Blog Review: El Güicho Crónico

I am gifted with a "genius radar." It is the ability to process as little as one paragraph of prose through an unpatented internal mechanism too complex to explain and not altogether understood by me, which, in a matter of seconds, provides me with the writer's IQ. Of course, we should never confuse IQ with utility. Hyperintelligent people are rarely useful to society. The smartest man who ever lived collected trolley car transfers and wrote the authoritative text on them, the greatest monument to misplaced scholarship since St. Thomas Aquinas calculated the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin. That much said, I believe I have discovered the greatest intellect in the Cuban-American blogosphere. No, it is not Val Prieto. A joke like that would make me an imbecile.

As it happens, the genius to whom I refer doesn't take himself too seriously, which is a good thing. In a country where someone who reads books is considered a little odd and one who writes books the oddest of the odd, it would hardly do to parade one's intellectual endowments without at least buttressing same with a considerable layer of regular guy bravado. This our genius does a little to excess, but then again he has a lot of genius to cover. In the autobiographical sketch appended to his blog, he reproduces the grateful exhalations of various women in flagrante delicto, a broad slice of humanity — German, Peruvian, French, Argentine, Brazilian, etc. — attesting to the universitality of his libido if not his genius. Do not be fooled: the genius lurks behind the jerk, who exists only to enable the genius to exist. This genius calls himself a "precocious retard," which, socially speaking, most geniuses are; but we believe he is just undercompensating.

This genius is not very prolific. He started his blog in September 2007 and has produced some 25 posts to date. Of course, the biggest fools in blogdom are the most prolix. Quantity can never supply the place of quality, though it is often mistaken for it by even bigger fools.

The name which this newest Cuban blogger goes by is El Güicho Crónico. I am going to refer you to my favorite post from El Güicho which provides the key to who we are as a people and what the future holds for us. Having read it, you will never see our country the same way again. Whether that is a good or bad thing, I will leave to your discretion.

http://guicho-cronico.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-post.html