It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The Trump administration’s hard line against Cuba pushed Sherritt International Corp. to the brink. Now, an ex-adviser to the US president may be the Canadian mining company’s salvation.
The nearly 99-year-old company, whose former chief executive was once known as Fidel Castro’s favorite capitalist, has staked its business on a bet few Western companies would touch. After entering Cuba in the 1990s, Sherritt developed a nickel-and-cobalt mine through a joint venture with the state before expanding into energy. The result was a sprawling business that’s survived commodity busts, US political pressure and economic instability on the island.
That wager abruptly unraveled this month, plunging Sherritt into turmoil. After President Donald Trump expanded sanctions on the communist country, Sherritt initially announced plans to dissolve its mining venture in Cuba. On Wednesday the US charged former Cuban President Raúl Castro with murder, sharply escalating a standoff with Havana as the Trump administration attempts to reshape the island’s political order.
But just days after Sherritt announced its retreat from Cuba, a potential rescuer emerged in the form of a Dallas family office linked to Ray Washburne, a real estate executive appointed by Trump in 2017 to lead the Overseas Private Investment Corp. Washburne’s Gillon Capital LLC signed a non-binding preliminary agreement on Wednesday that would hand the family office a controlling stake in Sherritt.
“It came out of nowhere,” Peter Hancock, Sherritt’s interim chief executive officer, said in an interview. “I would like to tell you that I’m a business genius and that I knew an American entity would see that it could create value in the situation that Sherritt was in. But no, I didn’t foresee that.”
As Trump’s foreign policy during his second term turns markedly more aggressive, Sherritt is still at risk of losing its Havana gamble. The saga underscores the dangers facing companies and investors from shifting geopolitics amid a rapidly changing world order. While major multinational firms have not been immune to conflict-driven losses, the threat is particularly acute for companies with assets concentrated in a single country outside of the US.
It’s not clear whether Sherritt’s preliminary pact with Gillon signals a potential shift in Trump’s Cuba strategy. On Wednesday, he played down the need to further ratchet up pressure on the Cuban government after the charges against Raúl Castro. Representatives for Gillon and the State Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
But for Hancock, the sudden backing from Gillon helped “bridge the huge gap” between Sherritt and the administration.
“This deal happened because an actor in the United States was able to make a case to the US State Department,” he said. “We were collateral damage in a larger policy objective for the United States.”
Sherritt was founded in 1927 and named after Carl Sherritt, a trapper who staked copper prospects in Manitoba. The company’s first foray into Cuba was steered by Ian Delaney, who became CEO after a proxy fight in 1990 and secured a deal with the Castro government one year later. The state agreed to sell Sherritt unprocessed nickel from Moa, a mine in eastern Cuba that was nationalized after the country’s 1959 revolution.
It was a milestone deal for the Canadian firm, which needed raw material to feed its key asset: a refinery in Alberta. The company entered into a joint venture agreement in 1994 with the state to operate Moa, which produces cobalt and nickel, both key metals for the energy transition and providing power to data centers.
For years, Sherritt was enormously successful in Cuba. Its market capitalization jumped to almost C$5 billion ($3.6 billion) in 2008, while the stock traded as high as C$18. Sherritt, by that time, had poured significant investment into the country, including stakes in electricity, oil and natural gas ventures alongside state companies.
Sherritt executives became the first people barred from entering the US under the Helms-Burton Act, a law passed in 1996 to target firms doing business in Cuba. But Canada and several European nations opposed the law and maintained diplomatic ties with Havana, allowing Sherritt to keep selling most of its nickel and cobalt into those markets as well as Asia.
Yet at the height of Sherritt’s rise following its success in Cuba, the company made costly bet on a nickel project in Madagascar. The decision would ultimately shred its balance sheet, driving debt to almost C$2.5 billion at its peak in 2013. Then came a prolonged slump in nickel prices, leaving the company periodically teetering on the brink of insolvency.
Saddled with a heavy debt load and years of weak cash flow, the company became even more reliant on Cuba, exiting other assets including its Canadian coal business to fund loan repayments and eventually writing off its Madagascar venture. Today, Cuba accounts more than 70% of the company’s asset base on a book value basis.
