The Asia-Europe People’s Forum 7 with the theme “For Social and Ecological Justice” took place in Beijing between the 13th and 15th October 2008. Since the venue was China, there were intrinsic limitations and challenges that emerged from the very outset of its preparatory phase. Nonetheless, AEPF-7 turned out to be a hugely successful event and a number of Asia-Europe observers considered it as ’historic’.

The brave new world of neoliberalism lies in ruins. Its wealth turned out to be based on robbery, sham and deceit. The Left is in a new situation. Without its self-transformation and development of a capacity to act that is adequate for these times, it will squander for a long time any possibility of becoming a force of social, ecological, democratic and peace-promoting social transformation beyond capitalism. This paper, presented here in a shortened form, aims to contribute to the discussion about the strategies of a Left that is renewing itself in the crisis of neoliberalism.

Cuba, and in particular its former President, Fidel Castro, is already a player at the fifth Summit of the Americas which takes place Friday and Saturday, April 17 and 18, in Port of Spain, Trinidad. That much is evident from information coming out of Havana, Moscow, Santiago de Chile and La Paz in recent days.

Upon his inauguration as Nicaraguan president in January 2007, Daniel Ortega asserted that his government would represent “the second stage of the Sandinista Revolution.” His election was full of symbolic resonance, coming after 16 years of electoral failures for Ortega and the party he led, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN). The Sandinistas’ road to power was paved with a series of previously unthinkable pacts with the old somocista and Contra opposition. The FSLN’s pact making began in earnest in 2001, when, in the run-up to that year’s presidential election, Ortega forged an alliance with Arnoldo Alemán, an official during the Somoza regime who had been elected president in 1997.