Panic in Acapulco as heavily-armed Mexican police are sent in to protect our nation’s most valuable resource: nubile young college students whose scantily-clad bodies perk up pretty much any boring news story. Anyway, parents of our country’s spring breakers are concerned that Mexico’s spiraling drug violence will put their children-who just want to get drunk and have random sex in warm weather-at risk. They’re also worried about the lives of the poor Mexicans whose daily existence is a struggle to survive the violence of rival cartels and who are about a million times more likely to become crime victims, especially now, when even the terribly inadequate police protection they are used to has been shifted in service of a bunch of yanqui undergrads. Actually, I’m just guessing on that second part.

There are few worse things than the ol’ “Really Nice Guy Killed by Coming to New York City” stories. This is one of the worst ever, about a kid from Jersey. Let’s mash the Daily News and the NY Post: “[24-year-old] Connor [Donohue], jokingly nicknamed ‘Con Man’ by friends and family, had just started a job at SingleStop USA, a nonprofit helping the poor…. Until last month, Donohue worked as dean of students for Prep for Prep, a nonprofit Manhattan group that identifies promising minority students and prepares them for private school. He fell from his building at 8:30 a.m. Sunday, hitting a tree and then the sidewalk. A portion of his balcony’s iron railing was ‘loose and damaged,’ DOB determined. Further, DOB had cited building manager Pan Am Equities in December 2008 for violating a city law requiring landlords to hire private inspectors to check balconies every five years.”

“Then lobster, a slash of red and white claw meat in a lobster bordelaise so deeply flavored as to recall both veal stock and opium smoke, with cabbage to bind them together. And sturgeon, a rectangle of meat the color of ivory, with a sauce of reduced grape must and a grape-pumpkin marmalade. It’s a mad hatter’s dish, cooking out of Lewis Carroll.”
-Alice In Wonderland is everywhere these days: movies, hip-hop, politics, and now restaurant reviews-Sam Sifton gives Colicchio & Sons three stars in today’s Times

. I’d complain about oversaturation. But that would be Petty.

Good news from yesterday’s election in Queens: “Popular Assemblyman Jose Peralta crushed [slashy former State Senator Hiram] Monserrate with 65% of the vote to his rival’s 27%, according to the unofficial final tally in the special election.” A defiant Monserrate told supporters that “This is not the last of Hiram Monserrate,” so, you know, watch out if you see him near the stemware.

by Aaron Wiener

The Plaza de la Revolución fills much the same role in Havana as the National Mall does in Washington. It lies in the shadow of the city’s tallest monument, constructed to honor the memory of the country’s great revolutionary hero. Huge crowds, sometimes topping a million people, have crammed onto the concrete square to partake in patriotic ceremonies, concerts, or speeches by Fidel Castro or the Pope.

When I visited Cuba earlier this year, the Plaza was eerily empty. Dozens of vultures circled patiently overhead, as if waiting for the 83-year-old Castro and his 51-year-old revolution to succumb to the steady march of time.

The 11 million people of Cuba are waiting, too. Castro, ailing from a digestive illness, stepped down as president in 2008, handing over the reins of power to his younger brother, Raúl. The junior Castro has largely continued the policies and leadership style of his predecessor, but there is a sense that he is merely a stepping stone between the five-decade-long rule of Fidel and whatever comes next.

Across the Vedado district — a former Mafia haven of luxury hotels and crumbling mansions — from the Plaza, my brother and I chatted with an energetic 30-something stranger-turned-confidant named Tati in a seedy basement bar. Several cigars and mojitos in, the conversation turned to politics.

“Fidel is the kind of genius who comes along every few hundred years,” Tati said. “But Raúl” — this was with a perfunctory glance over the shoulder, followed by a tap on the head — “doesn’t have it up here.”

He finished off his mojito and replenished it with rum from a cheap bottle we’d picked up at a nearby convenience store.

“It’s not just me saying that,” he said. “Ask anyone — they’ll tell you the same thing.”

So they did. In the lush valley town of Viñales, 120 miles southwest of Havana, our host, his tongue also loosened by several glasses of rum, shook his head at the mention of Raúl.

“Fidel is a hero to every Cuban,” he said. “But Raúl is crazy — much crazier than Fidel.”

Yet no one attempted to articulate what exactly it was about Raúl that made him so inferior to his brother. Instead, it appeared that his greatest crime was simply not being Fidel, whose unimpeachable hero status among many Cubans has propped up a sagging Communist regime far past its time.

Cubans enjoy privileges — a decent public education, free health care — that can’t be found elsewhere in the third world, or even in parts of the first. Racism is largely absent from a society that boasts an astonishing degree of economic equality. And some of the island’s social restrictions have been relaxed, if not altogether removed. (Until 1988, Cubans who “publicly flaunted their homosexual condition” faced prison sentences; now Cubans are entitled to free sex-change operations. Our first night in Cuba, we happened upon a jam-packed rooftop gay party in Central Havana — with plenty of flaunting.)