“They had an ample opportunity to eliminate their indebtedness entirely,” Jeffrey Gavarkovs, a managing partner at Northstream Capital Inc., said in an interview. But “the combination of Cuba and a debt load that was a little bit too heavy was their poison pill.”
While Sherritt continued receiving distributions from its power and nickel operations, the company spent more than C$100 million on an offshore well, a higher-risk category of oil exploration, Gavarkovs said. The effort yielded a well that was ultimately written off as uneconomic.
But according to Gavarkovs, who owns Sherritt bonds, the company’s biggest flaw was its bloated corporate overhead for what had effectively become a single-asset mining company. Directors on the board, rather than ensuring that unsecured note-holders received cash interest payments as required by the debt covenants, prioritized vesting cash-settled stock options, he said.
The company also spent millions trying to fend off several activist campaigns against it, he added. Last year investment firm Pala Assets Holdings won its battle against Sherritt, resulting in the resignation of CEO Leon Binedell and a shakeup of the board.
When US forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, investors began speculating that Cuba could be the Trump administration’s next target. In Venezuela’s case, US oil majors and Western mining companies swarmed into the country after Maduro’s arrest, with Chevron Corp. emerging as one of the clearest winners.
But unlike Chevron, which has a diversified asset base, Sherritt was facing a worsening a fuel shortage as the US blocked Venezuelan exports to Cuba. The company announced plans to pause mining at Moa in February after receiving notice that planned fuel deliveries could not be fulfilled.
As Cuba’s economy continued to crumble, with mass blackouts sweeping the island as Trump tightened his squeeze on the nation of 10 million people, Sherritt faced a choice: keep operations going at a loss and at reduced capacity, or mothball the company’s most valuable asset. In late March, the company announced it was seeking an emergency cash injection of as much as C$50 million to support Moa.
Hancock was at home in Halifax on Monday, a public holiday in Canada, watching the Giro d’Italia cycling race on TV when the phone rang. On the other end was Washburne, calling with his offer for Sherritt.
Two days later, the Canadian company announced that it had signed a non-binding term sheet with Gillon. Sherritt said the US State Department had no objections to the discussions.
It’s far from certain that Ottawa will support a US investor taking majority ownership of Sherritt, however. Canada instituted a new policy in 2024 to make it more difficult for foreign companies to take control of Canadian critical minerals assets.
To Ben Rowswell, a former Canadian ambassador to Venezuela, the move by a Trump-friendly investor to take control of Sherritt in Cuba exemplifies what’s become known as the Donroe Doctrine, the US president’s take on Washington’s 19th-century push for hemispheric domination.
The latest move provides “further insight into the changing character of the US relationship with the region as it’s turning into an extractive predator” that uses its power over all countries, said Rowswell, now a consultant with strategic advisory firm Catalyze4.
The government of Prime Minister Mark Carney might be reluctant to attempt to block the takeover of Sherritt by a US investor to avoid complicating efforts to renew a free trade agreement with the US, Rowswell said, adding that he believes Carney’s administration should defend the company against US sanctions.
A spokesperson for Canada’s industry department said the government welcomes foreign investment that benefits Canada’s economy, but declined to comment on specific transactions.
Sherritt isn’t the only foreign company with mining operations in Cuba: Singapore-based commodities trading giant Trafigura has a lead-and-zinc mine there in a joint venture with the state. The company has said that it complies with all applicable sanctions and maintains a regular dialogue with relevant authorities.
Despite the potential deal with Gillon, Sherritt’s situation remains tenuous. Three board members have resigned from Sherritt, leaving just Hancock and one other director. Its chief financial officer and its auditor also departed earlier this month. The company now trades as a penny stock, with a market capitalization near C$80 million. Without essential nickel and cobalt supplies from Cuba, the available inventory at the company’s Alberta refinery will run out in mid-June, it said earlier this month.
“A lot of things will need to happen to get to the state where the full value is realized,” said Hancock, adding that sourcing key inputs such as fuel and sulfur would also be critical to unlocking Sherritt’s full potential. But, he added, “the posture of the US government with respect to this deal opens up a much wider world of financing.”
The Fort Saskatchewan refinery is one of just a few nickel processing facilities in North America. As governments and manufacturers race to build critical minerals supply chains outside of China, the facility carries growing strategic importance, according to Northstream’s Gavarkovs.
