RCAB's Funniest Posts for 2007

Here are 10 of the RCAB's funniest posts this year. With nearly 500 to choose from, and almost all of them humorous (or at least imbued with humor), it was not an easy choice. In fact, I have expended more time selecting them than if I had written 2 or 3 new posts. I excluded most of the Babalú critiques because they would have overwhelmed everything else. I also sought to vary the topics, although 10 posts do not afford much opportunity to be expansive. My favorite from this selection? It's a tie between Anita Snow the hunger artist and the 520 lbs. woman who went to Cuba to in search of new knees and a revived sex life. Of course, you could click any month on your right and laugh for hours if you are so disposed. It's suppose to be good for you. It certainly is good for me.


Juventud Rebelde Hails Metrosexuality in Cuba (11/24/07)
One would think that in a country where women use sugar syrup (almíbar) for hair dressing and lightning fluid for deodorant (both excellent for their purposes if these are to catch bees or fire), the likelihood of men co-opting their "beauty products" for their own personal toilet would be slim. But, if Juventud Rebelde is to be believed, metrosexuality has taken Cuba by storm...

Cuban Ambassador Puts On Fashion Show In Jamaica to Mark "Cuba Day" There (Updated) (Oct. 31, 2007)
I didn't know there was a "National Day of Cuban Culture" in Jamaica. The idea itself is not incongruous; the two Caribbean islands share a long and complex history, though their roots and colonial experiences are not identical. The focus of the festivities was a fashion show which featured the latest innovations from Cuba's so-called "fashion industry." Now, the island's chancletera aristocracy has never been obsessed with dressing to the nines. There is nary an Evita Perón among them. On the contrary, though their confiscated pre-Castro mansions have the latest appliances from K-Mart and their larders may be stocked with precious delicacies from a typical American Dollar Store, their wardrobes are not noted for great extravagance...

Another Satisfied (Foreign) Customer of Cuba's Health Care System (Sept. 6, 2007)
Here's a follow-up on Diane Paul, the 520 lb. Canadian who went to Cuba in October for knee replacement surgery... As we noted when Mrs. Paul first announced her quest for new knees in Cuba, she should ask to see them before they were implanted. Improvisation is the great resourse of Cuban medicine. A patient with bone cancer recently had a section of his legbone replaced with a broomstick. The operation was successful. New bone actually grew over the broomstick. No doubt the news of this revolutionary achievement would not have been made public if the operation had failed. Maybe it failed many times before this success. Still, we warned Mrs. Paul to be wary or she could end up with wooden clogs for knees...

Of "Che" Guevara's Hair and Napoleon's Penis (Oct. 26, 2007).
Gustavo Villoldo has had his payday at long last and I couldn't be happier for him. If everything else has been commercialized about "Che" Guevara, why not his goldilocks? The old freedom fighter will receive $100,000 (minus commission) for a tress of "Che" Guevara's hair which Villoldo snipped 40 years ago before burying the serial killer...

Ana Menéndez Psychoanalyzes Cuban Exiles (Sept. 24, 2007)
[Y]ou would do Ana Menéndez a great injustice if you thought she was merely a self-hating Cuban who trades on her ethnicity while remaining aloof from "her people" and even contemptuous of them; who discovered at the age of 35, after denying her roots all her life, that being a Cuban by accident and a liberal by choice had its advantages in the world of journalism, where such rara avis are collected and sheltered and even presented to the world as representative of their species when in fact they are only freaks...

White Dade R.I.P. (Sept. 12, 2007)
As this is a review of Cuban-American blogs, I do not usually concern myself with blogs written by Anglos for the expressed purpose of heaping scorn on Cubans and Hispanics in general. Perhaps I should. The most prominent of these blogs is (or was) White Dade. I only learned of its existence at its funeral. The author was obliged to close his blog when he was "outed" as a racist by his college newspaper. Before the prospect of losing his sinecure as a grad-student-cum-instructor, he put away his bedsheet and closed his blog. Well, almost... One of White Dade's last posts was written as HBC (Hot Blonde Chick). In it he/she complains endlessly about the unwanted attentions of short Hispanic men at local bars, where at 6'2" he/she towers over everybody. White Dade seems particularly fixated with the size of Hispanic men's penises, which he believes to be smaller than the endowments of white men...

Insanity, Homoeroticism and Xenophobia on "The Babalú [Faux] Radio Hour" (Aug. 2, 2007)
Never before had I heard a man having a nervous breakdown on radio, even faux radio; but the dozen or so listeners to yesterday's Babalu Radio Hour witnessed such a spectable. It was frightful, horrible and unexpected...

ஹொசே மார்த்தியின் எளிய கவிதைகள் - முன்னுரை (July 7, 2007)
"The Distilled Wisdom of Manuel A.Tellechea." As published in the Indian press. Yep, it's in Hindi.

Anita Snow the Hunger Artist, or The New York Times' "Snow Job" (June 13, 2007)
Let this be duly noted at the onset: Anita Snow's stint as a hunger artist is nothing but a charade, an imposture and a fraud. To all those attributes let us add too unoriginality and callousness to a degree seldom encountered in that most cynical of all enterprises known as American journalism...

Babysitting the Beacon School Bitongos (April 25, 2007)
[T]hese kids might have profitted from their trip to Cuba if they had been able to enroll in the Literacy Campaign, not as alphabetizers but as the alphabetized. If this is the kind of education my taxdollars underwrite, I am all for cutting off funding for public education. Truly, if I were their teacher, I would probably have ended up a suicide. The funny thing is that they don't seem to have any inkling of just how stupid and illiterate they are. I guess this can be explained by the media's description of their school as "special" (in a good way) and "prestigious." They may be under the misapprehension that these juvenile delinquents are attending Stuyvesant or Bronx Science, but I am not...

Forgot about this one:

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize; Cuban Dissidents Again Ignored (Oct. 12, 2007)

Albert Arnold Gore has been awarded the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. America's national joke is now the Norwegians' paradigm of modernity and savior of the planet. Jerry Lewis must feel relieved that now somebody else represents the cultural divide between the U.S. and Europe. Of course, Lewis actually claimed to be a comedian...