Yoani

Yesterday I added a few links to the right, one of them to the blog by Yoani Sánchez, the celebrated blogger from Cuba who has been threatened by Fidel and his thugs. It is highly recommended and you don't need to know Spanish. Yoani is a global phenomenon: her blog is translated not just to English, but also to Portuguese, Bulgarian, Dutch, German, Finnish, Polish, French, Italian, Lithuanian, and Japanese! (But I'm not sure about the Bulgarian–that link seems to have gone dead.) She is a brave young woman. I especially recommend it to my friends who still think Fidel is "not so bad" and that the revolution overall is really pretty good because Cubans enjoy wonderful education and health care. I guess I'd recommend it to Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, too. (Stone's documentary on Fidel is a work of hagiography I didn't think was possible today. Amazing.) For those of you who read Spanish, I suggest José Angel Cilleruelo's blog. Excellent! It's a cold, dark day in Malaga. Good for spending too much time on the computer. And for a movie on TV: over lunch I watched Pay it Forward with Helen Hunt, Kevin Spacey, and Angie Dickinson in a wonderful cameo. A pretty sappy Hollywood production, but a well done one, and it's rather hard not to enjoy the story. Who can resist good deed doing? Well, the poor little kid gets killed in the end, an unfortunate choice by the author and/or director. I don't know, the film is based on a novel I'm unfamiliar with. (In the photo, Yoani Sánchez, a Reyes Lázaro look-alike. Hey Reyes, check it out!)