Red Ken - collecting more colors?

Probably just being red is not enough for Ken Livingstone. He went yellow recently, refusing to flash. Now he is adding another color, hailing the glorious achievements of sicklish Fidel.

Mr Livingstone was speaking at the weekend during a visit to Cuba on the first leg of a Latin American tour. He called Mr Castro's Communist revolution "one of the high points of the 20th century" and praised Mr Castro while on a trip to see a cricket match on the island.

Yep. The revolution was a high point indeed, the problem is that the life in Cuba has gone steadily downhill since this point. But Red Ken had acquired some in-depth knowledge of life in Cuba during the cricket match, no doubt, we should not worry then.

He said: "What's amazing here is you've got a country that's suffered an illegal economic blockade by the United States for almost half a century and yet it's been able to give its people the best standard of health care, brilliant education. To do this in the teeth of an almost economic war I think is a tribute to Fidel Castro and his government."

Medicine without medicines (no money to purchase), education without books (this specific democracy has a long list of forbidden literature, including names like Solzhenitzin, Havel, Kundera and many, many others), the "revolutionary police" infesting every corner, lack of basic foodstuffs... the list could go on, but this is all trifles to Red Ken in his eagerness to please his hosts:

He added: "And though Cuba's only got a fifth of the population of Britain, it gets as many medals in the Olympics as we do. So clearly they're doing something right here about engaging their young people in sport, and that's what I'm really interested in finding out about."

We do remember the astonishing successes of Soviets and East Germans in sport. Usually many of these successes went in tandem with the developments in some areas of biotechnology. Which is well developed in Cuba too, incidentally.

Yes, Red Ken has developed a rare case of myopia. But truly - one can't see far away when one's nose is stuck in someone's arse.

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