The Global Fight for Freedom

Children jumping deliriously, waving American flags. The CIA director opposite the grandson of a revolutionary. Rooftops where families sleep to escape the heat. A young woman running back through prison gates to kiss her mentor goodbye.
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This week, the struggle spans three continents. A rising power that isn't rising. A regime running out of fuel. A generation refusing to lose.

Flashpoints

1. Xi Invokes Thucydides—But He’s No Pericles
2. Cuba Is “Back In the Stone Age”
3. Madagascan Kids Hit the Streets—Again

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

For nearly three decades in the fifth century BCE, the great empires of Athens and Sparta tore at each other across the Aegean. Sparta — the dominant land power, the established hegemon — had watched Athens rise into a wealthy naval empire and feared what it had become. The Peloponnesian War that followed defined the ancient world.
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When Donald Trump arrived in Beijing this week, a People's Liberation Army band played the Star-Spangled Banner. Children jumped deliriously, waving flowers and American flags. Xi told Trump the United States and China should be "partners, not adversaries."
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But inside the Great Hall of the People, Xi dropped the pretense, warning the U.S. not to fall into the "Thucydides Trap."
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The inherently adversarial phrase — named after the Greek historian by Harvard's Graham Allison — refers to the disaster that befalls an established power challenged by a rising one.
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The analogy revealed both Xi's worldview and a direct threat. As a worldview, it claimed what Chinese officials and scholars now say openly: America is in "imperial twilight," while China is ascendant.
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As a warning, it told Trump that defending Taiwan risked war.
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But China is misjudging its strength. China's property sector has collapsed, with new home starts down 70%. Beijing has set its 2026 growth target at 4.5% — the lowest in three decades. Youth unemployment runs over 16%. The working-age population is shrinking.
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And last week, Xi sentenced two of his own former defense ministers to death. The few generals with real combat experience were purged earlier this year. His current command has none.
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Meanwhile, The Economist reported this month that America is enjoying a "productivity miracle," powered by an economy that "remains unusually flexible, dynamic and innovative by rich-world standards." The American worker remains among the most productive on earth. The Chinese worker is not close: U.S. per-capita GDP is $85,000; China's is $13,300.
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In 2012 The Economist itself projected China would overtake the U.S. within a decade. The Centre for Economics and Business Research said 2028, then 2036, then "not in the next fifteen years."
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Around 432 BCE, Pericles led Athens into war on the strength of an open commercial society, where merchants traded freely across the Aegean, citizens debated in the Assembly, and wealth flowed from below rather than above. Xi is doing the opposite. He has crushed China's private sector, jailed its entrepreneurs, and choked the very engine that lifted 800 million people from poverty.
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Athens rose because it set its people free. China is faltering because Xi will not.
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Xi is no Pericles. And to quote a great American, the reports of America's death are greatly exaggerated.
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​Sources: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, CSIS ChinaPower, CNN, CNBC

​When the guards released Sissi Abascal Zamora from a women's prison in Matanzas, they wouldn't let her say goodbye to her friend and mentor, Sayli. So, she broke away, ran back, and kissed her through tears.
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Sissi arrived in Miami Thursday, over four years after her arrest at age 18. The youngest member of the Damas de Blanco — the Ladies in White, profiled below — Sissi had been imprisoned alongside the movement's co-founder, Sayli Navarro. Sayli is still inside, serving 8 years for attending the same 2021 protest as Sissi.
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Now, the country Sissi just left has gone dark.
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Blackouts in Havana now stretch 22 hours. Cubans sleep on rooftops to escape the heat. They wake at odd hours when power flickers on to charge phones and cook the next day's meals. They cook on charcoal when the power dies mid-meal. "We are back in the stone age," one Havana journalist said Thursday after three days without water.
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On Wednesday, Cuba's energy minister announced that the island has "absolutely no fuel, absolutely no diesel."
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For three consecutive nights, more than a dozen Havana neighborhoods erupted. Pots banged. Garbage piles burned. Stones flew at gas stations with nothing to pump. The state-run telecom monopoly cut internet service block by block to keep the unrest from spreading.
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Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez calls Trump's blockade "collective punishment through an economic war," and he's not wrong.
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But Marco Rubio's answer hit the nail on the head: "The reason they don't have oil is because they don't have any money to pay for oil." Socialism's record of creating poverty and despair remains unblemished.
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CIA Director John Ratcliffe arrived in Havana on Thursday and took his seat at a long white table across from the head of Cuban intelligence and Raúl Castro's grandson. It was an image unthinkable for the past sixty years — brought to fruition by American pressure.
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1,260 political prisoners remain. Without that pressure, and the youngest Lady in White would still be one of them — and the long white table would have been empty.
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​Sources: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, El País, Prisoners Defenders

