Cuba's Potemkin village

Michael Totten, who usually covers behind the scene stories in the Middle East and other war zones, visited Cuba and came back with a picture overlooked by official visitors.

Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.

Headsup AnnAlthouse

and don't forget they jailed dissidents. Sure, the people who lack internet access and a free press will mourn and tell reporters how sad they were, but wait til they get free, and you will hear about these things in the same way you heard about the atrocities behind the iron curtain once people were allowed to talk.

BBC reports on one of the few groups that laments their loved ones jailed as political prisoners and who sometimes are allowed to demonstrate.

also forgotten and not covered: Cuba's link with the drug trade, and with groups like FARC that killed people in the name of the revolution (and helped them by assiting the drug trade).

And then there was the story on how Russia spread revolution in Africa, and how Cuba sent 30 thousand troops to Angola to "assist" a minority tribe takeover of that country. NYTimes story.

 In Angola, it was about oil, so the result was that local politicians got rich, and the ordinary folks are left with a yellow fever epidemic.