I SWEAR I am not making this up!

dave barry 2

I SWEAR I am not making this up.

Event A. In the midst of arresting 1162 people for attempting to exercise their free-speech, a Stalinist regime reinstates an apparatchik who had earlier veered slightly from the party-line.

Event B. Citizens of a free country threaten to vote with their dollars.

According to Gannet columnist and one of the founders of the National Association of Black Journalists A. means free-speech is safer in Communist Cuba than in repressive Miami, as proven by B.

Obviously he words it differently but here it is titled:

Guillen and Cubans exercise free speech

A.) Shortly before Major League Baseball manager Ozzie Guillen was banished for five games for professing to admire Fidel Castro’s survival skills, I chanced upon a meeting in the capital of this communist country where free speech exacted no such penalty. Cuba is showing greater tolerance for openness and a willingness to change, albeit slowly. That was apparent in both the frankness of the discussion among participants of the meeting on race –and by the presence of professor Esteban Morales….Morales was expelled from Cuba’s Communist Party in 2010, a defrocking that is tantamount to internal exile, after he wrote two articles arguing that corruption is “much more dangerous” than dissidents within the country. He was reinstated last year without backing away from his criticism.

B. Despite the chastened manager’s (Ozzie Guillen) public apology, protesters demanded he be fired and threatened to boycott the team, if he wasn’t dismissed.

Absolutely Un-Freakin Real