Bella Thomas is an adviser to the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation and Axess TV. She worked as a journalist and researcher in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America from 1994. She wrote for a study group that looked at communist countries in transition, and for the Washington Post and other United States papers. More recently she has worked in documentary films, curated an exhibition at the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol about the relationship between food and empire, and organised the Engelsberg Seminar 2006, a conference in Stockholm under the auspices of the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation on the theme of the secular state and society

Recent articles

Fidel Castro has dominated Cubans' minds as well as lives for forty-seven years. How have they coped? Bella Thomas explores the intimate psychic effects of an era nearing its end.

(This article was first published on 13 August 2006)

A historic church in east London is hosting a series of debates exploring some of the most contested issues of modern Britain - multiculturalism, feminism and the relationship with America. Bella Thomas, architect of the Blackwall debates, explains their inspiration.

Cuba's reality is layered, complex, inaccessible. There is no soap, but people are clean; little food, but people survive; no freedom, but people talk in code. How to go beyond the traps of nostalgia and romanticism? For Bella Thomas, a fascinating conversation with a comandante far beyond illusion gradually reveals a secret entrance to the Cuban heart.