Manuel Valls is the real new thing in the European Left. He is French, born in Barcelona, Spain in 1962. He is currently a member of the socialist group in the French Parliament, and mayor of Evry. Considered the Sarko of the Left, he refused a job in Nicholas Sarkozy’s cabinet. He has just published Pour en finir avec le vieux socialisme... et etre enfin de gauche, [Editors’ Translation: “Out with the Old Socialism, In with the New”], which details his recipe for rebuilding a new socialism from the ashes of old dogma.

Raul Rivero was born in Cuba in 1945, and is considered the best poet of his generation. A professional journalist, he was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1970s for Prensa Latina. He and other nine journalists and writers signed a public letter to Castro, entitled " Carta de los Diez " , asking for political and economic reforms. The official state newspaper Granma immediately denounced the effort as a CIA plot. Sentenced to 20 years in 2003, he was liberated thanks to Spanish pressure. He is now a columnist at El Mundo (Madrid), a voice of independent and moderate Cuban opposition.

Alaa Aswany is an Egyptian dentist… and the most important novelist in the Arab world. His fourth book, The Yacoubian Building, was translated into 20 languages and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Arabic and French. His last novel, the bestseller Chicago, takes its title from the American city where he studied for a Master's Degree. He criticized the West, especially for supporting the Egyptian and Saudi regimes. He is a militant of Kifaya, a movement promoting democracy, a social group badly needed to oppose both to dictatorship and Islamic radicals.

I would take off of the list: Alex de Waal, Therese Delpech and.... Lee Kuan Yew (A national patriarch? An anti-democrat. Incredible!