Yesterday Land and the Pirates of the Carribean

A blogger follows plans by Cuban authorities to build a "theme park" to showcase the island's achievements. Babalu Blog starts an informal contest to suggest motifs. Some ideas put forward by readers for the new park include Torture Land, Repression Land, Snitch Land, and Hunger Land.

Although most people are probably unaware of it, a theme park called Stalin World opened in Lithuania. During a gala opening:

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thousands of invited guests were greeted at the gate by an actor dressed as Stalin; a Lenin look-a-like, complete with a goatee and cap, sat fishing by a nearby pond. Guests were invited to drink shots of vodka and eat cold borscht soup from tin bowls, while loud speakers blared old communist hymns. Nearby, red Soviet propaganda posters read: "There’s No Happier Youth in the World Than Soviet Youth!"

"It combines the charms of a Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet gulag prison camp," Malinauskas told assembled journalists, including a handful from abroad who’d flown in to report on the bizarre spectacle.

Commentary

I think the Cuban authorities would be ill-advised to open a theme park in Cuba. The regime's admirers like fantasy, but not that kind of fantasy. They like to imagine a Communism that never was, the one that existed in poetry readings at Revolution Bookstores. The kind that still exists, provided you never go looking for it.