Wait - What Just Happened In Cuba?

Nothing happened. Don't pay attention to it. The Cheese Vendors in Miami & the Hacky-Sack Construction Company in Havana don't care, why should you? Instead, listen to this:

In eighteen eighty seven, on a Wednesday I think, the grumpy bastards who wrote that ridiculous forgery The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion were having coffee outside a well-regarded Moscow urinal. They had spent the night spreading nasty rumors about their landlord's sexuality (finally deciding that he fucked goats, although a last-minute rally to label him simply "gay" failed only because the main supporters disappeared into the bathroom for fifteen minutes), but, although they looked forward to the future tarring & feathering that was bound to happen, they were slightly dissatisfied. They had been ruining lives with rumors for years now, starting with their athletics' coach in Boy's School, but one could tell they longed for bigger prey. Why not take on an entire race?

In what is always ironic about shit like this, these ne'er-do-wells weren't exactly anti-Semitic. They frankly hated everyone. In less than a year they would have the themes for the Protocols & would only have to wait for Dmitri to come up with a good name. Dmitri wasn't much of a thinker, but he did have a fake ID so he could get the guys booze & he was a little attractive, so women would talk to him. This was an ugly bunch of fellows, so getting a girl close to them was quite the task.

This group of troublemakers need not concern us entirely. I mention that Wednesday in eighteen eighty seven because, after a fight broke up over who spilled the last of the sugar, an American who we'll call Theodore Roosevelt was stumbling out of a Moscow brothel two houses down. This man was in town on a brief Eastern European tour to promote what was soon to be a new weapon in the War On Sailing: radiation. Ostensibly looking for an attractive scientist to "discover" radiation, he had recently met a charming Polish girl named Marie who was on the top of his list. But he had plans to visit both Moscow & St Petersburg & had figured that, Russians being Russian, their scientists might spend time in whorehouses. That was his excuse anyway - he really just wanted to have sex.

As he passed the ruffians, they took notice of what was surely the bushiest damn mustache they had ever seen in their lives, & it astonished them. Their reaction, too, astonished Theodore Roosevelt (not his real name). In the way that history sometimes works - pushing two kinds of people together who probably would never have otherwise had anything to do with each other - there was a sudden moment of emotional clarity, & the coffee-drinking pranksters surrounded the man & gave him what had to be (I assert without a whole of data, but come on!) the first ever Group Hug in Russia. Tears flowed freely, &, even though they picked Roosevelt's pocket, & he stabbed one of them in the butt cheek, they remembered the meeting fondly, years later, when Roosevelt, who was an elected official at the time (but not the president because it's not the same Roosevelt I'm trying to tell you), visited the group (reduced in number to six since the one called Vlad had found a girl & was now working with Lenin as a door-to-door communist) at the circus where they were now working.

They confessed to Roosevelt their authorship of the Protocols & grumbled because they saw copies of it everywhere, & yet hadn't made a dime off it. "Maybe," said Roosevelt, "you should have put your name on it. Authors who sign their books get royalties & stuff." "D'oh!" they all said together.

What does this have to do with the recent events in Cuba? (I know you understand what this has to do with the War On Sailing! You're not idiots!) Well, at the circus, sitting in a stroller lined with the down of revolutionary geese was a young Raul Castro!

That's much more important than the puppet show going on now in Caribbean.