For Hancock, a former engineer with commodities trader Glencore Plc, there have been “a lot of very unexpected twists and turns” since he stepped in as interim CEO of Sherritt in December. If the Gillon proposal goes ahead, any easing of tensions between the Trump administration and Cuba would likely improve the payoff for the Washburne family office, he added.
Gillon is “very, very familiar with the business and the value that they see down the track,” he said. “This deal signals that they believe Sherritt has got a real bright future when things normalize in Cuba.”
(By Sybilla Gross, Paula Sambo and Stephen Wicary)
Sherritt in talks to hand control of Cuba mining business to ex-Trump adviser
US new sanctions revive a decades-old clash with Sherritt, rooted in the 1990s. (Image courtesy of Sherritt International.)
Sherritt International Corp. is in talks to hand a controlling stake to a family office linked to a former adviser of President Donald Trump, as the mining company seeks to navigate US sanctions tied to its Cuba operations.
The Toronto-based company said it signed a non-binding term sheet for a private placement involving a warrant, which would allow Gillon Capital LLC to acquire enough common shares to own 55% of the company on a fully exercised basis, according to a statement Wednesday.
Sherritt expects that the exercise price will be at a discount to the company’s closing price May 15. The company, which operates nickel and cobalt mining and refining businesses tied closely to Cuban state partners, on Tuesday reversed course on plans to unwind its operations in the Caribbean country.
Shares of Sherritt, which trades as a penny stock, rose 9% in early trading in New York.
Gillon Capital is the family office of Ray Washburne, a real estate executive whom Trump appointed in 2017 to head the Overseas Private Investment Corporation before later naming him to the Presidential Intelligence Advisory Board.
Sherritt said it has “engaged constructively” with the US Department of State, which confirmed no objections to Gillon Capital’s engagement with the company, according to Wednesday’s statement. The Department of State and Department of Treasury don’t view the negotiations as contrary to US law, the statement said.
Last week, Sherritt said it was considering steps to relinquish its 50% stake in a Cuban nickel-and-cobalt mine, as well as surrender its interest in an energy joint venture with the state. On Tuesday, it backtracked on that decision and flagged it was evaluating a “potential value preserving opportunity.”
Sherritt operates nickel and cobalt mining and refining businesses tied closely to Cuban state partners and has long depended on the country for a significant portion of its production.
The company has been in turmoil since Trump signed an executive order earlier this month targeting non-US individuals and entities doing business in Cuba, which has faced sweeping US sanctions since the 1960s. The upheaval triggered a wave of departures, including three board members and the chief financial officer, and triggered a plunge in its share price.
Sherritt International (TSX: S) has dropped plans to dissolve its mining assets in Cuba, though operations will remain suspended amid ongoing US sanctions.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Canadian miner said it will now keep its Cuban interests, namely the Moa nickel mining venture, and will not proceed with its application to the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta to disclaim the asset.
The decision was made following further “consultation with advisors, stakeholders and relevant governmental authorities,” and “in light of additional information” currently available to the company, it said.
The announcement comes just days after Sherritt said it would be dissolving the 50/50 Moa joint venture with the state-owned General Nickel Company, citing a “material change” from the JV shareholders’ agreement. It followed a recent executive order by US President Donald Trump that expanded sanctions on Cuba to include non-American entities, including Sherritt.
The extended US sanctions triggered a wave of departures within the company, including three board members, the chief financial officer, and led to a more than 50% drop in its share price.
Before that, the Toronto-based miner had already been struggling due to its heavy exposure to the Cuban market. Sherritt has been mining cobalt and nickel in the island nation since 1990. It also produces electricity, oil and gas through a stake in Energas SA, another joint venture with Cuba’s state electric and petroleum companies.
Sherritt International shares rebounded slightly off an all-time low of C$0.11 on the news. Its market capitalization is approximately C$81 million ($59 million), following a decline that extends to nearly two decades.
While the company is not longer seeking a dissolution of the Cuban assets, its participation in the Moa venture will remain suspended, Sherritt said on Tuesday, adding that it will “continue to work with stakeholders and advisors on steps to address the executive order as soon as practicable.”
