Sunday readings (and the funny pages): 26-October-2007

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Along the Malecon tours Havana’s Interior Ministry Museum:

A stuffed German Shepherd and a rock once used to hide spy gear are among the curiosities at Havana’s little-known Museum of the Ministry of the Interior.

The museum is hidden in plain sight along Quinta Avenida in Miramar. A TripAdvisor traveler calls it “a true hidden gem”

… Museum displays include black-and-white photos of purported CIA agents sneaking around in Cuba as they try to drop off money and supplies for dissidents in the 1980s. Cuban agents caught the CIA on film and video and blew the agents’ cover. I understand that the CIA had to change its tactics in Cuba after that, relying more on electronic surveillance than fieldwork.

When Baker visited, the well-preserved German Shepherd – evidently a former Cuban police dog – was among the exhibits.

Sweet dreams are made of these…

The “sugar economy” of the 21st century may not be so sweet, Hope Shand writes in Foreign Policy in Focus:

Peak oil, skyrocketing fuel costs, and the climate crisis are driving corporate enthusiasm for a “biological engineering revolution” that some predict will dramatically transform industrial production of food, energy, materials, medicine, and the ecosystem. Advocates of converging technologies promise a greener, cleaner post-petroleum future, where the production of economically important compounds depends not on fossil fuels but on biological manufacturing platforms fueled by plant sugars. It may sound sweet and clean. But the “sugar economy” will be the catalyst for a corporate grab on all plant matter as well as the destruction of biodiversity on a massive scale.

Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive…

Mexico News and Reviews offers Five Tips for Staying Alive on Your Mexican Vacation.  My favorite:

4) Stay off of your balcony when you are drunk:
Perhaps it’s carelessness inspired by their access to universal healthcare, but Canadians have by far cornered the market for falling to their deaths after drunkenly cavorting on a high rise hotel balcony.
You might feel like it, but I assure you, you are not Superman.

The old terrorist and the candidate of change…
… are the same guy in today’s mayoral elections in Rio de Janeiro. Alexi Barrionuevo profiles Fernando Gabeira in the Sunday New York Times:

In September 1969, Fernando Gabeira helped kidnap the American ambassador to Brazil to protest the military government’s oppressive dictatorship here. On Sunday, he could become this city’s next mayor.

Mr. Gabeira at a military tribunal in Rio in 1970, where he was convicted for his role in kidnapping the American ambassador.

In the nearly four decades since that episode catapulted Mr. Gabeira into Brazilian history, the former student militant, now 67, has become a respected writer, congressman and symbol of the left here — although a photo of him wearing a woman’s bikini bottom also made him a sex symbol of sorts.

Now the slender, soft-spoken former guerrilla has a chance to help chart the future of a city that many say is crying out for radical redefinition after decades of steadily losing its place as a diplomatic and business hub in Brazil…

See ya’ in the funny pages.

Quico, at Caracas Chronicles, is a lively writer on the very active Venezuelan opposition, often cited by those searching for some evidence that the country is a dictatorship.   Its not a perfect country, but…

For a country where the standard of political commentary is, erm, not always what one might hope for, Venezuela sure produces a freakish number of really brilliant editorial cartoonists.

…

In Venezuela it’s perfectly normal for the guy who scribbles the newspaper funnies to get commissioned for a vast roadside mural and sell his more “serious” work in super fancy galleries, where art collectors compete for signed originals of their more celebrated strips. It’s the editorial cartoonist as public intellectual, in the sense Edward Said envisioned…