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New York Times
6 days ago
- New York Times
A 500-Year-Old Receipt for Supplies to Conquer an Empire Is Returned to Mexico
About 30 years after it was discovered to be missing — and 500 years after it was written — the F.B.I. has returned a document bearing the signature of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés to Mexico. The manuscript, a register of payments from 1527, is one of 15 pages believed to have been stolen from Mexico's national archives between 1985 and 1993, the F.B.I. said. It was signed by Cortés, who led the overthrow of the Aztec empire for the Spanish crown. The F.B.I. said that it returned the document on Wednesday, and that no one would face prosecution in the theft because the document had changed hands many times since it vanished. The document 'outlines the payment of pesos of common gold for expenses in preparation for discovery of the spice lands,' Special Agent Jessica Dittmer, a member of the F.B.I.'s Art Crime Team, said in a statement, 'so it really gives a lot of flavor as to the planning and preparation for unchartered territory back then.' Those 'spice lands' that Ms. Dittmer spoke of were eastern and southeastern Asia. European explorers sailed west in the hopes of finding a faster route to the region, and instead landed in the Americas. In 1993, while archivists at the General Archive of the Nation in Mexico were creating microfilms of their collection of documents signed by Cortés, they discovered that 15 pages of the manuscript were missing. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Spectator
13-08-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Trump's Alaska meeting is a gift for Putin
From the Kremlin's point of view, holding a US-Russia summit in Anchorage, Alaska is an idea of fiendish brilliance. The venue itself determines the agenda. Literally half a world away from the petty concerns of the European continent, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin can flex the vastness of their respective countries. Anchorage is an eight-hour flight from Washington D.C. and roughly the same distance from Moscow, flying over no other country but Russia for most of the way. By travelling to the point where their countries almost touch in the North Pacific, both leaders can feel justified in prioritising issues that concern just the two of them, from arms control treaties to space cooperation to Arctic mineral rights. Seen from Anchorage, Ukraine seems a very distant and very local problem. The summit is the brainchild of Yuri Ushakov, a veteran diplomat who joined the USSR's foreign ministry in 1970. Ushakov is a wily old attack dog who learned the ways of Washington during a decade-long stint as Russian ambassador from 1998 to 2008. And in suggesting Alaska as a meeting point, Ushakov clearly knows how to flatter not only Trump's ego but also his own President's obsession with history. For Putin, Russia's conquest of north-east Asia and much of the coast of America's Pacific north-west is the founding myth of his country's modern greatness. In the 16th century Muscovy and Spain had both defeated Muslim occupiers and began expanding into rich new worlds east and west – in Spain's case, gold-rich America; in Muscovy's, fur-rich Siberia. Spanish conquistadors and Russian Cossacks reached the Pacific from different sides and started settling colonies along the coasts. In 1776, the Spanish Crown ordered the foundation of San Francisco – in the form of a Franciscan Mission and garrisoned Presidio – in direct response to news that Catherine the Great had started assembling a major Russian fleet to grab the unclaimed territory of northern California. In the event, Catherine's fleet was redeployed to fight a war with the Swedes, leaving most of California to the Spanish. Who was to say who was the more logical ruler of America's north-west coast, distant Madrid or distant St Petersburg? From 1816 until 1842 the southernmost frontier of the Russian empire was 70 miles north of San Francisco at Fort Ross on the Russian River (hence the name). For a brief period in the early 19th century Russia had a colony on Kaua'i island in Hawaii. And until 1867 the modern state of Alaska with its 6,500-mile coastline was known as Russian America and was a possession of the Tsar's. In the wake of the Crimean War, during which a Royal Navy force bombarded and briefly occupied the port of Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka, Tsar Alexander II realised he lacked the naval power to maintain control of his American colonies. He first offered Russian America to the British prime minister Lord Palmerston for the eminently logical reason that the territory was contiguous with British Columbia. Palmerston, however, was uninterested in acquiring half a