The company also said it has been presented, on a preliminary basis, with “a potential value preserving opportunity”, which it will evaluate.
US Supreme Court Rules Cruise Lines Can Be Sued Under Cuban Libertad Act
There are other cases under the Libertade Act also pending in the U.S. courts based on Trump’s 2019 decision not to extend the suspension of the act. Presidents before Trump had suspended the enforcement of the act.Cruises docked at the piers in Havana between 2016 and 2019 working under U.S. licenses (GPH photo)
The United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling saying four cruise lines could be sued for their use of the pier in Havana, Cuba, under the Libertad Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996. The case has been seen as a potential watershed in the long-running fight for compensation for assets seized during the 1959 Cuban revolution and other events around the globe.
At issue was the cruise lines' use of the docks in Havana between 2016, when the United States lifted many of its restrictions on Cuba under President Barack Obama, and June 2019, when Donald Trump reinstated the restrictions and let a presidential waiver over enforcement of the Libertad Act lapse. The Havana Dock Company, which built and operated the docks under a 99-year concession before the Cuban revolution, sued Carnival Corporation, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, MSC Cruises, and Royal Caribbean Group, contending they profited from the use of confiscated property.
The case alleges the cruise lines carried nearly one million passengers to Cuba between 2016 and 2019 using the piers that were tainted property, seized by the Cuban government in 1960 from Havana Docks. Under the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (known as the Libertad Act or the Helms-Burton Act for its sponsors), companies were given the right to sue for compensation from their seized properties.
A federal district court in Miami found for Havana Docks and awarded damages of $440 million. However, a U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the decision. The cruise line case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in February over the interpretation of the act. Among the defenses presented by the cruise lines is the argument that the concession for the piers was to have expired in 2004. Further, it is argued that the cruise lines were operating under permits issued by the U.S. government.
The Supreme Court, in an 8 to 1 decision, ruled that the property was, in fact, “tainted” by the 1960 seizure and that Havana Docks only had to show that the cruise lines had used the confiscated property. The majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas disagrees with the appellate court’s ruling, finding that the act generally makes those who use property tainted by a past confiscation liable to any U.S. national who owns a claim on that property. Havana Docks' claim for the lost docks was certified at $9 million in 1960.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, raises concerns that the majority opinion, however, is too broad. She believes it was unlikely that Congress intended in the act that “someone who suffered a finite loss to reap infinite recoveries.” She believes the claim should be finite and not go on so long as anyone continues to make any commercial use of the docks. Justice Sotomayor, in her opinion, raises another point, highlighting that the cruises were operated at a time when U.S. policy was that they were lawful and beneficial to both Cuba and the United States.
The solo dissent came from Justice Elena Kagan, who focused on the assertion that the Cuban government always owned the docks. She points to the 2004 expiration of Havana Docks’ contract. She warns the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the act “treats all property interests as if they were perpetual ones." She sides with the Appellate Court, saying that Havana Docks’ claim should fail because the cruise lines did not use the docks during the time-limited concession.
The ruling sends the suit against the cruise lines back to the lower courts for further arguments.
There are other cases under the Libertade Act also pending in the U.S. courts based on Trump’s 2019 decision not to extend the suspension of the act. Presidents before Trump had suspended the enforcement of the act.
The Supreme Court in February also heard a case under the act brought by Exxon Mobil seeking compensation from the Cuban state-owned oil company CIMEX. The U.S. energy company lost its oil and gas assets in Cuba, which were seized by the Castro regime after the revolution and handed over to the state oil company.
In 2022, it was noted that more than 40 Libertad Act suits had been filed, including cases against commercial shipping companies Maersk, MSC, Crowley Maritime, and Seaboard Marine. Some of the cases brought under the act, such as Crowley Maritime and American Airlines, have reportedly reached settlements, while others will be impacted by the decisions in the cruise line case and the yet-to-be-announced decision by the Supreme Court in the ExxonMobil case.
Dispatches from the Terminal Ward of the Western Echo Chamber
From the Edge of the Confirmation Bias Abyss
Something is cosmically wrong with the primordial ooze.
