im getting increasingly annoyed at the reporting of fidel castro's 'retirement' from politics. nicky cambell on R5 this morning was scathing about cuba's human rights record and anti-revolutioanries are queueing up to slag off the regime. castro's revolution kicked out a deeply unpleasant right wing pro american and corrupt governemnt in the 50s. the revolution has killed many and locked up many and human rights IS an issue in cuba for sure..but castro has brought many benefits to his island in terms of health care and education and has had to do all this in spite of intense antagonism from america. and lets just pause a moment and consider the good old US of A.

how many times are we prepared to let america back unpleasant regimes (the contras, saddam first time around, the mujahadin against the soviets and many more), for how much longer are we happy for them to torture people in guantanamo bay, or to invade places they dont like (from greneda to iraq) or to ignore international agreements (kyoto) and to export their capitalist 'revolution' to the rest of the world (macdonalds)? lets face it the USA is not very democractic (remember florida folks?), it is an extremely unpleasant culture where schoolchildren murder each other in gun battles, it is home to some extremely unpleasant religious bigots who think that their beliefs (their 'faith') allows them to kill surgeons who perform legal abortions, it is run by obscenely rich political families and it thinks it has the right to tell everyone else how to live. after 9/11 it also believes it is the only country in the world to suffer from terrorism - a terrorism that it did so much to create. dont forget either that america all but wiped out its indiginous peoples for financial gain - it is capitalism in national form while cuba is communism in national form. give castro a break, he's not perfect (far from it) but neither are the chinese, and america (and us) are quite prepared to do business with them and let them host the olympics. hypocrites