million square miles of mostly unexplored North American wilderness. The only other plausible buyer was the US. But it took two years, and the distribution of tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to congressmen, for the Russians to persuade a reluctant secretary of state, William Seward, to write a cheque for $7.2 million for the Alaska Purchase – mocked at the time as 'Seward's Folly'. Even today, Alaska still bears the stamp of its century and a half as part of the Russian empire. A third of Alaska's population is Native American (by far the largest proportion of any US state) and most of the Aleut and Tlingit peoples still adhere to the Russian Orthodox faith. The major feature of every coastal town from Sitka to Kodiak is a distinctively Russian church, and there are communities of black-robed monks on out-lying islands – though most are Americans and their services are in English. Colonial echoes of Britain, France and Spain are commonplace in other countries, whether Anglican worshippers in Simla, French baguettes in Saigon or Spanish missions in California. Living echoes of a vanished Russian empire are much rarer and exist mostly in Alaska. It is clearly flattering and heartwarming for Putin to meet his American counterpart on what was once Russian territory. Some more excitable western commentators have claimed that hosting a summit in Anchorage encourages Putin's neo-imperial ambitions – including, supposedly, reclaiming the American lands sold by Alexander II. But the idea that 'Alaska Nash' (Alaska is Ours) is anything other than a Russian pub joke is absurd. A roadside billboard bearing that slogan and featuring a map of Russia including all of Alaska has been doing the rounds of Twitter as supposed evidence of Putin's revanchism. In fact it's just a jokey advertisement for a real estate company called Alaska. Rather than dog-whistling Russian imperialism, the location allows Putin to appeal to a bygone age of Russian-American cooperation where the two nations divided up large swaths of the world. The most recent example is, to Putin's mind, the Yalta conference of February 1945 where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill pored over maps and divided spheres of influence in the crumbling Nazi empire. A similar carve-up of Ukrainian territory is exactly what Volodymyr Zelensky fears and he has spent the week since the summit was announced gathering European support to insist that no deal can be done over the heads of the Ukrainians. Unfortunately for Kyiv, and for the Europeans, they're not invited. It's also highly likely that even if Putin and Trump reach some kind of a deal on a ceasefire, it will be largely on Russia's terms. But it's also possible that Moscow and Washington could agree on other, non-Ukraine related issues, such as getting Putin back on board with the New START treaty limiting the number of deployed nuclear weapons – the kind of deal that nuclear superpowers make between each other. And there is nothing that both Putin and Trump enjoy more than playing the role of imperial presidents.
Miami Herald
18-06-2025
- General
- Miami Herald
Are Pope Leo's ancestors from Cuba? Genealogy researchers in Miami think so
It has become an old joke in the Cuban-American community to note that Cubans seem to be everywhere. And so, when Pope Leo was elected to lead the Catholic Church and traces of his rich heritage began to emerge, including an ancestor who had been born in Havana, a Cuban genealogist in Miami rushed to figure out if this was just an isolated case or, if, by any chance, the first American Pope had Cuban roots. As it happened, the pope has several generations of Cuban ancestors. Robert Francis Prevost, the American cardinal who became Leo XIV after Pope Francis' death in April, was born in Chicago to a father with Italian and French ancestors and a mother with French, Canadian and Black heritage. But there was much more. The Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami tracked several generations of Cuban ancestors on his mother's side, dating back to the 17th Century, who themselves descended from Spanish and Italian families. In total, five generations in the pope's family tree on his mother's side were connected to Cuba, starting with Diego de Arana Isla, a Spanish captain who settled in Havana as an accountant for the Spanish Crown, and Juan Gonzalez Vazquez, a settler who farmed animals on land he owned in Pinar del Río in western Cuba. A century later, one of their descendants, Manuel José Ramos y Bastos, born in Havana in 1755, would travel to the United States and marry María Catalina Guesnon, a woman from New Orleans. He is one of the great-grandfathers of the pope's great-grandmother, Marie Rosa Pantaleón Ramos. The findings were first published by Mirelis Peraza, one of the Genealogy Club's directors, who said she was immediately curious when she learned about Ramón y Bastos' existence from another researcher who had traced the pope's roots in New Orleans. 