For years, decades, maybe longer, maybe since the first cable news anchor discovered that outrage was more profitable than information, a certain subspecies of political creature has been evolving in the lightless, pressurized depths of the ideological swamp. Deep down there in the fetid dark, nourished by the warm thermal vents of their own inane certainties, surrounded by the bioluminescent glow of sycophantic media organs pulsing in perfect, validating unison, these things have evolved. Better said, mutated. They have developed thick, rubbery hides impermeable to fact. Extra organs capable of converting contradiction into confirmation. Their eyes evolved sideways, like deep-sea squid, capable only of detecting praise and televised applause.
They are, in their natural habitat, magnificent in a terrible sort of way. Like watching weaponized algae bloom under a Pentagon microscope.
The problem, and it is a problem of almost Biblical grotesquerie. is what happens when they surface.
Because occasionally, through some malfunction of the billion-euro life-support aquarium of television producers, party handlers, pollsters and think-tank necromancers, these creatures breach. They claw their way up through the layers of sedimented delusion, through the thick strata of favorable polling, friendly broadcast hours, handpicked audiences and yes-men with law degrees, and they emerge, gasping, blinking, hideously unprepared, into what the rest of us have been living in all along: the actual, unfiltered, indifferent, merciless world of reality — that ancient, badly managed wilderness where consequences still roam free.
And Jesus Christ, the light.
You can see them recoil from it. The pupils dilate. The mouth opens. The whole magnificent apparatus of bubble-adapted physiology suddenly, catastrophically, encounters the one thing it was never designed to process: feedback. Real feedback. Not the warm, synthetic, nutritive kind that says yes, you are right, you are brilliant, they hate you because they fear you, but the cold, hard, ancient feedback of a universe that does not know their name and does not care about their brand.
The emperor is not merely naked. The emperor, exposed to daylight for the first time, is revealed to be not merely unclothed but anatomically improbable. Covered in the barnacles of accumulated falsehood. Trailing long tropes of ideological seaweed. Blinking those enormous, useless, dark-adapted eyes at a sun that has no interest whatsoever in their narrative.
What follows is always spectacular. Always, in a way that combines the horror of a car crash with the pure aesthetic pleasure of watching hubris detonate in slow motion, magnificent.
Let us take the field notes, one specimen at a time.
Specimen A: the Mar-a-Lago strain. Creatures so thoroughly marinated in televised nationalism that they emerged genuinely believing Iran was waiting for the right American strongman to straighten the place out like a casino acquisition. That Cuba, after sixty years of embargo and intervention, would gaze upon the latest emissary of the Monroe Doctrine and say: yes. Finally. Salvation in a red tie and motorcade. The creature surfaces. The world declines the offer. The creature calls them ungrateful.
Specimen B: somewhere in the Brexit nostalgic badlands of the English Tory shires, now Reform, the parade of bubble-adapted politicians who emerged from their hermetically sealed world of empire-adjacent fantasy to discover, with genuine howling astonishment, that the European Union was not going to fold under the awesome force of British exceptionalism, that Ireland would not dissolve its border on request, that forty years of economic integration could not be unwound in eighteen months without consequence, and that the rest of the world had, peculiarly, continued to exist and form opinions during the years these creatures had been marinating in their own mythology. The creature retreats. The creature calls them globalists.
But for sheer, crystalline, museum-quality grotesquerie, for the specimen that makes the naturalist set down his field notebook and simply stare, we must turn to Mexico City. First week of May, 2026. Because what unfolded there was not merely a political miscalculation. It was a masterwork. A perfect, terrible, unforgettable emergence event.
Picture the scene as it must have appeared from inside the bubble: Isabel Díaz Ayuso, President of the Community of Madrid, is the kind of regional politician the global reactionary right manufactures at scale these days — a telegenic culture warrior who has made her career converting every confrontation into content, every controversy into martyrdom, the Spanish-language answer to a type you will recognize immediately. Toast of the international right-wing think-tank circuit, idol of every outlet that runs historical revisionism as a form of competitive sport — this woman boards a plane at the considerable expense of the Madrid taxpayers (ten days, May 3 to May 12, a sovereign “business trip” of the kind that makes one wonder what the business was and who exactly was conducting it) and flies herself and her retinue to Mexico City with a sense of mission that could only be produced by years of breathing pure, uncut, ideologically filtered air.
