” at street protests; seeing a Cuban hallmark in the tactics of Venezuela’s armed forces; and circulating unsubstantiated Internet reports that Cuban special forces, or Black Wasps, are operating in Venezuela.

The Times report follows a number of pieces from the Tampa Bay Tribune, which discuss the relations between anti-Castro exiles, specifically in South Florida, and the opposition in Venezuela. In early March, Paul Guzzo wrote:

From Tampa to the Senate floor in Washington, and throughout the United States, Cuban Americans who defend continued isolation of the Communist island nation are throwing their support behind Venezuelan Americans in their efforts to bring order to the South American country.

It says something about overall media coverage of a subject when some of the most important news appears in the form of corrections.  On February 26, the New York Times corrected a false statement in a news report that had incorrectly referred to Globovis

Thomas Piketty’s provocative new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has struck a chord among prominent economists and political scientists in these trying times. Piketty’s sweeping account of economic theory and history highlights the special character of capital accumulation as the driver of economic inequality, and he challenges us to place distributional questions at the center of the economic debate. Positing that broad-based economic growth is largely a relic of the short 20^th century, he contends that the returns on capital will continue to outpace the economic gains accessible to the majority of society, ultimately threatening the foundation of our liberal-democratic states.

Piketty will be visiting Washington DC this April to discuss Capital, with stops in New York in Boston to follow. Be sure to attend one of the discussions of what is already shaping up to be a seminal work of political economy. You can find a list of these speaking events at the bottom of this post.

In case you have not gotten your hands on a copy of the book, or are as of yet unconvinced that you should read it, I have included below a sampling of reviews of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Oliver Stone y Mark WeisbrotThe Boston Globe, 22 de marzo 2014La Jornada, 28 de marzo 2014 En inglés

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian, 20 de marzo 2014La Jornada, 30 de marzo 2014 En inglés | En italiano