The increase in prepaid mobile data service rates introduced last Friday by the Cuban Telecommunications Company (ETECSA), along with other restrictions imposed for recharging mobile balances using the national currency, has been a clear own goal for the national authorities. The popular rejection has been humongous, with students leading a movement that is pressing for a return to the previous rates or a significant improvement in the position of all social actors under the new scheme. Executives from ETECSA announced last Monday that they had approved allowing university students to exceed the controversial limit imposed on national recharges once a month, but several student groups from major universities in the Cuban capital, such as the University of Havana and the Technological University of Havana, have demanded that this and other flexibility measures not be reduced for them. The technical and political dissection of the announced measures, which aim to financially rescue an indebted ETECSA and save its ailing infrastructure, has been overwhelmingly negative.

Nicaraguan co-president Daniel Ortega harshly criticized the anti-immigrant raids being carried out by US authorities under Donald Trump's command. “This is like the persecutions conducted by the Nazis as they sought to hunt down Israelis in the various European countries they occupied,” said Ortega, who also pledged to continue receiving Nicaraguan nationals who are deported. The current co-president—the other co-president is his wife, Rosario Murillo—claimed that in the United States there is “brutal, inhumane persecution that is neither democratic nor Christian, but rather fascist behavior.” “It is savage torture against our Latin American, Central American, Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan brothers and sisters,” he added. The four nationalities mentioned benefited for two years from a humanitarian parole program, discontinued by Trump, which allowed the entry of 30,000 individuals every month, as long as they had U.S. sponsors capable of vouching for them.

The first popular election of judges and magistrates in Mexico was marked by a very low turnout, which undoubtedly casts a dense shadow over a process on which the ruling party bet heavily, presenting it as a sort of democratic summum to form the judiciary. Instead of a system based, in principle, on merit and experience, MORENA sold as an unpostponable necessity to move to an alternative that would deny its corruption and other vices, transferring to the people the responsibility of choosing even those who sit in the Aztec Supreme Court. The idea became law thanks to the muscle of the political force led by former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, but with much rejection from popular, business, and political sectors that claim that the independence of the judiciary is being eroded.

In Mexico, even former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador was against the dissemination of so-called (narco)corridos, a musical genre that has exploded onto the global charts embodied in figures such as Peso Pluma and groups such as Fuerza Regida. But, in the end, what these songs do is express a reality. This reality is and will remain alive beyond any potential censorship that may be imposed on their musical contributions, because it is not there where the source of the problem lies. That reality, filled with drug use and trafficking, and deadly clashes between gangs and cartels, each with their codes of honor, symbolism, and slang, is there to stay. I think about this as I listen to Marlboro Rojo, a recent song by Fuerza Regida that captures all the essence of narcocorridos: (deadly) violence, women, and ostentation. And, at the same time, I read about the discovery this week of five members of the group Fugitivo—four musicians and their manager—who disappeared last Sunday after realizing that the place where they had been invited to perform, in the violent city of Reynosa, in the border state of Tamaulipas, was a vacant lot—strange that they hadn't checked this out first. Some speculate that the young musicians upset an organized crime group when they sang a controversial narcocorrido in a bar the night before.

The Cuban state telecommunications monopoly opened Pandora's box on Friday with a controversial reorganization of mobile data service marketing. The narrative is that the company is unable to maintain the current pricing dynamics, largely subsidized, in the face of the decapitalization of its infrastructure. The company's main source of income, and indeed a very important one for the country, is the balance top-ups made by Cubans living abroad for their relatives on the Island, but they say that this has lost momentum. Now, with a considerable increase in the cost of accessing plans and offers in national currency, authorities hope that a large portion of mobile balances will once again be replenished from this external source. The measure has been widely rejected by the population, mainly because there is not much talk about how a potential increase in foreign currency income will have a positive effect on their lives. The purported goal is to improve technological infrastructure that supports the company's services, something that is not at the center of popular priorities right now. The “political” communication performance around the new way of managing mobile data services is certainly the antithesis of what it means to govern and communicate well.

The NED: from (nearly full) transparency to (almost) total opacityWhen the NED was created in 1983, the aim was to position “democratic assistance” as an alternative way of conducting the political subversion activities that US military and intelligence agencies carried out—and continue to carry out—covertly and clandestinely. The CIA was going through a rough patch after a series of leaks and tough congressional investigations, which revealed some of its darkest endeavours, so the idea was to bring out into the open what had been done with extreme secrecy since the beginning of the Cold War. This was under the guise that “non-governmental” assistance could more dynamically penetrate the socio-political core of target nations. In this regard, although it is very likely that the most sensitive projects, or certain NED partners, were censored from the reports that the endowment—which receives its funding through the State Department—regularly published on its activities, it is presumed that most of its activities were made transparent to ensure a narrative and a penetration capacity.