She arrives accompanied by Nacho Cano, a faded Spanish pop star of the 1980s who has found, as faded pop stars sometimes do, that culture war is an excellent second act — impresario, author of a stage production about the Spanish conquest so aggressively tendentious it might have given pause even to the original conquistadors, who at least had the modesty to do their rebranding after the fact rather than before. Together, these two creatures have assembled an event and given it a name so staggeringly, so operatically tone-deaf that it deserves to be reproduced in full, to be savored in all its clueless grandeur:
Celebración por la Evangelización y el Mestizaje en México: Malinche y Cortés.
CELEBRATION. For the EVANGELIZATION.
In Mexico.
In 2026.
On the taxpayers of Madrid.
Diplomacy, as a discipline, continues to evolve.
They applied, and here is where the magnificence becomes almost unbearable, to hold this event in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City. Which is to say: they looked at a building constructed on the ruins of the Templo Mayor — the ceremonial heart of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital — on the sacred ground of the civilization that Cortés systematically dismantled, and they thought: yes. This is the right venue for our celebration of the whole business. A gold and baroque tribute to the imposition that replaced what was demolished to build it. What better stage? At no point during this process did anybody appear to experience what medical science refers to as a warning sign.
The Archdiocese of Mexico City, demonstrating considerably more diplomatic instinct than the President of Madrid, determined the event had “ideological implications,” lacked the necessary permits, and declined, with what one imagines was some ecclesiastical throat-clearing, to host it.
At this point a normal political delegation would have reconsidered the optics. But normal political delegations generally avoid staging conquest pageants atop the graveyard of the civilization being conquered. Standards vary.
The circus relocated to the Frontón México. One imagines there were lanyards involved. Perhaps branded folders. Madrileño-themed margaritas. Certainly bottled water.
Outside, indigenous groups were already in the streets.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum — the first woman and first person of indigenous and Jewish heritage to hold the office — played a card with the calm of a woman who knows exactly what she is holding. She posted a document online. A royal decree. Valladolid, 1548. Carlos I of Spain, writing to the Royal Audiencia of New Spain. In it, even the Spanish Crown, never exactly a monastery of anti-colonial ethics, eventually found the excesses intolerable enough to document and command the liberation of the indigenous people enslaved by one Hernán Cortés, Marquis of the Valley. The document named the places: Tepeaca. Texcoco. Cuernavaca. Oaxtepec. Cholula. It described the branding of women and children with hot iron, the seizure of men for forced combat, the capture of people who had already made peace. It ordered that the living be freed, their children and descendants be freed, and that the decree be read aloud in the plazas and markets of New Spain.
That is the document they marched into Mexico to “celebrate.”
“Those who seek to rehabilitate Hernán Cortés and his atrocities,” said Sheinbaum, with an economy of language that would make a surgeon envious, “are destined to fail.”
Confronted with the protests, the cancellations, the cold wall of an entire country’s historical memory pressing back against her, Ayuso assumed her habitual role of victim, the martyrdom reflex firing like an immune response, later claiming her delegation had been forced into extraordinary security measures that included beach time. That they had been in danger. That anything could have happened. They did have sunscreen.
The creature, so magnificent in the depths, had surfaced. The daylight hit like a police flashlight. The creature was revealed.
And here is where the comedy develops its second, darker movement. Here is where the laughter catches in the throat.
A political scientist examining the wreckage might suggest quietly that Ayuso had been seeking this. That the confrontation with Sheinbaum, impossible through diplomacy — Ayuso leads a regional government roughly equivalent in federal standing to a US state governor, and Sheinbaum would simply have ignored her — was precisely the point. That the grotesque spectacle of colonial rehabilitation was a product, manufactured for consumption back home in Spain, where a certain base finds this kind of defiance not repellent but intoxicating. Not a creature emerging blindly from its bubble, but a creature deploying the appearance of blindness as a weapon.
If the blinking is a performance, if the bewilderment is calculated, then we are not watching incompetence. We are watching something older and colder. Someone looking at a five-hundred-year-old wound, documented in the Crown’s own handwriting, and deciding it is useful. That the pain of Tepeaca and Cholula and the branded children of the Marquis’s campaigns can be converted, with the right staging and a friendly audience, into something approximating a political brand.
