May 10, 2016
Havana, Cuba
Source: Bigstock
Now that Americans are being allowed to visit Cuba too, prepare to have your family gatherings (further) ruined by human toothaches raving about the country’s “warm, wonderful people.”
(Pro tip: Always put in “You mean the ones who haven”t managed to escape?” and ask your kin if they”d be satisfied driving a 60-year-old car, no matter how “colorful” and “quaint”…)
Well, unless your last name is Kardashian.
Watching Cuba revert to its prerevolutionary state“a “cheap holiday in other people’s misery“ for moneyed (and often felonious) Yankees and other foreigners”has, ironically, provided me with a few cut-rate satisfactions, too.
This report on Chanel’s first haute couture show in Havana, for instance, reads like a fairly bright undergrad’s workmanlike parody of Tom Wolfe.
More convincing was this uncharacteristically accomplished spoof at the otherwise reliably po-faced Vulture.com:
The Kardashians, American plutocrats who have accumulated vast wealth from a foundation of murder and theft, are having a horrible time in Cuba, the right-wing broadsheet “Page Six“ reports. The cabal of decadent capitalists is visiting the Caribbean paradise to exploit its natural beauty for the sake of their television show….
I resent sympathizing with Kim and company, but everyone (left and right) laughing at these “spoiled celebrities” should remember how they acted the last time they endured a shaky Internet connection”then bear in mind that the average Cuban doesn”t have one at all.
Then again: Back when the Cold War was still a “thing,” we were always gravely informed that “the living would envy the dead” following that ever-pending nuclear conflagration. Today we can find ourselves, weirdly, envying those poor Cubans for one reason, at least:
“They don”t have reality TV in Cuba“the Kardashians aren”t a big deal…. They are like, “Who are you, why are you filming?””
