Convenience Big Store: On the road to ruin 🇨🇺

23 July, 2021

Hello,

Twenty years ago I attended a small dinner for Nelson Mandela just outside Oxford. I was lucky enough to sit near him and found him immensely charismatic and impressive; he talked about his hopes for South Africa and the friendship that had grown up between him and the country's last white president, FW de Klerk. Promptly at 10pm he stood up and made a typically gracious and charming little speech before heading for bed.

Mandela would be appalled, had he lived, by his successors, who have managed, in less than two decades, to turn the country he loved, and did so much for, into the most unequal society on earth. We look at how this has happened in our issue this week, available now on the app and on the website, for which you'll need to register. In our newsletter today, meanwhile, we look at another country that has been brought to its knees by its ruling elite: Cuba.

All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Cuba

On the road to ruin

Cuba's communist dictatorship has "outlasted more than 10 American presidents", says Jason Johnson in Slate, but now it faces a tougher test: its own people. Earlier this month Havana's sunny streets thronged with thousands of protestors yelling "Libertad" – "Freedom" – and hurling stones at police. The Delta variant has ripped through the island, infuriating Cubans. The largest anti-government protest since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution spread from a small town outside Havana to cities across. Young, mainly black Afro-Cubans dismiss the Castros' revolution against a US-backed tyrant as ancient history. A regime that has time and again bested the mightiest nation on the planet is now facing a fight from within.

Cuba hasn't faced down a popular protest since 1994, says Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker. That was "a pre-internet and pre-smartphone age", when Fidel Castro was alive and "in command". This feels very different. The usual black-uniformed special forces, police and stick-wielding plainclothes agents were deployed; hundreds of protestors are in dank jail cells. President Miguel Díaz-Canel – who succeeded Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, in 2019 – briefly restricted access to the internet, but the horse had bolted. News and images of what was happening shot across Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. A reformer at heart, the new president is "boxed in by circumstances". He rolled back internet repression when he took power.

Yet Díaz-Canel's "dull bureaucrats" have set Cuba on a path to ruin, says The Economist. Months of power cuts, crippling shortages and queues for barely affordable food and basic medicine have left Cubans at breaking point. The Castros, for all their atrocities, commanded respect "even among the many Cubans who abhorred them". Díaz-Canel, a man "without a shred of charisma", does not. The protestors' anthem, Patria y Vida, has rung across Cuba despite being outlawed by the party: "Your time's up, the silence is broken... we're not scared, the deception is over." The world is now watching President Biden, who has expressed solidarity with protestors and called Cuba a "failed state", but hasn't fulfilled his promise to roll back the Trump-era sanctions that left the country bankrupt. This week he slapped more sanctions on Cuba.

Biden is in a bind, says Ernesto Londoño in The New York Times. His old boss, Barack Obama, normalised relations with Cuba in 2014. American cruise ships and capital rolled in. Rihanna, the Kardashians and the Rolling Stones made their way to its sunny shores. That was nice. But in a way Trump's sanctions – a throwaway campaign promise aimed at hawkish American-Cubans who fled to Miami to escape Castro's regime – are getting results. Communism is crumbling. Biden may be Obama's former Veep, but he seems happier with the "older playbook of confrontation". And why not, says Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph: "Covid could topple the world's worst regimes." Look at virus-ravaged North Korea, Iran and now Cuba, where full-strength governments would usually snuff out protest. The clumsy responses of these failing regimes to the pandemic have only served "to expose the rot". All they need is a nudge.

Long read shortened

The land the pandemic forgot

The Covid ward in Niamey, Niger's desert capital, has been empty for months, says Benoit Faucon in The Wall Street Journal. Hastily erected isolation facilities are "gathering dust" and masks are "almost unheard of". Days go by without a single person testing positive, and demand for vaccines is so low that the government has sent thousands of doses abroad. At Le Pilier, a restaurant popular with rich locals and expats, Italian owner Vittorio Gioni says business dived in the spring of 2020, but quickly recovered. One of his regulars is the oil minister, Sani Issoufou. "Here, we still live like it's 2019," he says with a smile.