This is the question that will not leave you. Because the technology of the modern echo chamber is now sophisticated enough that its inhabitants can be simultaneously genuine and cynical — truly believing the parts that are comforting, performing belief in the parts that are useful, incapable even of distinguishing between the two because the distinction dissolved long ago in the warm bath of unquestioned consensus.
Are these creatures blind? Or do they simply find blindness convenient?
For the Mar-a-Lago strain, the calculation is obscene in its clarity: the crisis with Iran, the standoff with Cuba, the deaths and the sanctions and the regional chaos are not miscalculations, they are the product. Crisis is the content. The base requires an enemy, the enemy requires a crisis, and other people’s suffering pays the production costs. For Ayuso in Mexico: the indigenous protesters, the cold shoulder from the presidency, the diplomatic wreckage of a ten-day taxpayer-funded provocation, all of it converts, back in the studio audience of the Madrid echo chamber, into exactly the footage that feeds the machine. She was attacked. She was brave. She told the truth and they — the vague, conspiratorial they of every bubble’s mythology — couldn’t handle it. She is the perpetual victim.
The wound is not an obstacle to the performance. The wound is the performance.
But if you think the Mexico episode was a sufficient serving of historical irony, wait.
Nacho Cano, undeterred, apparently energized, in the manner of all true believers, by the hostility of the non-converted, has packed up his traveling snake-oil minstrel show, his revisionist historical pageant, his celebration of the warm and fuzzy aspects of civilizational demolition, and is bringing it to the land of the conquistadors, to Extremadura — the impoverished Spanish region that supplied a disproportionate share of the men who went to the Americas and whose noble families built their palaces on what those men sent home. To Cáceres. To a conference room in a luxury hotel where he will deliver his lecture on the glories of the conquest.
The hotel is the Palacio de Godoy. Curio Collection by Hilton.
The Palacio de Godoy was commissioned in 1548 by Francisco de Godoy Aldana, one of the principal lieutenants of Francisco Pizarro, the man who did to the Inca Empire approximately what Cortés did to the Aztec one. Godoy came home to Extremadura flush with the profits of that particular enterprise and built himself a palace. It stands in the UNESCO-designated old city of Cáceres, which is itself essentially a monument to the wealth that flowed back to Extremadura from the systematic dismantlement of pre-Columbian civilization. Every noble family crenellation, every carved escutcheon, every Renaissance courtyard, architectural residue of conquest.
And who restored the Palacio de Godoy? Who poured millions of euros into its rehabilitation and turned the conquistador’s house into a luxury hotel?
Scipion Real Estate. A Peruvian investment company. Founded by a man who had spent years working in Lima, who celebrated the project explicitly as a way of connecting Extremadura and Peru, who decorated the restaurant and suites with textiles from the Amazonian Peru his investor’s ancestor helped to subjugate. The hotel’s restaurant is named Mamay Aldana, after María de Aldana, Francisco de Godoy’s mother, an Extremaduran woman whose son helped Pizarro take Peru, and whose descendant’s palace was then restored and made into a luxury hotel by the money of the country that was conquered.
The wheel of history has, it appears, a sense of humor. A very dark one.
Into this baroque labyrinth of colonial irony, the five-star hotel built on conquest profits, paid for by Peruvian capital, in the ancestral lands of the men who went and took it, stride Nacho Cano and Juan Miguel Zunzunegui, fresh from their routing in Mexico City, to explain that actually, the conquest was fine. Better than fine. It was a celebration. It was evangelization. It was mestizaje — the message of hope and joy — and we should all be more grateful.
Zunzunegui, a Spanish writer and self-appointed philosophical defender of the conquest, who in Mexico asserted there was no conquest, “it was the birth of Mexico”, who questioned whether the whole business could properly be called a genocide, will stand in the house that Pizarro’s lieutenant built with Inca gold and deliver the same performance. Perhaps with the same slides. With the same absolute, serene, climate-controlled conviction that the evidence of the room around him, the walls, the courtyard, the very Peruvian money in the walls, does not constitute a rejoinder.
