Paxety Pages

On a recent Sunday, Katia Martin rose a few minutes after 7 a.m. and donned a white T-shirt with a photograph of her imprisoned husband stenciled on the front.

Martin dressed her twin daughters in matching pink outfits and fed them yogurt before opening the front door to her one-room, rooftop apartment.

She gazed out over the neighboring rooftops like a soldier scanning enemy terrain.

First she glanced to the right to see if a yellow window shutter on a nearby building was ajar, then to her left at the nearest street corner, and, finally, down through a tangle of electrical cables to a first-floor balcony.

On this day the coast appeared to be clear, but that was no guarantee. So Martin proceeded with caution to prepare for Mass at Santa Rita church across town.

Each Sunday for the last nine months, Martin often has not been allowed to join a group of women calling themselves the Damas de Blanco - Ladies in White - who after Mass silently walk the streets for 10 blocks in civil disobedience. They are protesting the jailing of family members involved in Cuba's tiny opposition movement.

The wars over the Wikipedia entry for Cuba has attracted the attention of another Knight-Ridder paper, the Miami Herald.

One editor complained that Havana sympathizers were transforming a scholarly enterprise into ''their own private Fidel Castro fan page.'' A user was tossed out after threatening to sue another for libel.

The fuss is over the Cuba entry in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia created, edited and administered entirely by volunteers with the altruistic purpose of becoming a Web-based knowledge repository for humanity.

Babalublog has more.

Yesterday, Evo Morales announced he is following in the footsteps of his mentors by nationalizing all of Bolivia's oil industry. According to Xinhua, those mentors, Cuba and Venezuela, quickly supported Evo's more towards totalitarianism.

Cuba and Venezuela voiced their support on Tuesday for Bolivia's decision to nationalize its energy assets, reports reaching here said.

Granma, the ruling Cuban communist party's official newspaper, reported the news with a headline: "The looting is over -- Evo Morales."

Actually, if evo continues to follow fidel, the looting has only begun.