In September 2025, in the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar, a generation answered a call already echoing across the world.
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What began as protests over power and water outages in Antananarivo escalated within days into a national movement. The young waved the straw-hat skull from the anime One Piece — the global emblem of Gen Z defiance from Kathmandu to Lima.
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Security forces killed 22 of them. In October, an elite military unit, CAPSAT, refused to fire and instead joined the protesters. President Rajoelina fled aboard a French military plane. Colonel Michael Randrianirina took power and promised a referendum and elections by mid-2026.
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Nearly two years after Gen Z’s global rebellion began, the results are mixed.
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In Bangladesh, students toppled Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, and the country held its freest election in decades on February 12 — a genuine democratic achievement. But the interim government banned the previous ruling Awami League, and the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami emerged as the principal opposition.
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In Nepal, six months after Gen Z forced KP Oli to resign, voters delivered a stunning landslide in March 2026 to 35-year-old rapper-turned-mayor Balendra Shah, who personally defeated Oli in his own district.
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Madagascar remains the open question. Its revolution hit a wall last week, when its electoral commission pushed its constitutional referendum to June 2027 and presidential elections to October. And Foreign Policy reports prominent Gen Z activists are now being arrested under vague charges of "criminal conspiracy" and "destabilization of the state."
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The pattern when recent African revolutions fail does not augur well. In Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, and Gabon, popular discontent with corrupt governments opened the door. A colonel walked through it. He promised a constitution, a referendum, elections. He delivered a long transition, vague charges against the same kids who carried him to office, and a new constitution that entrenches him.
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But the straw-hat generation is not giving up. They are back in the streets, demanding elections now, not in 2027. The Madagascans are betting they can write a better ending.
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​Sources: Foreign Policy, BBC, Amnesty International, Council on Foreign Relations, AP
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Freedom Fighter of the Week: Berta Soler

Berta Soler was marching alongside her husband when a Cuban State Security agent clamped his hand over his mouth and bit his right ear to silence his protest.
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23 years later, she’s still marching.
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After that 2003 protest, the Cuban regime swept up 75 dissidents in what became known as the Black Spring. Soler’s husband served eight years in prison. Berta and the other wives, mothers, and daughters of the prisoners formed the Damas de Blanco — Ladies in White. They wear white for peace. Every Sunday they walk in silence to Mass at Santa Rita Church in Havana, each carrying a single gladiolus and a photograph of an imprisoned loved one.
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They do not chant. They do not block traffic. They walk, and they pray.
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Then the regime arrives.
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State Security has dragged Berta Soler off the street so many times the count has lost meaning. She “disappeared” three times in a single autumn — held more than 60 hours each time, no charges, no notification to her family.
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She has been arrested on her way to mass, on her way to a U.S. Embassy reception, and on New Year's Day 2026 while walking to a peace rally at a Havana Cathedral. She has been beaten, held without water, and threatened that her "time will run out."
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Several years ago, a State Security agent offered her a deal. Leave Cuba. Go see your children. Stop walking on Sundays.
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She said no.
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Soler is still walking, and still being dragged into unmarked cars on the corner of Porvenir Avenue and E Street.
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The Damas de Blanco have outlasted Fide. They have outlasted Raúl. And they will soon outlast Miguel Díaz-Canel.
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A woman in white. A single flower. A regime that cannot break her.

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