Friday, April 11, 2003

So much pond scum, so little time
While we've been focusing one brutal thug, another one close to home has been up to his old tricks as the AP reported earlier this week in Cuban dissidents ordered to prison:
HAVANA -- Fidel Castro's government dealt a crippling blow to Cuba's opposition movement Monday, sentencing peaceful activists, journalists and an economist to up to 27 years in prison for allegedly collaborating with U.S. diplomats to undermine the socialist state.

Prosecutors sought life sentences for the dissidents, who were among 80 facing closed trials that began Thursday.

... journalists were being punished for having such books as Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, and others written by Groucho Marx and Stephen King.
And surprise, surprise, surprise - the useful idiots are forming up into a cloud around Castro's ass as Mickey Kaus reveals in La Fiesta de la Gulag:
Why are a group of high-powered "New York-based VIPs" -- as reported in A.L. Bardach's Newsweek International "Global Buzz" column -- joining Yoko Ono in traveling to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro in the middle of Castro's repressive campaign to throw scores of dissidents in prison? ... It's one thing to go to visit Cuba. It's another to go now, when Castro will use the publicity as cover for his anti-democracy drive. It's especially ironic that press and publishing executives are paying an apparent premium to meet with a man who is busy jailing journalists and writers for being journalists and writers. (The trip's cost, -- a reported $6,500 per person -- is inexplicable, unless you consider that Ono's presence guarantees an audience with Fidel.)
On the other hand, time spent in proximity with Yoko is likely to make one contemplate suicide.