This vast west African nation was once identified by the WHO as one of the most vulnerable to the coronavirus on a continent where the UN predicted millions of deaths. Instead, Niger is "the land that Covid somehow forgot", thanks to a hot, dry climate and the world's youngest population – half of its citizens are under 15. Policy has also played its part: the authorities locked down, banned communal prayer in mosques and closed borders months before nations like the UK started to restrict international travel. "The coronavirus arrived, but it never prospered," says President Mohamed Bazoum. "We killed a fly with a hammer."

Read the full article here (paywall).

Life

The pool at the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, on the Côte d'Azur

Swimming teacher to the stars

I can get anyone in the water, says German swimming instructor Pierre Gruneberg, whose clients have included Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Paul McCartney and Tina Turner. McCartney was terrified of jellyfish, but Gruneberg coaxed him into the ocean; Picasso was so grateful for the lessons that he gave him a drawing of a dove. But Gruneberg isn't fussed by celebrities, he tells High Life magazine: "Every man is created equal when he's wearing nothing but his swimming trunks."

He worked at the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, on the Côte d'Azur, for 70 years after stumbling across it in 1949, while he was hitchhiking through France. He was 18 and charming – he wangled a job as a swimming instructor on the condition that he wouldn't flirt with any customers. Several years later he married one of his students. .

Gruneberg's teaching methods are unconventional. Before getting to the pool, he fills a salad bowl with water and dunks his student's head in it. "My greatest pleasure is to undo the fear in people." He is used to fear himself. While he was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish Grunebergs fled Germany for Paris, taking a "little suitcase and some gold coins". When the Nazis occupied the French capital, they buried the coins under a cherry tree, forged identity papers and headed south. They all survived and, when they returned to Paris, the coins were still there.

Gruneberg is now 90, but he has only just started winding down. He retired last year, but still swims in the sea every day – "in the winter, even when it's raining, and I never wear a wetsuit". Swimming at the hotel was his dream job. "I sat on a little green chair, I didn't move, and all the personalities of the world passed by."

Property

THE COUNTRY HOUSE The Cliff House is on the edge of the white cliffs of Dover, with Channel views from almost every room. It has five bedrooms, a beamed sitting room, a snug and a balcony. There's a pool and a Grade II listed lighthouse in its 11.5 acres, as well as an annexe and two smaller properties. £4.25m.

Staying young

Micro chips: the six fries rule

The "six french fries" rule is infamous, says Mirel Zaman in Refinery29. Eric Rimm, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard, once told The New York Times that Americans are addicted to "starch bombs" (fries, wedges or chips), and should limit themselves to the tastiest-looking six from any side order. When I ask him about it today, he stands by it – salty chips are terrible for you and plates should be smaller. "I think restaurants could probably make more money on a per-fry basis."

Quite right, says Christopher Mele in The New York Times. Potatoes lack the compounds and nutrients found in green leafy vegetables. Americans typically eat about 115lb of white potatoes a year, of which two-thirds are french fries. And if you take a potato, remove its skin (where at least some nutrients are found), cut it, deep-fry the pieces in oil and top it all off with salt, cheese, chilli or gravy, that starch bomb can be turned into "a weapon of dietary destruction".

Heroes and villains

Hero

Elon Musk, who has admitted he rather hates running Tesla. How reassuring, says Giles Coren. I "bloody" hate my job too. "I hate banging out column after column, whanging on about nothing on the radio for hours and talking codswallop [on TV]." Musk's outburst is a reminder that "we ALL hate our jobs… and there is simply no privilege bar".

Villain

The gypsy moth, which has been cancelled. The Entomological Society of America, after taking advice from a "Romany activist", says it will henceforth be known as the LDD moth. Perhaps, says Rod Liddle, it's because "the gypsy moth is reportedly a highly invasive creature that descends, en masse, upon chosen rural areas and wreaks havoc".

Hero

Lithuania, the only country in Europe with a serious foreign policy, says Edward Lucas in The Times. The tiny Baltic state stands four-square against China and won't be bullied into attending Beijing's summits for former communist nations; it has held hearings on Uighur genocide; and it is offering humanitarian visas to Hong Kong refugees in a way that makes Britain look "stingy in comparison".