But it’s economic concerns that dominate the lives and daily banter of most Cubans. The country’s unusual two-currency system — enacted in 2004 to remove the powerful influence of the U.S. dollar — puts a wide range of basic necessities, including most toiletries and clothes, out of the reach of ordinary Cubans, who receive their wages in the badly devalued national peso. Food staples are rationed, but quite a few people said to me that their monthly rations rarely get them by for more than two weeks. Each short stroll we took through Havana saw us accosted by locals pleading for milk money (the most common request, since the milk ration is evidently the stingiest of all), our old clothes or razor blades, or a chance to sell us cigars and chicas (usually offered in that order).

Foreign travel is out of the question for Cubans, and most habaneros I spoke with had never even ventured to other parts of their country. Much to my surprise, nearly everyone I spoke with became visibly excited when I said I was from the States, and they all wanted to exchange stories. “I love talking to foreigners,” one stranger said. “It’s my way of traveling.”

Upon our return to Havana after two days exploring the hills and caves of Viñales, we sought Tati out once again. When we’d parted with him in front of his building four days earlier, he’d told us how to find him in the future: “Come to this corner and ask anyone, ‘Where’s Tati,’ and they’ll tell you,” he’d said. We were skeptical, but sure enough, when we posed the question to the only person in the street, a studious-looking young fellow, he replied without so much as blinking: “Go up the block, turn left into the first alley, go to the end, turn left again, and there you’ll find Tati playing dominoes.”

This time, he was quite drunk before we arrived — I never quite figured out how Cubans who couldn’t afford milk managed to consume so much rum — and his pithy political observations had given way to a full-fledged vitriolic rant. In a hoarse whisper, again accompanied by the compulsory glances over his shoulder and frequent swigs from a rum bottle I’d bought with him in mind, he railed against the lack of free expression and economic opportunity in his country. My brother attempted to interject with praise for a society where neighbors help one another on a daily basis and where no one slips through the cracks into hopeless poverty. But Tati was quick to point out that these ideals, whose lack we so frequently bemoan in America, only get you so far when life feels static and stifled.

“Here in Cuba, we have nothing,” he hissed. “I am nobody. In my neighborhood, I am somebody. Everyone says, ‘Oh, Tati, I know Tati, I like Tati, I respect Tati.’ But in Cuba? I am nobody. I am shit.”

He got up to relieve himself in a corner, then returned to his lengthy lament. “We can’t express ourselves. We can’t do anything. You don’t understand what it’s like. You spend a week in Cuba and expect to understand these things? Impossible.”

We listened with a sense of resignation, and eventually had to pull ourselves away to catch a taxi to the airport. We parted with a hug and a promise that we’d see him again soon. But Tati, so vocal just minutes before, said simply, with tears in his eyes, “No, you won’t,” and turned away.

When he’s not breaking embargoes, Aaron Wiener works as the managing editor of The Washington Independent.

“Since at least January, Tim, a gay 22-year-old senior at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, has been recording himself masturbating, and uploading the videos to Xtube…. Among those photos is a series of him in University of Hawaii classrooms, snapped in January-February…. the University’s Twitter account posted this campus warning: ‘if you see ‘Hawaii Speedo Student’ on campus, do not approach him — call Campus Security.’ Now, he’s an outlaw. Or at least a wild mountain lion roaming campus looking for prey.”

The whole Pride and Prejudice and Zombies thing seemed worth a chuckle and not much more. I mean, a one-note joke on Jane Austen is all well and good, but was there really call for a sequel? Apparently yes, there was, and Dawn of the Dreadfuls will be arriving in bookstores soon. Whatever reservations you might have about that-and do you? Do you really? Are you somehow that invested in what winds up in bookstores? Is your little masterpiece somehow going unpublished while an extended riff on romantic fiction from the Regency period festooned with the living dead somehow merits a second volume? Maybe the problem is with your work and not with anyone else, did you ever consider that? I’m sure you’ve brought a delightful and idiosyncratic spin to modern ennui and you’re no doubt terrific with illustrations of the sky and depictions of urban angst, but maybe we’ve all had enough of that. Did that ever occur to you?-you’ve got to admit that this “trailer” is pretty damned good. I enjoyed it, at least. Oh, whatever, I’m tired of you and your complaining. Just watch it. [Via]

BREAKFAST. PIZZA.

This is why Sarah Palin is the best at what she does: In a simple, 140-word burst of text she can evoke both the beginning of Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” and that Berlin song from Top Gun, all while distorting what Nancy Pelosi actually said. Admit it, the gal’s a pro.

A dispatch from Jackson Heights, where faces are pressed against the glass to see if Hiram Monserrate can slash his way back into the State Senate. Our correspondent reports:

Pretty quiet here in JH. The poll lady said there was a “middling” turnout. She said this twice.

Here is a face-slash flyer, tossed to the ground (in disgust, I hope?) and the voting machine — do unemployed gays count as “Working Families”? Sure hope so! Also, the “Yes We Can” party made me larf.
WWPD (What Would Plouffe Do?)

But wait, there’s more!

Ben Smith brings word of the latest endorsement for the Monserrate, which comes from Karla Giraldo, the woman who was actually Monserrated. Says Smith, “There’s little more depressing in politics than a domestic abuse victim filming a testimonial for her abuser,” and calls the video “too grim to embed.” Agree! Perhaps even more grim? The comments accompanying the clip in the Post, which even by that crowd’s usual standards are particularly vile and misogynistic. Click through only if you want to be filled with despair over the human condition.