2005-05-09 - 9:20 p.m.

Havana, Cuba

You�re Havana larf, intcha?! So finally here despite some minor border control altercation�apparently I had exceeded the quota for bringing pens into the country and I had to sacrifice a couple of biros.

I�m staying in a 50�s hotel with all the original features, by which I think they mean CCTV and hidden microphones in the rooms. It�s apparently where Frankie �The Voice� Sinatra swanked around with his mafia goon mates such as Paulie �The Violent Killer� Luciano and Freddie �The Psychotic Murderer Who Likes To Torture People� Vendetti, tha kind of thing.

It�s a different kind of clientele now, of course. The women, and this seems to be a general theme running through Cuban females� approach to dressing, look as if they have been clothed by a futuristic clothes-o-matic dressing machine, which is permanently set to �Ho�. The men are in crappy Che t-shirts and solidarity with the workers caps and trousers. So to sum up � Girls = Hoochie Mammas, Boys = Ho Chi Minh-ers.

Did you see what I did there? Yeah, cheers.

Today we spent the afternoon walking around the old town, which has all these fabulous colonial buildings which only house 27 families per room and look like people have been subjecting them to heavy shelling for the best part of a decade. But they�re happy, I think.

Unemployment is illegal, and everyone has fulfilling jobs. These career paths include the always popular sitting in dark doorways making sure that no-one goes into various dilapidated wrecks, the entry level looking at members of the opposite sex with barely disguised feral lust and the executive level having your picture taken with tourists and accepting the filthy money from the fascist pigdog oppressors. It�s quite a system, you have to admit.

Last night the bars were full of tourists buying overpriced cocktails and pretending they were being in some way exotic. Ernest Hemmingway figures largely as you can imagine � that guy is keeping more drinking holes in business since he died than he did when he was alive.

Still, later we�re being shown the socialist fish of the national aquarium, and then being doused with rum based cocktails and trying to make conversation with the rest of the press delegation, who handily all only speak Spanish.

Viva la revolucion! Yours in solidarity,

Pablo �Chav� Guevara