We Waited Five Hours for This?: So, loco Uncle Fidel got on the teevee the other night and made a 5-hour speech. To put that in perspective, that's roughly as long as one-and-a-half NFL games, 2 MLB games, 2 and a half college basketball games, or one Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with extras (allegedly). Now if I'm going to watch anything for 5 hours, there better be a payoff. And payoffs there were!
Castro said 100,000 pressure cookers would be made available each month, an announcement that underscored the communist country's continued retreat toward greater political and economic centralism.
The move "will do away with the rustic kitchen,'' Castro told the Federation of Cuban Women on Tuesday night, saying the new cookers would use half the energy of the homemade ones they will replace.
The program could wipe out what has become a popular, and in most cases legal, private business that uses molds to make pressure cookers from cheap aluminum. Although imported cookers are sold in stores for about $25 more than the average Cuban earns in a month; homemade ones cost about $5.50.
Now let's back that azz up for a second: Fidel is going to wipe out Cuba's homemade pressure cooker cottage industry by "flooding the market" with new energy efficient cookers at the rate of 100-thousand a month. I can hear the ladies cry with delight: "Free health care, free education, and now free pressure cookers! Viva Fidel!"
Oh, wait a minute...there's an old Cuban saying that, when translated, roughly means, "There may be such thing as a free lunch, but the pressure cookers will cost you half your monthly salary."
At subsidized prices, the government-distributed cookers will cost about the same as the homemade ones. And the government's cookers can be paid for in monthly installments.
That's 5 easy installments of $1.10, which might not seem like much, except when you make ELEVEN DOLLARS A MONTH. It is unclear whether buying these cookers on the Crazy Fidel installment plan is optional, like anything is optional in Cuba. No matter, this is a much better option that harnessing the plucky, albeit piss-ant power of the Cuban entrepreneurial spirit.
Workers paradise? More like a paradise of paella! (Pray tell, what is Spanish for "Bitch better have my paella"?)
Now if only Fidel can do something about all those goddamned whores, which at last count, have serviced one in every 9 Canadian men, a smaller ratio of British men, and Woody Harrelson. No, that's in the next 5-hour speech. Spit tha' real, Fiddy!
Ah, Cuba. A land where an episode of Pimp My Ride could reduce a grown man to tears.
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