Pity the people of Cuba.
The long suffering proles who have had to put up with food shortages and driving cars made no later than 1958 are being forced by their tyrannical government to suffer the latest Western personal technology: The cellphone.
After having been largely spared for the last 20 years from putting up with people rudely nattering on handsets in restaurants, buses and stores, new El Supremo Raul Castro has decided to show his administration isn’t as strict as the old one he was in by allowing ordinary Cubans to buy cellphones.
Sigh. We often envied the place as one of the few spots in the Northern Hemisphere that a person can really get away from it all – certainly one of the few warm spots in winter.
Cubans, we romantically thought, were a tough people on a pleasant isle who could while away the hours in cantinas enjoying each other’s company by – dare we say it – talking to each other face to face.
Instead they’ll learn the joy of squeezing onto a steaming bus with their neighbour hollering into an iPhone: “I still can’t hear you, the coverage isn’t very good here.”
Perhaps they’ll rebel.
Viva la revoluci