'I was surprised, I didn't think I'd ever heard that there would be a pope with Cuban roots, and I made a mental note,' Peraza said. Then she found one of the surnames already linked to the pope in sources she was consulting to establish her family's own genealogy. From there, things went fast. Lourdes del Pino, the club's first vice president, picked up where Peraza left off and found Diego de Arana Isla's Spanish ancestors in the 1500s, 15 generations back in the pope's family tree. She also identified the Italian ancestors of Diego's Spanish wife, Ana Tadino, who lived in the Duchy of Milan, now part of Italy, at the time under Spanish rule. Their findings were reflected in the fascinating pope's family tree recently published in The New York Times. The Club, which has collaborated in the past with PBS's show 'Finding Your Roots,' once again partnered with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for the Times story. The pope's family tree 'is the perfect representation of the Americas,' said Del Pino. 'What fascinates us and we are delighted with is the diversity that the pope's genealogy has shown. An impressive diversity that the vast majority of Hispanics carry.' Del Pino said she had been surprised at how much ancient relatives traveled around the world. 'Spending two months on a ship? I'd go crazy, but for them, it was part of their lives,' she said. 'Once you start researching, you realize people in those times moved around much more than we thought.' Overcoming challenges Researching Cuban genealogy presents particular challenges, given the limited availability of digitized sources and Cuban government restrictions on accessing archives. But Peraza had a stroke of luck when she found out many of the records she was looking for were in one of the few early historical sources still available: a rare book of marriages that took place in the late 1600s and early 1700s at the Iglesia del Espírito Santo (Church of the Holy Spirit), Havana's second Catholic church. 'One of the things we have against us is that many of those books have been damaged over time; they are no longer available,' Peraza said. 'We were lucky that the pope's ancestors we found were all concentrated in the same area, that of the Church of the Holy Spirit, and coincidentally, almost everything fell into the same book, which luckily still survives.' The researchers' good fortune continued. Because Diego de Arana Isla wanted to become a knight of the Order of Santiago, a highly prestigious and selective appointment at the time, he underwent a thorough background check that was documented and is available in digital archives from Spain, making it easier for Del Pino to locate his ancestors. Diego became, in fact, a knight of the Order of Santiago in 1678. 'His service record and list of merits depict 40 years of devout service to the crown with multiple military and administrative posts throughout the colonies,' Peraza wrote. He died in Cuba in 1684. Incidentally, Diego's sister Catalina, whose children were born in Venezuela, would become the great-great-grandmother of Antonio José de Sucre, one of Latin America's independence leaders. The Aranas came from Isla, a small village in Cantabria in northern Spain. Diego's father, Diego de Arana Valladar, was born in 1595 and lived an adventurous life as the captain of a galleon in the Spanish Royal Navy, defending Portuguese settlements in the Caribbean and South America from Dutch corsairs, said Marial Iglesias, a Cuban historian and Harvard University researcher who collaborated on the Times story. (Portugal and Spain were united for about 60 years until 1640.) A final mystery As the surnames of the ancestors began to pop up, Iglesias realized that there is a chance the pope's Cuban ancestors might be connected to one of the most iconic places in Havana: La Plaza de la Revolución, or Revolution Square, where Pope Jean Paul II and Pope Francis had held mass during historic trips to the island. The landmark, topped with a massive obelisk and a statue of José Martí, Cuba's independence hero and most famous writer, was built under Fulgencio Batista's government in the 1950s as the 'Civic Plaza' in an elevation known as the Catalans' Hill. But in the past, that spot had a curious name: Loma de Tadino, or Tadino's Hill. 'I haven't had time to find out why it's called Loma de Tadino, but that's a very rare surname. The family lived in Cuba for generations, and it could have been their property,' Iglesias said. 'Imagine if the pope's Italian branch of the family, who moved to Cuba in the 1600s, gave name to the place where the statue of José Martí stands. How about that?'
