"Cuba's having an election today," I tell my wife.
"Hmm." She takes a bite of cold pizza. "Wonder who'll win."
I just got e-mail from my dad and his wife, who are living in the Czech Republic now. They recently met with his aunt, my great-aunt, who's over seventy and has Parkinson's. I met her once, when I was 15. The main thing I rememver from that meeting -- this was in 1990, just after the Velvet Revolution -- was her explaining to me how she used to type samizdat.
You would take a sheet of letter paper, which is like tissue paper used for packing, and lay a carbon under it, and another sheet of paper, and another carbon, until you had about ten or fifteen pieces of paper. And then you'd carefully roll it into your typewriter, and then you'd type very hard so that it would impress on all ten copies. And that was how forbidden literature would get distributed, under Communism.
But that was a long time ago, and things are different now. Vaclav Havel just completed his last term as president of the Czech Republic. In the seventies he was in prison. He was a high-profile political prisoner, so ultimately he was treated pretty well. And if you credit the cynics, the real reason the Velvet Revolution of '89 went so smoothly was that Havel cut a deal with the Communists.
I'm not a cynic, though. I think the point is that the Czech Republic used to be a country where, in order to read something critical of the government, you had to use samizdat. Now you can get political commentary on the Internet.
And now Fidel ("faithful") is going to be unanimously re-elected. And I fully expect some news service -- possibly even Reuters -- to report it with a neutral or positive spin; failing to call attention to the fact that this election, like all those under Communist dictatorships, is a sham.
Here in Canada it's fashionable to vacation in Cuba. I find it hard to understand how Canadians can feel good about supporting the last totalitarian Communist regime in this hemisphere, but they do.