2026-07-31 ATS briefing¶

Can capitalism save Cuba's revolution?¶

The care home in Vedado is a useful place to start, because it condenses the whole predicament. A former paediatrician and an IT specialist open Cuba's first private care home — a business type explicitly prohibited under the revolution — because public facilities have collapsed. The state that once guaranteed care as a right now depends on entrepreneurs to provide it, and the entrepreneurs themselves are products of the revolution's education system. That is not hypocrisy; it is a state surviving by cannibalising its own social base.

The numbers bear this out: private firms employ a quarter of the workforce, and thousands of mipymes have appeared since 2021. But the liberalisation was never a choice — it was a response to the combined weight of the US embargo, Trump's 243 coercive measures, and a currency reform that produced soaring inflation. The timing is the tell: the reforms came as the largest anti-government protests since 1959 were met with harsh crackdowns. Havana is not experimenting with markets out of ideological conversion; it is trying to prevent economic collapse while preserving political control.

The question the article poses — can capitalism save Cuba's revolution — is almost certainly the wrong one. The real dynamic is that Washington's pressure is doing the work of dismantling the revolution's economic model from outside, while the internal reforms do it from within. Trump's second-term threats to "take" the island, the demand that Venezuela cease oil deliveries, the tariff threats against any country supplying hydrocarbons — these are not abstract hostility. They are a deliberate strategy of strangulation, and the market reforms are the Cuban state's improvised response to that strangulation.

What is striking is the absence of any political opening accompanying the economic one. The regime appears to believe it can have a private sector without a private sphere — that entrepreneurs can accumulate wealth without accumulating political demands. History suggests otherwise, but the more immediate pressure is external. The vice is tightening, and the question is not whether capitalism can save the revolution, but whether the revolution can survive the capitalism it is being forced to adopt.

The AI Boom and the Future of Finance¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The $27 trillion question is not whether the AI boom is a bubble, but whether its bursting would interrupt the underlying transformation. The editors at Project Syndicate are right to separate the two, though the distinction is less comforting than they suggest. Circular investment — AI companies buying each other's chips and cloud capacity, financed by debt against speculative future revenues — is precisely how overaccumulation works in the current period. The bubble is not a distortion of the transformation; it is the mechanism by which capital is being concentrated into the infrastructure that transformation requires.

The comparison with dot-com is instructive but incomplete. In 2001, the fibre optic cable laid during the boom became the physical basis for the next two decades of internet capitalism, even as the companies that laid it went bankrupt. The same logic applies to AI data centres: their environmental damage and energy consumption are not externalities of the boom but fixed costs of the transition. The capital that is being destroyed in the bubble is simultaneously being sunk into the productive forces of the next cycle.

What the editors do not address is the political dimension. Mass layoffs and copyright destruction are not incidental casualties but constitutive features of how this transformation is being imposed. The question for the left is not whether the bubble bursts — it will — but whether the infrastructure being built now can be seized and repurposed before the next cycle of accumulation locks in its current ownership and control.

Trump's New Tariffs Are an Opportunity to Fight Back¶

Source: Project Syndicate

Stiglitz frames Trump’s tariff volatility as a legal problem, but the deeper issue is that the US state has abandoned even the pretence of a coherent trade strategy. The forced-labour pretext is telling precisely because it is so transparently instrumental: the justification shifts to fit whatever domestic pressure the White House needs to manage, while the underlying drive remains constant. That drive is not protectionism in any classical sense — it is an attempt to seize a larger share of global value chains through raw state power, without regard for the rules Washington itself helped construct.

The appeal to international law misses the point. Those agreements were always the juridical form of a particular balance of forces, and Trump’s violation of them is not an aberration but the logical expression of US capital’s declining capacity to secure its interests through multilateral institutions. When the hegemon can no longer win by rules, it rewrites them unilaterally. Stiglitz’s warning that businesses and governments must “stand up” to Trump assumes those actors share a common interest in the old order — but the fragmentation of global production has dissolved that unity. European and Asian capitals may resent the tariffs, yet they also see an opening to renegotiate terms in their favour.

The real question is not whether Trump’s tariffs are legal, but whether the working class can convert this disorder into political advance. Tariff wars are a form of inter-imperialist rivalry that redistributes value between capitals while leaving labour’s share untouched. The opportunity Stiglitz gestures toward is real, but it belongs to those who can organise across borders against both the tariffs and the system that produces them — not to those who hope for a return to a rules-based order that never served workers in the first place.

The Limits of Asia's Two Major Growth Models¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The piece rests on a premise worth interrogating: that China and India represent two distinct, exportable "growth models" whose lessons can be catalogued and applied elsewhere. The authors' own data — drawn from a period when both countries pursued deliberate industrial policy — apparently undermines that premise, showing instead that neither route is accessible to other nations. The conclusion is honest but the framing is telling. The question "can other countries emulate them?" treats development as a menu of technical choices, when the actual divergence between China and India is not a matter of policy preference but of historical starting points and geopolitical latitude.

China's trajectory was built on a specific conjunction: a vast, disciplined labour force, a state with the capacity to direct capital at scale, and — crucially — access to Western markets and technology during a window when the US tolerated its rise as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. India's path, by contrast, has been shaped by its democratic federalism, a weaker extractive state, and a services-led growth that bypassed the manufacturing stage that historically absorbed surplus labour. Neither condition set is replicable, because neither was the product of policy alone. The authors gesture at "structural limitations and coordination problems" — code for the fact that the global economy is no longer absorbing new industrialisers the way it absorbed China.