New York Post
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
See ya, tequila: Discover the next agave craze deep in the heart of Mexico
Better watch your sips … er, six … all you celebrity moonshine moonlighters like George Clooney and Bryan Cranston. A (new-to-us) agave-based Mexican spirit sensation is gaining bar shelf space next to the liquorati. Say que onda to raicilla, a spirit literally rooted (its name means 'little root') in Mexico's southwestern, Pacific Ocean state of Jalisco. One of the best and brightest raicilla tabernas (distilleries) is Aycya. Hidden away in the lush fields of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains, raicilla now has a PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) just like Champagne. Raicilla can only be made here, from a specific, ancient agave native to Jalisco (though Nayarit is allowed to get in on the action a wee bit, too). 4 Aycya's name (said, 'I see ya') rhymes with said literal fire water and is so spelled in order for Americans to pronounce its product correctly — Branding to Goofus Gringos 101! And it pairs well with everything from agave syrup to citrus. As with mezcal, raicilla's purity makes it smooth and fruitified to the nth degree — Aycya uses the Agave maximiliana species — while tequila can be a mixto, containing up to 49% non-agtave sugars. As a result, tequila is pugilistic in nature, thus the salt and lemon ritual. Raicilla, conversely, makes love, not war, to your insides and manages to be sweeter, brighter and more floral than (mostly Oaxaca-made) mezcal which, created underground, is smokier and heavier than this surface-level-made cousin. But this now half-a-millennia-old Mexican fire water was banned for nearly a decade by the light-years-away Spanish Crown in the late 18th century (1785 to 1792) in order to protect the monarchy's global wine and brandy industries. It never quite recovered. These days, Aycya — whose first batch of raicilla started in 2022 — is run by the Fernandez del Valle family (brothers Diego and Pedro are the youthful faces of it, along with their lively grandmother, Charlotte) and its monocot-whispering maestro raicillero Jorge Luis. His grandfather, Don Guelo, was a honcho in this particular booze biz going way back. Using old-school, clay ovens, Aycya's production process takes three days of slow-cooking agave hearts, followed by another week, maybe even 10 days, of fermentation in stainless-steel tanks. The resulting raicilla come in multiple flavors like Maximiliana Joven (aged for 3 months with notes of fresh wood and hints of rosemary) and Maximiliana Madurada (aged for 12 months with notes of roasted agave, light oak and wild vanilla). 4 Want to know exactly how Aycya's agave whisperers brew their secret sauce? Sorry, their lips are sealed. AYCYA Raicilla And, much like vodka, versatile raicilla can be mixed with basically any and everything. The low-key best co-pilot is kumquat (also grown onsite) juice, which might be the one and only thing to justify the oddball citrus's existence. Drink that potent potable out of a copper cup and it makes for a mean mule replacement. So why aren't we seeing it on our side of the border? Aycya is currently tussling with the kind of buzz-killing bureaucracy only Merika can do in snail-slow states like Texas and California when it comes to fun imported goods. 'Red tape' is a frequent term you'll hear from the Aycya team. And who knows what all of this tariff tumult will mean. (Although, as of press time, they have successfully shipped their first batch of raicilla stateside starting from $100 per bottle including shipping fees, etc.) 4 Raicilla is tech-ing on tequilla for bar shelf space around Mexico (and hopefully up here, too). AYCYA Raicilla All the more reason to visit the taberna in the flesh at their 370-acre agave plantation in the small Jaliscan pueblito of La Estancia de Landeros, San Sebastián del Oeste, and indulge at the source. Puerto Vallarta is the closet big city and where to fly into and drop anchor in order to visit Aycya after a 90-minute rustic road drive. Velas Resorts' properties are nearly as omnipresent up and down Mexico's Pacific coast as farmacias. And the 80-room, hacienda-styled Casa Velas (from $361 a night), in downtown PV, is offering a package to its guests a 'Raicilla Roots' experience. 4 While raicilla may be a spa for your liver, Casa Velas can handle the rest of your body. NY Photo composite It includes a round-trip Jeep commute eastward to and fro Aycya, a guided tour of their facility and agave fields and, best of all, a tasting (with chips and salsa, claro) of four of the distillery's varietals plus a special edition raicilla only offered to partaking Casa guests. And unlike what they're selling over the counter at those farmacias, the 'medicine' at Aycya is legal to take back home. If that weren't enough, when it's about time to return to Casa Velas and nap it off by the pool, you'll be happy to know the all-inclusive is also adults-only. ¡Salud!
ITV News
02-06-2025
- ITV News
A replica of a legendary Spanish galleon, the Galeón Andalucía docks in Wales
The Galeon Andalucia is the replica of the type of vessel used by the Spanish Crown for maritime expeditions during the 16th through the 18th centuries.
