"The Last Communist City/A visit to the dystopian Havana that tourists never see."

A Spring 2014 article by Michael J. Totten. Excerpt:

Many tourists return home convinced that the Cuban model succeeds where the Soviet model failed. But that’s because they never left Cuba’s Elysium.... Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.....

Communism destroyed Cuba’s prosperity, but the country experienced unprecedented pain and deprivation when Moscow cut off its subsidies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Journalist and longtime Cuba resident Mark Frank writes vividly about this period in his book Cuban Revelations. “The lights were off more than they were on, and so too was the water. . . . Food was scarce and other consumer goods almost nonexistent. . . . Doctors set broken bones without anesthesia. . . . Worm dung was the only fertilizer.” He quotes a nurse who tells him that Cubans “used to make hamburgers out of grapefruit rinds and banana peels; we cleaned with lime and bitter orange and used the black powder in batteries for hair dye and makeup.” “It was a haunting time,” Frank wrote, “that still sends shivers down Cubans’ collective spines.”

Hamburgers made from grapefruit rinds and banana peels and cleaning with lime and bitter orange sound like something American hipsters might effuse over (though I'm thinking "lime" is not the kind of lime I'm used to seeing near "orange"). Black powder from batteries for hair dye and makeup... that's something else entirely. A tragic testimony to the longing for beauty. You might think that in abject poverty people would dispense with things that are patently unnecessary, but perhaps these things feel more necessary. Toxic makeup has a long history.

I need to get this week started.

It's 9:27 here in Madison, Wisconsin, and I've got nothing new up here on the blog for you yet.

And it's10:27 in Tennesee, which is Instapundit time, and — as you may have noticed — I'm playing Instapundit once again this week.

I’M HEADING OFF TO A SECURE, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, and I’ll have a bunch of guestbloggers filling in here: Not only my usual crew of Ann Althouse, Megan McArdle, and Michael Totten, but to lighten the load on them, quite a few others: Ed Driscoll, sometime InstaPundit correspondent Stewart Baker (whose new book on counterterrorism, Skating On Stilts, will be coming out soon), Radley Balko, and Mark Tapscott. Should be lively enough that when I get back, you’ll wish I’d stayed gone longer!

Glenn posted that at 10, and you'd think somebody would have gotten the guest-blogging rolling by now. Should be lively enough... He even packed in 3 more guest-bloggers. Hellloooo? Where is everyone?

Glenn's back.

With 10 posts up before 9 a.m., so you won't fail to understand what it means for Glenn to be back. Why I remember how I felt yesterday at 8 a.m., thinking, damn, I need to make this thing look like it's going. What is worthy? What is pithy? What is pithy and worthy enough to tell 250,000 people?

But, of course, I'm immensely grateful for the opportunity to twirl around on the big stage for a week — and also for the nice feeling of being trusted with it. It's quite a responsibility and a complicated task: How can you be yourself but also fit into that other environment? It's not only that there it's a huge readership (and it doesn't exist because of interest in what I have to say). It's also that it involves group blogging, and — terrific as Megan McArdle and Michael Totten are — I'm used to controlling the whole structure of the front page.

So much as I love the chance to be Instapundit, which I've done a few times over the years, I'm also always happy to get back to being just Althouse. Among many benefits of things getting back to normal: I can read Glenn again.

Sunday morning.

It's 66° here in Madison, Wisconsin. It's a good time to go for a walk along the lake path...



I'll take my camera -- my big Nikon. (I lost the charger to my small Sony, which finally pushed me over the edge to order a new pocket-sized camera. There are so many, and the differences are so subtle, that I had to simplify the search, which I did by embracing Sony, which had done so well for me. I picked this.) I'll take my iPod shuffle, not to listen to music, but to listen to the recording of "The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America," which I've already listened to for a few minutes while falling asleep and then while completely asleep. I need to get a grip on what's been pouring into my unconscious brain.

Anyway, I must be going. I've got that walk to do, and later, a late lunch to attend, and, in the early evening, I've got to do a one-hour drive to catch up on this week's "Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan," which I still haven't heard. (It's about eyes this week.) And I want to spend some time at a little table in a State Street café adding some sentences to a draft of an essay I'm writing that's due in a few days. And, of course, it's podcast day.

