El Opinador Compulsivo

Acá va un reporte del WSJ sobre la nueva preocupación del gobierno carcelario de Cuba: los montañistas. Cómo alguien puede justificar el totalitarismo cubano? Me saco el sombrero a los progres, hay que tener coraje para defender a estos criminales.

Adrián Pérez Martínez, a 20-year-old art teacher with a joker tattooed on his shoulder, says that police showed up at his house recently to warn him against climbing, especially with foreigners. "Good Cubans don't do this," he says they told him. "Climbers use drugs. And you shouldn't take foreigners to militarily significant areas." Indeed, some caves in the climbing area are designated as civil-defense sites in the event of a U.S. invasion.

Some of the official anxiety over climbing seems to be based on Cuba's revolutionary history. The revolution that brought Mr. Castro to power in 1959 was launched from a clandestine encampment in the Sierra Maestra Mountains on the eastern end of the island. Mr. Castro became intimately familiar with Cuba's highest mountain, 6,500-foot Pico Turquino. "The Revolution was the work of climbers and cavers," Mr. Castro once said, according to a history by Antonio Nuñez Jimenéz, a prominent revolutionary leader and naturalist.

Now the Cuban government may be worried that history will repeat itself. "The system is paranoid about Cubans' private activities, but especially when those activities are occurring in hills away from sight and when foreigners are involved," says Vitalio Echazabal, one of the first Cubans to take up rock climbing in the 1990s.