So sorry Fidel

Como a Gripe A mudou a minha visão do mundo....até voltei a ler o The Times! E que dia para voltar a ler o times!

E como não sou nada egoísta, ora leiam:

Up in Smoke

The good news for Fidel Castro is that capitalism has caught a cold, just as he hoped and predicted it would. And the cruel irony? His fellow Cubans are the ones who are doing the sneezing.

The recession that has chased so many tycoons from their boardrooms — taking their humidors with them — has made spending as much on a Cohiba as on a week’s groceries feel profligate. Simultaneously, the difficulty of being able to smoke in restaurants has prompted many smokers to stub out their habit. As a result, demand for Cuban cigars is waning: it fell by 3 per cent last year and is down a further 15 per cent this year. That, in turn, has led to less land being sown to tobacco: 30 per cent less. Farmers are frantic. Capitalism has taken a kicking, but communism is smarting, too. Castro has learnt the hard way that if there is one thing worse than wanting something, it’s getting it.

Of all the barometers of economic vitality, demand for Havanas is not the commonest. It perhaps ought to be. A decade ago, when stock markets were booming, the appetite for Cuban cigars boomed with them. Exporters couldn’t keep up, resulting in even more fake Havanas than usual seeping on to the world market to satisfy demand from plutocrats who wished to flaunt their wealth without actually setting light to $100 bills in front of their dinner guests.

Now the economic cycle has turned. The plutocrats are no longer puffing, bars are smoke-free, and there are no Hemingways or Churchills, no Che Guevaras or Groucho Marxes, to take up the slack. Even Fidel gave up Havanas in 1985.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, as Freud said. Yes, but sometimes it’s also a straw in the wind.

Published in The Times, 8th October 2009.