Reply #60: Richard Gott is a veteran journalist who works for the Guardian. [View All]

Richard Gott has reported on Latin America for more than four decades. In the 1960s he worked at the University of Chile, where he wrote Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. He is a former Latin America correspondent and features editor for the British newspaper The Guardian and author of Cuba: A New History, among other books. His most recent book is entitled Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (Verso, 2005).
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http://redpepper.blogs.com/venezuela/2005/11/an_interview_wi.html

Reference to his Cuba book:

Cuba: A New History by Richard Gott - 19/02/2005
Cuba: A New History by Richard Gott,
Yale University Press
2004, 384 pages, hardback
£18.99
ISBN 0-300-10411-1

Steve Wilkinson reviews a new history of Cuba

Long awaited and much needed, this new history of Cuba is, unlike the huge Hugh Thomas ‘bible,’ of manageable proportions at just 384 pages. Thus it serves as a sound introduction as well as a handy reference for the more initiated.

Richard Gott, formerly of The Guardian comes to Cuba with an experienced eye and as someone who was himself not an insignificant part of the story – being the man who helped to identify the body of Che Guevara after his murder in 1967. Gott, then a young reporter was in Bolivia doing a documentary when the hero was captured and killed. A case of being in the right place at a wrong time, but nonetheless one that has equipped him well for this task.

This is not a book that many on the other side of the Atlantic will like, simply because Gott has no brook with the mistaken assumptions about the revolution that prevail over there. Fidel is not a tyrant, says Gott, and does not rule without the consent of the people. It should be compulsory reading in all Miami high schools.
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But Gott, to be fair, is a fair man. He painstakingly builds towards the understanding that because of racism, because of imperialism, the Cuban nation was not really formed until after 1959.
He is also the first commentator of note from outside Cuba, as far as I know, to venture an opinion on what is likely to happen after Fidel dies. While I cannot agree that Fidel is preparing Cuba for a return to capitalism or that today he is largely absent from the scene, I can applaud Gott for arguing that nothing will happen when the great man dies – the revolution will carry on much as it is right now.
(snip)

http://www.cubanlibrariessolidaritygroup.org.uk/news.asp?ID=81

Richard Gott on Anthony Seldon, Blair. As ‘Iraq’ joins ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’ in the lexicon of British foreign-policy disasters, does the Labour Prime Minister have his own neo-imperial programme?

RICHARD GOTT

THE THIRD CRUSADE

Elections in Britain on 5 May 2005 brought a third victory to Tony Blair’s New Labour party, though with a much reduced majority in parliament, only 35 per cent of the popular vote, and barely a fifth of the overall electorate—the lowest percentage secured by any governing party in recent European history. ‘When regimes are based on minority rule, they lose legitimacy’, Blair had told an audience at the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999. He was thinking at the time of the former Yugoslavia of Slobodan Miloševic´ and of apartheid South Africa, but his warning could now be applied to his own regime. More people abstained from voting in May 2005 than voted Labour. Disgust, rather than apathy, was the root cause of the abstention.
(snip/...)

http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26710.shtml

A Guardian article on Tony Blair:
The drive to intervene
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,207293,00.html

ETC.

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His interests are rather too broad to place him in the category you devised. I think he has a somewhat larger understanding of the world than some.