Oh, Glorious Cuba!

[Links added]
So I was in this little pan-Asian grocery store a couple of weeks ago to buy Thai basil and tofu for a curry when I overheard a conversation between a French woman and the female Vietnamese owner about how to cook and serve yucca. I jumped in with my two cents, saying that it's really delicious with a Cuban mojo sauce, basically a lime vinaigrette with garlic, cumin and cilantro thrown in.

After the French woman said, delighted with the multicultural exchange, "This is how life should be. I share, you share. All of us peacefully sharing with each other," I got into a discussion with the Vietnamese woman who was equally thrilled to talk about Cuba, a country she just adores, so beautiful, the people so wonderful.

It had, as usual, the fingernail on chalkboard effect with me, and I gave my stock answer. "It's a very complicated place." And because I've been following Cuba lately through news and blogs said, "People have been suffering a lot lately. Especially since the last hurricane. There's a lot of hunger."

And for a minute she concedes that maybe what tourists see from their resorts and tour buses isn't the whole picture. But she can't help herself. She declares that Cuba is much more beautiful than Viet Nam. No pollution! And I give up, not telling her that environmentalists worldwide have been sounding the alert for years, and when I was there a man told me the people of his region were forbidden to fish. The water was too polluted. Though he thought maybe it was just one more way they were being screwed with by the government.

But who gives a shit, really, when Cuba offers such a handy hook on which to hang all our hopes and dreams of beauty, revolution, life under a perpetually shining sun. Cubans, conveniently muzzled, have few ways to wake us up. When they can, they write blogs no one reads or are denounced as the work of spies, as are occasional critical, though measured, articles in the global press.

Meanwhile the regime does whatever it can get away with. Including, in 2006, setting up a deal with a Curaçao dry dock to fix up American cruise ships with barely paid labor in trade for payment of a debt.

Besides grueling double shifts, the workers did, after all, get two whole pairs of overalls, a set of boots, a helmet and a certain amount of food depending on how hard they were judged to have worked.

Goshdangit, they should have been grateful instead of escaping from the docks and bringing suit for forced labor. Especially since the dock's production manager was Manuel de Jesus Bequer Soto Del Valle, the nephew of el comandante's wife, Dalia Soto Del Valle.

Lies, of course, all lies, by imperialist spies.

Here's an account of the case in Curaçao recounted by the most biased of them all, the nefarious Christian Science Monitor.

The judgment for the plaintifs was reported in The Miami Herald. While they were awarded several million dollars, it's unlikely they'll see a penny; the Curaçao company walked out of the U.S. court and cannot be forced to pay. The only repercussion might be for U.S. cruise companies to be shamed into not dealing with them in the future.