Revolutionary

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• He left no mark on search engines or in coverage of Iran’s military and the Middle East.
• He had been the right-hand man of General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guards’ branch for operations outside Iran.
• On January 2, an Israeli drone fired into a building in Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah is based.
• They are telling Hamas, the Iran military and Hezbollah, “We can hit you anytime, anywhere,” and asking, “What are you going to do about it?”

Tough poses meet tougher realities

• Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi postured in a photo opportunity with Mousavi’s family.
• “This crime will definitely not go unanswered and the Zionist criminals will pay for this crime,” he said – without offering any specifics.
• The near-paralysed Lebanese government, with no president and 12 intermittent and inconclusive parliamentary sessions, could finally dissolve into anarchy.
• Asked by Amwaj Media if there would be retaliation for the assassinations, a “senior Iranian source” reflected: “Difficult decision.

Fighting the indirect war

• Meanwhile the world, if not the Israelis, can be unsettled by “indirect war”.
• Yemen’s Houthi insurgency, with political and military backing from Iran, are attacking civilian vessels in the Red Sea.
• But there is always a risk of a chain reaction that, response by response, will wind up in the second-front war that no one wants or intends.

Scott Lucas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Together these companies comprise Revolutionary Insurance Group (Revolutionary).
• The revised outlooks to stable from negative reflect Revolutionary’s improved operating performance metrics in recent years that are more in-line with their composite average (fidelity & surety).
• Additionally, the group's risk-adjusted capitalization has stabilized primarily due to the growth of its policyholders’ surplus, driven by operating earnings.
• AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specializing in the insurance industry.

• On July 26 1953, an attack on army barracks in eastern Cuba heralded the consolidation of a Cuban national resistance movement against the dictatorship of General Batista.
• A group of 111 young rebels attacked the army barracks, the Cuartel Moncada and Cuba’s second most important military fortress.
• Here are seven things I recommend reading and watching to better understand and mark the anniversary.

1. Fidel Castro’s defence speech

• He cited the 19th century writer and independence leader José Martí as the inspiration and intellectual guide.
• The speech ended with the words “Condemn me.
• The text of Castro’s speech was smuggled out in note form by a young Cuban journalist, Marta Rojas, and published after 1959.

2. El Mégano (1955)

• Released in 1955, the short documentary El Mégano highlighted the extreme poverty that afflicted rural Cuba.
• It was made by young Cuban filmmakers Julio García Espinosa, Jose Massip and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who were trained in the Italian neo-realist tradition.

3. The novels of Alejo Carpentier

• The Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier, writing from exile in Caracas, published startlingly original novels with experimental forms.
• His novels, The Kingdom of this World (1949) and The Lost Steps (1953), offer fascinating explorations of the impact of colonialism and the wealth of cultures in the region.

4. The poetry of Nicolás Guillén

• Much of his work deals with the impact of colonialism, although it is explicitly political and often conversational in style.
• Collections such as West Indies Ltd (1934) offer an insight into the racialisation of power in pre-1959 Cuba.

5. The poetry of Roberto Fernández Retamar

• Roberto Fernández Retamar is best known for his seminal essay, Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America (1968), that reworked the Shakespearean figure of Caliban as a metaphor for anti-colonialism.
• But he also wrote poetry that underlined the humanist underpinnings of the rebel and revolutionary movements, such as Blessed Are the Normal (1962).

6. The Situation by Lisandro Otero (1963)

Lisandro Otero’s novel, The Situation, examined the bourgeoisie in 1950s Cuba. With its publication, Otero – a middle-class Cuban when the revolutionary government came to power in 1959 – marked his changing position to a writer in service of the Revolution.

7. Bertillón 166 by José Soler Puig (1960)

• José Soler Puig’s novel, Bertillón 166, narrated the events of the second half of the 1950s in Santiago de Cuba, including the growth of the 26 of July Movement.
• The events of July 26, 1953 marked just one of many stages in a complex and often violent exit from colonialism that lasted for half a century.
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