Cuba

I meant to post the link to this article a couple of weeks ago, but the float trip intervened and I forgot all about it.

The headline is fun enough: Sympathizing with Carter, while laughing at Bush

But my favorite part is the line at the bottom, which is a blurb about the author: Alarc�n, the president of the National Assembly in Cuba, is Cuba's most powerful political figure after Fidel Castro.

Now, obviously the author chose that byline, and the Chron bought it. But I would suggest that Mr. Castro's brother, General Raul Castro, the head of the army and the first vice president, is a slightly more powerful "political" figure in the totalitarian regime.

And I could spend all night picking apart the editorial itself, but one thing is really amusing. Those Havana hotel bombings in recent years (1997, to be precise) referred to by the author? The Castro regime long blamed the United States for those "terrorist" bombings (!?), but many sources have suggested that the Castro regime itself was behind the attacks, so that it would have a pretext for one of its regular draconian security crackdowns -- which conveniently took place shortly thereafter. How's that for irony?

I'm sure the editors of the Chron didn't remember any of that, though, since they decided to run this propaganda piece that would have been better suited to the local Pacifica station. Ah well.

[Posted at 22:11 CST on 06/03/02] [Link]