What the piece cannot say, given its institutional frame, is that the fragmentation it cites as context is itself the point. The window for late development has closed not because of poor policy design but because the system that allowed China to industrialise — an open trading order underwritten by US hegemony — is being dismantled by the very power that created it. For countries in the Global South, the lesson is not that homegrown solutions are needed, but that the era of catching up through export-led industrialisation is over. That is a structural condition, not a coordination problem.

Donald Trump's Latin American proconsuls¶

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

The interesting thing about Espriella is not that he holds a US passport — Noboa set that precedent — but that he says the quiet part out loud. "No country in the world can be independent at the moment" is a strange campaign slogan for a presidential candidate, unless the candidate understands his constituency differently from how we usually understand electorates. Espriella's voters are not being asked to believe in Colombian sovereignty; they are being asked to believe in Trump's ability to deliver security and capital flows. The evangelical pastor at his side is not incidental colour but the transmission belt for that message.

The historical comparison the article draws is instructive precisely because it is inexact. Washington once needed coups because the left was strong enough to threaten US assets directly. Now the left is weaker, and organised crime has filled the vacuum. The far right does not need to be installed; it can win elections on a platform of subcontracting security to the US and Israel. Plan Colombia 2 is not a return to the 2000s but an escalation of a model that already failed once — the coca acreage has increased fivefold since 2013, which suggests the war on drugs was never really about drugs. It was about basing rights and counterinsurgency, and Espriella is offering both back.

The contradiction here is not between Espriella's rhetoric and his policies; he is perfectly consistent. It is between the US's need for stable client states and the dynamics of the drug economy itself, which rewards fragmentation and violence over order. Washington wants a partner who can pacify the territory, but the very flows of capital and arms that make Espriella useful to Washington also sustain the cartels he promises to crush. The article notes elections across the region in 2026-27; the model Espriella represents is being tested in six countries simultaneously. Whether it produces stability or a more chaotic form of extraction is an open question, but the left's failure to offer a credible alternative to "total peace" — Petro's strategy, which collapsed — is what made this possible. That is the more uncomfortable lesson.

What France's far right has learned from Israel's apartheid system¶

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

The habit of reaching for Mussolini whenever the far right approaches power may be doing the left a disservice. Bréville and Rimbert’s argument is that the more instructive model for France’s National Rally is not 1930s Italy but contemporary Israel: not a dramatic seizure of power and suspension of constitutional forms, but the incremental construction of a legal architecture that sorts the population into tiers of rights. The warning is that fascism-talk, by framing the danger as a cliff-edge, obscures the actual terrain on which the RN is already winning.

The distinction matters politically. Anti-fascist mobilisation premised on stopping a coup misunderstands how the RN has advanced under Macron: not by breaking the Republic’s rules but by having the terms of debate shifted towards them, with business leaders warming to the party and the media normalising positions once confined to the fringes. The Israeli comparison suggests something more insidious — a system that maintains democratic forms for one class of citizens while subjecting another, classed as alien in origin, to permanent legal exception. That is not the suspension of the rule of law but its reorganisation along ethnic lines.

The authors’ point is that this slide is almost imperceptible precisely because it is legal. Each measure — citizenship stripping, police powers, administrative detention — is presented as exceptional, targeted, temporary. The accumulation of exceptions is what builds the structure. For the French left, the implication is uncomfortable: the fight may not be against a fascist rupture but against the normalisation of a two-tier citizenship, and the organising forms suited to one struggle do not automatically transfer to the other.

Tanker Market: Saudi Arabia's New Strategy Shifting Crude Volumes¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

Saudi Arabia has spent two years engineering its way out of one chokepoint only to land squarely in another. The numbers from Yanbu are striking: over 80 million tonnes of crude loaded between January and late July 2026, nearly four times the pre-crisis volume, with monthly exports climbing above 16 million tonnes through the second quarter. The East-West Pipeline has effectively allowed Riyadh to reroute around Hormuz, and Asian buyers — China, India, South Korea, Malaysia — now take roughly 70% of that Red Sea crude, a complete inversion of the 2025 pattern when Egypt absorbed over half.

The Houthi declaration that vessels calling at Saudi ports are legitimate targets collapses the neat distinction between "Israeli-linked" and everyone else. Bab el-Mandeb crossings fell almost 30% in a single day; tankers diverted immediately. The extra costs are concrete — 10 to 14 days and around $1 million per transit for a Cape rerouting — and they ripple outward into insurance premiums, bunker consumption, and container schedules being redrawn to omit Saudi calls.

What is genuinely interesting here is the structure of the risk. Saudi Arabia has not eliminated its exposure to maritime disruption; it has relocated it. Hormuz dependence was swapped for Red Sea dependence, and the threat actor changed from state-on-state confrontation to a non-state force whose capacity to impose costs rests on uncertainty rather than blockade. The Houthis do not need to stop a single tanker to reshape global freight markets — they only need to make the insurance maths ambiguous.

For the shipping industry, the lesson is that geopolitical risk premiums are not disappearing, only migrating. For anyone watching the broader crisis, the implication is that the Gulf states' energy strategy now hinges on a waterway they do not control and a conflict they cannot contain. The "freedom of navigation" framing in the report is telling: it is the language of capital demanding that the conditions for circulation be guaranteed, even as the political forces that once guaranteed them fragment.