Please allow me to register my agreement with Grant Piper. No other country has built such an internally cohesive society capable of coping with the most extreme external shocks as Cuba has. We have much to learn from it in how we should prepare to cope with the external shocks that we are about to encounter in the next decades with regard to global warming, diminishing oil supplies, war and terrorism, economic instability and epidemics. Cuba's ill-informed protagonists in the United States have already shown how they will cope: Katrina-like incompetence has already been demonstrated.
simon mcguinness