Meanwhile, I feel I should point you to something to read... as if you wouldn't figure out somewhere to go next if I didn't point you there. There's Michael Totten's report from Lebanon. And Charles Johnson is uncovering information about unearthing bodies for posing in propaganda photos in Lebanon. Beyond Lebanon, you might wonder are smart people grumpier? But don't start acting grumpy as a way of trying to look smart. And speaking of grumpy, remember how pissed everyone got that time I said fat people needed to eat less? Here's a big, steaming helping of food for the kind of thoughts you like: you can blame the microbes that are colonizing your body.

So feel free to talk about any of that while I'm away. And with all that subject matter jammed up in one post, I may as well jam it up more and declare this post a coffeehouse... and alt-coffee-house.

Instapunditry.

I'm guest-blogging on Instapundit again. Yes, I'm on the road. Nevertheless... I do have three co-bloggers: Megan McArdle, Michael Totten, and -- a new one, another lawprof -- Brannon Denning. Thanks to Glenn for having me back. He's setting the example for leaving the blog behind while going on vacation, while I have become the cautionary tale: not just continuing my own blog along, but taking on a second one. Anyway, I'll be over there -- and here as well -- through Auguest 6th, and the road is supposed to lead me back to Madison before then.

At the genocide museum in Suleimaniya, Kurdistan.

Michael Totten reports:

When you enter the museum you will walk through a long and winding hallway. The walls are covered with mirror shards. Each represents one of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds murdered in the genocidal Anfal campaign. A river of twinkling lights lines the ceiling. Each represents one of the five thousand villages destroyed by Saddam Hussein....

The hardest thing to see was the cell used to hold children before they were murdered. My translator Alan read some of the messages carved into the wall.

“I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution.”

“Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again.”

"Kurdistan is a place of the mind."

But Michael J. Totten has pictures of it.

Okay, 6 posts over there.

Time to pay attention to my readers in Althouse-world.

Did you notice I quoted one of yesterday's Althouse commenters over at Glenn's place?

Both Michael Totten and I have linked to Dan Savage guest-blogging at AndrewSullivan.com. Michael calls Dan "gay sex advice columnist Dan Savage," which presents a complicated grammatical or punctuation problem, because if there's one thing about the Savage Love column, it's that Savage, though gay, rarely writes about gay sex. The idea -- as you already know if you're a regular reader -- is that there's something especially useful and interesting about a gay man giving advice to heterosexuals.

Speaking of advice, feel free to give me advice about what to do and not do with my Instapundit pedestal.

Today and the immediate future.

It's a beautiful day here in Madison, and we Madison bloggers convened at Mother Fool's at 10 a.m. to talk, blog, and photograph. That last post was done from MoFo's, but I'm back home now, with over 250 photos to cull, some from the café and a lot from the Willy Street area between MoFo's and Café Zoma. It's going to take me a while to get things into bloggable form, but if you've been wondering why Althouse doesn't have more photos from the East Side, just wait.

And here's another bit of news about future Althouse blogging: I'll be guest-blogging on Instapundit all next week -- with Michael Totten and Megan McArdle (just like last fall, but without the big presidential campaign to dominate our attention). I'll still be posting here, though. Noticing bloggable things will take on the more complex form of needing to think about what should go there and what should go here. At the very least, the Amsterdam Notebook series will continue here.

What's better, a group blog or an individual blog?

Gordon Smith has a lot of interesting things to say comparing group blogs and individual blogs. Is one sort of blog better than the other? It seems that there are a lot of variables that make some group blogs better and some individual blogs better. But what are all these variables? Gordon gets the subject going. Some pairs or sets of bloggers make each other better because they generate more posts, with more regularity, and because they play off each other or balance each other in some way. But sometimes a blogger you like adds a co-blogger to plump things up and only dilutes the quality of the blog. One blog I used to read every day added a co-blogger, and I found myself reading less and less over time, so that now I check in maybe twice a month.

Some blogs have so many people it's just irritating. HuffPo is the egregious example here. What a mess! Some political hacks churn out whole columns, some comedians jot down some notes that are kind of funny if you imagine the way they'd say it out loud, and some slightly well-known people repeat very conventional observations with no style at all. No one seems capable of keeping a solo blog, but if there were a few people in there who could, I wouldn't know, because I'm not going to slog through all the bad. And I find the environment there so un-charming that it doesn't put me in the mood to find the good.

I like running an individual blog, though I did temporarily group-blog last fall when Megan McArdle, Michael Totten, and I took over Instapundit (scroll down). When I did that, I still kept this blog going, and I was very aware of the different feelings I had writing in the two places. Over here, the whole blog is my self-expression. I don't have to stop and think about whether my saying something is good for the group. But operating within a group is good in different ways. It occurred to me as I wrote that that it's like the difference between living single and living in a family. There are benefits and limitations in both, but once you've made your choice, it's going to change what kind of a person you are.

