There actually has been some coverage here of Castro's crackdown on prominent dissidents, sending dozens of writers and journalists to prison for long terms. However, there's been little criticism on the editorial pages (Baltasar Porcel has actually spoken out on this, to his credit. For once. Libertad Digital has been very critical of Castro. That's all I've seen as far as opinion pieces go.) Seems to me that if we're hunting down enemies of democracy, we'd do a lot better looking in Havana than in Washington. The Spanish left, of course, is never going to admit this. They're too busy criticizing America for the Baghdad looting and calling American troops "murderers" for having killed a Spanish journo to notice such an atrocious and blatant act of injustice and censorship.

Well, here's a story from Fox News about three guys who hijacked a ferry trying to get to Florida last week. They didn't kill anybody. They were sentenced to death and summarily shot. Now, the Spanish left periodically works itself up into paraoxysms about the fact that in most American states we execute murderers after due process of law. Somehow they never seem to notice it when Fidel has people shot after a mock trial, though, for having done much less.

Here's the link from Libertad Digital on the story. They've got a link to a petition you can sign, and they're calling a demo for Saturday in front of the Cuban Embassy in Madrid. LD says that Mariano Rajoy, Aznar's No. 2, blasted Castro, calling him a "tyrant". CCOO, the Communist labor union, of all people, has protested too. The Socialist Party, the PSOE (People Subsidized with Our Earnings) somehow managed to avoid any condemnation of Castro's actions and voted no, along with Batasuna (ETA's political puppet) and the Communists, on a Parliamentary proposal to condemn Castro's actions.