The echo chamber has not merely followed them home. It has checked in. It has been given a room with a rooftop bar and views of the Extremaduran countryside.
Which brings us to the word at the twisted center of this entire carnival. Not conquest. Not mestizaje. The word is evangelization, and it is worth pausing here to look at it directly, without flinching.
Evangelization. The gift of the faith. The introduction of the one true God to the benighted millions who had, through some cosmic administrative oversight, been left entirely alone for forty thousand years by a deity who apparently only remembered their existence in 1519, when he dispatched the appropriate delivery mechanism in the form of smallpox, steel, and a man from Medellín with a financial interest in the outcome.
Let that settle for a moment.
The argument — delivered with a straight face, in a luxury hotel, in the twenty-first century — is that it was a good thing to arrive among people who had built cities, mapped the stars, developed writing, raised temples, cultivated maize and chocolate and political philosophy, and inform them that their entire cosmological framework was wrong, that the gods worshipped across a hundred generations were demons or hallucinations, and that the correct deity — who had, strangely, shown no previous interest in the Western Hemisphere despite his alleged omniscience — was now available, at sword-point, for immediate subscription. And if the conversion was imperfect, if the newly baptized retained inconvenient attachments to their previous metaphysics, well. There were instruments available to address that. There were always instruments.
This is what evangelization means, stripped of the festival lighting and Nacho Cano’s production values. The imposition of a Bronze Age creed, assembled in the Iron Age Levant, refined in the courts of Constantine, weaponized in the Inquisition, upon people who had committed no offense against it beyond existing on the wrong side of an ocean. The favor being commemorated is the favor of being informed, under duress, that you have been theologically overlooked and incorrect from birth and that your correction is now non-negotiable.
The narcissism required to frame this as generosity is not merely breathtaking. It is, in the clinical sense, remarkable. The grandiosity of the self-image that can look at that history, the iron, the fire, the children of Cholula, and arrive at the word celebration.
That is not historical revisionism. That is a personality disorder with a press office.
You can debate the balance sheet of colonialism, and there is a balance sheet, however ugly the math. You can acknowledge that Spain built universities, that mestizaje eventually produced a civilization of genuine complexity and beauty, that history is not a simple story. None of this requires you to perform amnesia about the branding irons.
What you cannot do, what no honest engagement with the record permits, is call it a celebration. The word is not a position. It is a symptom.
And so the show comes to Cáceres. The creatures dry themselves off, shake the primordial ooze from their extremities, adjust their lanyards, and check in to the Peruvian-funded palace of the man who helped take Peru. The rooftop bar has panoramic views. The Amazonian textiles in the suites are tasteful. The irony hangs over the whole enterprise like carbon monoxide — colorless, odorless, quietly lethal to anyone left in the room too long.
The walls know what they are. The walls were built on what they were built on. The money that restored them came from where it came from. The wheel turned, as wheels do, with the bleak, grinding, impersonal humor of things that do not require our permission to be what they are.
The creatures will not feel it. They never feel the ground shift. That is what the ooze is for.
But the documents survive. They always survive. A royal decree, Valladolid, 1548, sat in an archive for nearly five centuries and surfaced, with perfect timing, on a phone screen in Mexico City. The children of Cholula are not a rhetorical inconvenience to everyone. To some people they are a memory that requires no maintenance because it was never allowed to become a memory in the first place.
Down they’ll go, eventually. Back into the pressurized dark. Back into the warm thermal vents of their own certainties, the bioluminescent pulse of the approving apparatus, the perfect, sealed, nutritive darkness where the light cannot find them and the documents cannot reach them and those same children of Cholula are just a rhetorical inconvenience that someone else will deal with.
And the ooze will close over them like it always does.
Patient. Warm. Waiting for the next emergence.
Troy Nahumko is an award-winning author currently based in Spain. His recent book, Stories Left in Stone, Trails and Traces in Cáceres, Spain was published with the University of Alberta Press. As a writer and photographer he has contributed to newspapers and media such as The Globe and Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Toronto Star, The Irish World, The Straits Times, Lonely Planet, Khaleej Times, DW-World, El País, SUR in English and HOY.
US new sanctions revive a decades-old clash with Sherritt, rooted in the 1990s. (Image courtesy of Sherritt International.)