Gordon wonders whether some individual bloggers -- he names me and two others -- could make some big, popular megablog, and he thinks it probably wouldn't work. The whole would be less than the sum of the parts. I guess that's a compliment! Are there people you want to read solo whom you'd like less if they were matched up with some appropriate co-bloggers? (And who would be appropriate for me?) And are there group blogs that you read that are written by individuals you'd shun if they set up a separate site?

A side note: the group blogs Gordon especially likes -- Marginal Revolution, Crooked Timber, and Volokh Conspiracy -- all put the blogger's name at the beginning of the post. I wish all group and partnership blogs would follow this pattern. Too many times have I read a post thinking it was one blogger only to realize it was one of the others, and on some blogs I only like one of the bloggers, and that little extra trouble of scrolling down to see the name and then back up to start reading is a disincentive to go over there at all. I know this is a default in the software, but changing it is important!

Continued fallout from the "Quick, change that headline!" post.

On Sunday, I posted about the NYT changing a headline on an article about the voting in Iraq. Its original headline had been "Amid Attacks, a Party Atmosphere on Baghdad's Closed Streets," which took us to an article by Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns that began:

After a slow start, voters turned out in very large numbers in Baghdad today, packing polling places and creating a party atmosphere in the streets as Iraqis here and nationwide turned out to cast ballots in the country's first free elections in 50 years.

American officials were showing confidence that today was going to be a big success, despite attacks in Baghdad and other parts of the country that took at least two dozen lives. The Interior Ministry said 36 people had been killed in attacks, Agence France-Presse reported.

But the violence did not seem to have deterred most Iraqis. In Baghdad, Basra in the South, the holy Shiite city of Najaf and even the restive Northern city of Mosul, Iraqi civilians crowded the polling sites, navigating their way through tight security and sometimes proudly displaying the deep blue ink stain on their fingers that confirmed they had voted.

That original headline represented the article fairly. I praised the Times's headlines earlier that day as "a subtle mix of positive and negative," giving us "a sense of the importance of what is happening [without allowing] the bad to overshadow the good." A number of prominent bloggers, linking to the Filkins-Burns article, drew special attention to the "party atmosphere" language in the headline. Later in the day, I noticed that the headline had been changed to "Insurgent Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Kill at Least 24," which completely failed to convey the gist of the article, the text of which had not changed. (The headline became even more negative later: "Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Reportedly Kill Several Dozen.") I thought the headline change was worth blogging, along with my observation that it was "pathetic" -- pathetic to pick out the negative from an article full of positive.

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly somehow saw fit to launch into an attack, calling me a "wingnut" and delivering an irrelevant lecture about how newspaper headlines are written and websites updated. You certainly can't tell from reading his garbled post that I was writing about changing the headline on the same article and changing it to something that did not fit the article. I've exchanged some emails with Drum, who has an elaborate justification for putting an inappropriate headline on one article so that the whole mix of headlines on the main page that day would not be excessively positive. There was violence in Iraq, the theory goes, so one of the headlines needed to refer to violence, and since there was some reference to violence in the Filkins-Burns article, that was a good place to put the negative headline. I think that may be the best thing that might be said in defense of the Times, though I still have a problem with it. But I have much more of a problem with Drum, who -- despite his lecture about how websites can be frequently updated -- has not seen fit to update his post and make it clear that he misrepresented my post. Frankly, he owes me a public apology, on his website, for calling me a wingnut and for ridiculing me based on his own misreading (or deliberate misrepresentation).

Now, I see that Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post has reprinted Drum's post, nearly in its entirety, without any criticism of it, passing along Drum's insult and distortion. I know it's in quotes, but I'd really prefer not to see myself referred to as a "wingnut" in The Washington Post!

UPDATE: Poliblogger writes that Drum should apologize.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Howard Kurtz quotes part of this response in his Wednesday column. He also quotes this post, which says something I really do care very deeply about.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: One of the comments over at the Washington Monthly link abuses me for not allowing comments on my blog, which is just rich: I was forced to cancel the comments function over here because I had no way to block the commenters who were resorting to abusive, ugly forms of expression that I did not want on my blog. You can go over there and see the kind of comments that are being made about me, which would be smeared all over my blog if I had comments. Here, I explain why I cancelled the comments. It's a little funny to me to reread that post today, where I summarized the nasty things that commenters were saying about me, becuase some of the comments over there at Washington Monthly fit the categories I came up with last spring, especially: "I claim to be a moderate, but I'm only posing as a moderate for some nefarious reason."

