LUÍZ Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) runs about the stage. He is a man with a great deal of energy. He is telling the story of his time in Iran, when he tried to mediate the conflict imposed on that country by the United States over its nuclear energy policy. Lula, and his foreign affairs minister Celso Amorim, had managed to secure a deal in 2010 that would have prevented the ongoing pressure campaign that Washington conducts against Tehran. There was relief in the air. Then, Lula said, ‘Obama pissed outside the pot’.

A NEW kind of madness is seeping into global political discourse, a poisonous fog that suffocates reason. This fog, which has long marinated in the old, ugly ideas of white supremacy and Western superiority, is clouding our ideas of humanity.

PALPITE, Cuba, is just a few miles away from Playa Girón, along the Bay of Pigs, where the United States attempted to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in 1961. Down a modest street in a small building with a Cuban flag and a large picture of Fidel Castro near the front door, Dr Dayamis Gómez La Rosa sees patients from 8 am to 5 pm. In fact, that is an inaccurate sentence. Dr Dayamis, like most primary care doctors in Cuba, lives above the clinic that she runs.

IN 1959, one of the revolutionary leaders in Cuba, Haydée Santamaria, a hundred years old this year, arrived at a cultural centre in the heart of Havana, Cuba. This building, the revolutionaries decided, would be committed to the promotion of Latin American art and culture and it would become – eventually – a beacon for the progressive transformation of the hemisphere’s cultural world. Renamed the Casa de las Américas, the home of the Americas, it would become the heartbeat of cultural developments from Chile to Mexico.

ALLURI Sitaramaraju is a much venerated revolutionary freedom fighter in both the Telugu speaking states. Along with his associates Gam Gantam Dora, Gam Mallu Dora, Padalu and others, he had waged a war against the British empire. This year, his 125 birth anniversary, coincides with the 75^th anniversary of our independence. The BJP and the Sangh Parivar eco-system, as is their nature, are busy trying to appropriate his legacy.