"Mugabe describes himself as both a practicing Catholic and a Marxist, but his birthday party was held at the Elephant Hills golf resort..."

"... near Victoria Falls, just up the road from the haunts of Cecil. Mugabe was honored with seven birthday cakes. One was so large that it had to be carried in by eight men; another was described as the size of a mattress. The celebration reportedly cost a million American dollars, in a country that now suffers up to ninety-five per cent unemployment and underemployment, according to the C.I.A.’s World Factbook. (Mugabe conceded during his last election, in 2013, that at least sixty per cent of his countrymen were jobless). Three-quarters of Zimbabwe’s population lives below the poverty line. 'It’s sad when wildlife is abused, but the Zimbabwean people have been suffering decades of abuse under the wily old Mugabe, who seems never to relent and never to go away,' Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told me last week."

From "Cecil the Lion and Robert Mugabe," by Robin Wright in The New Yorker.

I don't understand the "but" in the first sentence — "a practicing Catholic and a Marxist, but his birthday party," etc. I mean, I understand it, but it assumes the reader thinks a certain way, and I don't.