Dutch Minister of Asylum and Migration Marjolein Faber and Deputy Prime Minister Fleur Agema are great examples of Pantsuit Deportation Politics, very un-intimidating cuddly and not weird EU Social Democracy HR ladies sensibly and sophisticatedly opting out of EU Migration Policy
POV: Your asylum application has been rejected and you are being deported back to Bomalia but in a progressive, sophisticated and not weird incel-like way
Deputy Prime Minister of The Netherlands and ‘Far Right’ PVV (Party for Freedom) Member Fleur Agema
Your School Crush and First Love that you are ‘meeting in a bar for drinks’ 15 years after you last saw her because your first marriage to another woman fell through and you ran into her again in a store while you were visiting your hometown and you thought why not give it a go?
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
WHAT CUBA IS LIKE AT THE MOMENT AND HOW LIKELY IT IS TO COLLAPSE 🇨🇺
With rolling blackouts in Cuba and Communist concessions towards opening up the country’s economy you could credibly think the Havana government is on the verge of finally collapsing. In retrospect, based on my time there last year, there was a read of the situation where there was always an inevitability that things were eventually going to come to a head, since the situation was so bad already
Let me just describe the conditions in 2025. Havana itself, in the downtown and especially near the tourist area yes it is quite dilapidated, litter strewn everywhere etc - but also it was basically fine in the sense you can get everything you need as a tourist; a nice AirBnb, a nice meal, internet and even money despite the island nominally being disconnected from the international banking system. Watch out for scams but you won’t really be in any physical harm, it isn’t unsafe - it just smells and none of the women look anything like Ana de Armas except maybe if you go in two or three very specific highend bars and restaurants
Thereafter though Cuba excepting tourist areas like Varadero (which were basically fine) was a mess. For example, many cities you visited outside of Havana the lights would almost always be out at night. You walk around and there are a few houses with electricity but they’re running their lights on a generator. So you have a majority of the population sitting around in darkness every day after the sun sets at about 6:30pm. Then of course nobody has any money because of communism. A large but necessary black market for everyday goods. You get really rural (difficult because of the fuel shortages) and there were even apparently problems with diseases like cholera and typhoid because of sanitation and infrastructure problems. This is on top of the epidemics of tropical diseases that exist in Cuba. Some 10-15% of Cuba’s entire population left since 2020 alone
Thought at the time firstly what a shitshow and then secondly how impressive in a roundabout way it was the state hadn’t imploded yet. But you know that’s to the point - you can have blackouts for weeks on end, the return of pre-modern diseases in the countryside or whatever but the whole thing can still just limp on. Indefinite ‘Enshittification’ so-called
On top of this the Trump admin’s recent Venezuela intervention cut the limited oil supply Cuba already had and the Iran strikes signalled they may possibly be prepared to remove Cuba’s leaders. Does this mean the regime is going to come to an end soon? As far as I am concerned the state Cuba is in presently is indefensible but of course now it seems like they might get oil supplies from two major latino socialista countries - Sheinbaum’s Mexico and Sanchez’s Spain. Which is a revealed preference obvious ideological commitment from those countries given just how materially irredeemable actually existing Cuban communism is (which we knew they had anyway but still)
Don’t want to predict whether communism in Cuba definitely will or won’t fall but will say it is not impossible that it doesn’t fall yet as dire as the situation is simply because ‘these things’ can unfortunately just go on indefinitely. You have some Mexican or Spanish oil, you open the market up to some modest reforms and suspicion is despite everything you can last a while longer yet
At the same time, I visited Assad’s Syria at the end of the Civil War, before the surprise Al-Jolani blitzkrieg - and while the country seemed totally exhausted it did also seem possible at the time Assad had ‘won out’. Turns out though all it needed for ‘regime change’ was a little push. Nobody had any energy for a fight anymore so they just gave up and rolled over. I say little push, in the Syria case more like a heavily armed and highly motivated militia. Maybe in the Cuba case too, who knows. Point being despite the conditions it is unlikely to collapse of its own accord internally
There was woman in this city below - which had gone for weeks without electricity - who when I told her Havana and Varadero were functional got upset and said those places “weren’t real Cuba” and that they “kept the lights on there just for tourists because they need their money”
Enjoyable thing about places like Iran or Russia is they are only countries who will create longwinded intellectual and cultural genealogies for enemies out of reverse orientalism, or occidentalism. Discussions in civilisational terms you won’t see anywhere else outside the right
Famous example of this occidentalism was the former Iran President assuming Americans read Tocqueville because Tocqueville was the lens his own conception of America was filtered through from a distance
Same kind of endearing effect as ‘The Japanese Version of Europe’
China announces new law to formalise further the project of ‘Sinicization’ to ‘promote national unity’. Few countries prepared to top-down systematically integrate their minorities with their majorities like this. Which model of integration is most likely to work?
‘THE ART OF THE DEAL’ has a major flaw in that it doesn’t include a chapter on securing deals by threatening to drop missiles on people if they don’t accept your deals. Hopefully new editions of the book will fix this - it’s a very powerful and underused negotiating technique
Sense of it being done out of ‘completionism’ rather than any particular ideological commitment. You know like when you want to 100% a video game, collect all the collectibles and unlock all the achievements... In many ways a more noble sentiment than ‘ideology’ in-and-of-itself
Cuba in a very very enshittified state and ripe for upheaval as below but I don’t think ‘regime change’ will come internally, whole place is too lethargic - needs a big push from outside in order to topple. Cometh the hour cometh the man…
Lights are from the infamous ‘Rocinha’ favela. You might think they spoil the view of Ipanema beach but actually in a way they contribute to it; you look out and you really get full-on Brazil, full-on Lusotropicalism all included in just the one vista