neo-something-something There's so much alarming FSU news this week that I hardly know where to begin. Russia withdrew its ambassador to Georgia and ordered a complete diplomatic evacuation after Georgia arrested several Russian military officers on charges of espionage; last I heard the evacuation had been halted but things are still pretty ugly. The underlying issue--namely, that Georgia is accusing the Russian government of backing separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia--is serious, rather scary stuff. When you situate all of this within the broader regional context--Viktor Yanukovych's rise from the dead in Ukraine, Russia's own democratic backslide, and Romania and Bulgaria's looming accession to the EU--it's almost enough to make a girl start reconsidering her primary research agenda. Even though field research in South Ossetia is, um, not exactly gonna happen. But wait: Cuba? Not boring! In fact, the Russian prime minister just stopped by Havana to give Raúl a check for $355 million bucks. There's no real explanation for the half-mast flag and nostalgia tour on Cuban TV yesterday, except the hypothesis that it was in recognition of the death(s) resulting from a massive explosion and fire at Havana's biggest oil refinery on Wednesday.

In other news, my replacement battery from Apple finally showed up, it looks like I'm going to spend my entire weekend trying and failing to learn Arrr, and I really want a dog. But what else is new.  ¶ 6:46 AM

  doomed, doomed, doomed Faced with the rather unpleasant prospect of somehow slogging my way through three chapters of Sam Huntington's 1968 opus, "Political Order in Changing Societies," I understandably went looking for things to distract me. Not that it's any sort of improvement, but I've been meaning to read the actual text of S.3930, also known as the bill that killed habeus corpus once and for all.  ¶ 3:33 PM

  edumacational Here is the box I picked up from the copy center this morning with the rest of the semester's worth of reading for one of my three classes:



And the cross-section:



This is just the stuff that isn't available online, by the way. All of that stuff is probably half again what came in the box. JUST FOR THE FIELD SEMINAR. The Africa class isn't even fucking around--they want us to buy 12 books, and they "strongly recommend" another 15. Mmmmhmmm.  ¶ 12:17 PM

  an update (sort of) Now the rumors are that there has in fact been a revolutionary death, but not the big guy--just Raúl's wife, Vilma Espin. She has been very sick recently, as well...  ¶ 11:34 AM

  breaking news (?) Rumor has it that Cuban TV is showing the flag at half-mast and is running old footage from the revolution. Stay tuned...  ¶ 7:37 AM

  we're all doomed Doooooooomed.  ¶ 3:45 PM

  spooky I just got back from my morning coffee run, and you can just feel a big ass nor'easter on its way. The air is incredibly thick and heavy, and all of the squirrels are in hiding already. All of my memories of East Coast fall rainstorms are suddenly coming back to me...I can't believe I'm in freaking Boston again. What the hell is wrong with me? And this is going to turn into snow, soon, too. Aaauugh.  ¶ 7:38 AM

  NAM summit I really should be blogging more about this, since it's a pretty big deal, but I guess I've been so distracted by the raging methodological debates in political science that I've been neglecting my duties. As far as I know, Cuba hasn't hosted the Non Aligned Movement summit since it was fresh from its African wars and on top of the world, and so it's fairly remarkable that they're hosting it this fall, given the circumstances. Apparently a short video of Castro actually standing and chatting with--who else?--Chávez aired on Cuban TV, but nobody knows whether he'll make any kind of official appearance before the summit ends on Saturday. Pérez Roque has been quick to point out that Fidel is still the head of the Cuban delegation to the summit, even though he's left the speeches to Pérez and Raúl.

The speeches are utterly predictable--"it's obvious that our movement is more important than ever," "it's obvious that the American empire is in decline," etc. etc.--but what's most interesting to watch is the incredibly intricate positioning that is going on among all of these dudes who want to (and individually all fully expect to) succeed Fidel in a more ideological sense. The power struggle in the Politburo is fascinating enough, but there's also a macrocosmic version of the ever-popular moderates vs. hardliners game playing out between guys like Chávez, Lukashenka, and Ahmadinejad vs. guys like Musharraf and Singh. Even Evo Morales, who I am generally fairly fond of and don't fear nearly as much as Chávez, is bursting into bizarre, Zhirinovsky-style rants about how Bolivia is going to fuck Chile's shit up if it doesn't get its Pacific port back. When I first got into the post-Castro prediction business a few years ago, I remember telling Steve that things could look a lot like the post-Gorbachev struggle in Russia. You've got your Yeltsin-like "shock therapy" camp, your Zyuganov-style "Castro failed the revolution but I'll do better" approach, your Solzhenitsyn-style Cuban/Caribbean "identity"-based exceptionalism, and maybe even the wild card in a bit of Zhirinovsky-style "joke facism." But I predicted that struggle to emerge within Cuba, which, of course, it still could (and surely already exists to some extent behind the scenes), but I underestimated how broad the struggle could actually be. Obviously it isn't over the nominal leadership of a small island country--or even, as I think it was in Russia's case, a real identity question--"what is Russia, and who gets to decide?" But this is about the heart and soul of socialism, and the heart and soul of underdog-ism, and the underlying legitimizing principle of so many of these authoritarian countries: perpetual struggle. So there is, I think, a hell of a lot at stake here. Certainly a lot more than just Fidel's immediate succession.

With all of that in mind, I can't imagine Fidel missing the opportunity to get out there and revel in the glory of it all--he's waaaay too much of an egomaniac (and a good Leo!) for that. I know there's some evidence out there that the deathly ill sometimes are able to fight off the reaper just long enough to mark some kind of milestone--a birthday, an anniversary--and if welcoming 118 countries to your crumbling city precisely when you're trying to firmly secure your legacy isn't something to live for, I don't know what the hell is. One's thing for sure: if he does shuffle out in his bathrobe to say a few words this weekend, the smallest details of all that compulsory ring-kissing will be well worth watching.  ¶ 5:33 PM

  Posada Carriles--holy crap Wow. Not only did a federal magistrate in El Paso just recommend that Cuba's favorite self-confessed terrorist be let out of the pokey, but the guy issued his recommendation on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Pretty fucking amazing. This particular potato is so hot that Bush hasn't wanted to touch it since Posada first announced in May 2005 that he was, in fact, in Miami and thus basically forced the feds to arrest him. It will be verrrry interesting to see what kind of press this case gets in the lead-up to the midterms, and how on earth GWB is going to try to spin it if the recommendation holds. Does Jon Stewart know about this shit?  ¶ 12:23 PM

  my home away from home (away from home^3) Since posting photos is waaaay easier than actually posting an entry, here's another one...this is the home of the department, CGIS (Center for Government and International Studies, pronounced C-Jiss) North, which is one of 2 (very nearly) identical buildings across the street from each other right off of Harvard Yard. The department owns both buildings and since they were just built last year they are gorgeous and amazing. Even as lowly grad students we have office space and lockers and all that good stuff, too:



I fucking love Harvard. Seriously.  ¶ 8:17 PM