Some people who haunt comments pages are parasites: Why don't they have their own blogs and just link? Because they aren't good enough on their own to attract visitors. Some of them are so bad it's almost funny, like the one today who is saying:

Professor Ann Althouse is a faux moderate in the style of Jeff Jarvis and Michael Totten. She has discovered that the Right pays a hell of a lot better than the Left, and is promoting her own fortunes as fast as she can by sucking up. Like Totten. And like Jarvis. And like them, she has absolutely nothing good to say ever about liberals or liberalism, while making googly eyes at those big strong conservatives, while expressing dismay at the criticism she gets from the left. It's a transparent pose. She completely lacks integrity. Winnable? Anyone who can look at the bunch of criminals in the White House currently and remain neutral is stupid. Someone who just pretends they are in order to line their pockets is beneath contempt.

I hope Jarvis and Totten know this character is on to our little game of sucking up to right wingers for those big cash payouts.

There is a place in this world for beautiful sentimentality.

Michael Totten links to this Middle East TV advertisement promoting Iraqi unity.

Traveling to Libya.

The Sunday Times Travel Section has an article on Libya, and I was just blogging about traveling to Libya—not because I want to go there myself, but because Michael Totten just came back from Libya and had some nice pictures. Click on the slideshow at the NYT article. Here's a telling passage:

Back at the hotel, I bought some of the most amusing stamps I have seen anywhere, a set titled "American Aggression." … [T]hey featured not only the requisite defiant images of the Colonel but also a series, in blazing comic book colors, of enormous Libyan surface-to-air missiles annihilating fully armed American fighter jets.

I guess things are going relatively well if that can be experienced as amusing. And then there's this:

The Tuareg fancy themselves as desert swains. Encouraged by their reported success with European women, various members of our Tuareg posse regularly hit on the unmarried women in our group, flattering them at the same time they unintentionally insulted them, by explaining, in halting French, their preference for "large" women.

"I'm not that big!" complained one oft-approached woman, the investment banker from Seattle.

Come for the 140 degree heat, stay for the sexual harassment.

A deserted city.

Don't miss Michael Totten's great pictures from Libya (via Instapundit). I was entranced by the pictures of the deserted city of Ghadames, especially the beautiful traditional Ghadames house. Googling to find out something more about Ghadames, which I had never heard of, I learned that the name means "yesterday's lunch." I see that this is referred to as "cake and icing architecture." Here's another picture of the interior of a traditional house. Here's a collection of Ghadames pictures. Here's another. Fascinating!

Why not talk about al-Qaqaa?

The story I get the feeling the we-miss-Glenn readers of Instapundit most want me to write about is the news of the missing explosives at Al-Qaqaa and the possible pro-Kerry bias of news media like the NYT in suppressing information about when the explosives went missing. I acknowledge that this story is brewing, but before jumping on the NYT and others, I'd like to understand the facts better. NBC News seems to be a good place to start:

An NBC News crew that accompanied U.S. soldiers who seized the Al-Qaqaa base three weeks into the war in Iraq reported that troops discovered significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.

It remains unclear, however, how extensively the U.S. forces searched the site in the immediate aftermath of the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

I'm not interested in throwing a lot of extra chatter into the mix. I don't mind jumping on the NYT. I've done it before. But at this point, I can't see what's going on well enough yet to talk about it!

Note: one of the other guestbloggers, Michael J. Totten, is keeping up with this issue, updating a post from yesterday.

The big guestblogging gig.

Yes, it's true! I'm going to be guestblogging--along with Megan McArdle and Michael J. Totten--over at Instapundit for the next few days. I'm told I can go over there right now and post, which seems pretty amazing. I'll have to think up something to say! I suppose if I already feel comfortable speaking off the top of my head to a few thousand people a day, I should feel comfortable speaking to a couple hundred thousand people a day. What's the difference, really, in the grand scheme of things?

UPDATE: But stop by here too. I'll post the things here that seem not to belong there, and won't it be interesting to see what I think doesn't belong there? I feel so free over here all of a sudden. I used to have a second blog that I used for the things I felt didn't go so well here, so I'm used to having a two-track attitude about blogging. (That other blog--which you can see here--was largely an experiment with the software iBlog, but I used it to post very casual stuff. Now that the software expired, I can't do anything with that blog, but the funny thing is, I still get email about the post "The Mystery of the Saucer," which upsets some people.)