Oliver Kamm has the LibDems' Cuba reception, and the odious Cuba Solidarity Campaign, banged to rights:

How does the Cuba Solidarity Campaign resolve the tension between state sovereignty and political decency? By siding with the oppressors and blackguarding the persecuted, of course. Here's what Stephen Wilkinson had to say on the matter in a letter to The Guardian:

"Cuba's jailed dissidents were not at all "independent thinkers, writers or human rights activists" but rather in the pay of the US and carrying out activities against the Cuban government. They were not tried in a closed court - they all had counsel: 44 of them were defended by their own lawyers. They were convicted on the evidence of 12 of their number who were Cuban agents. They testified that the dissidents had plotted with the head of the US interest section, James Cason, who was given a brief by the Bush administration to create a "unified opposition" in Cuba."

...Something is seriously amiss when this type of event - which is not a humanitarian or pragmatic call for an easing of the trade embargo, but an expression of 'solidarity' with a totalitarian state - is found unexceptionable and unremarkable by a party that falsely claims the mantle of liberal politics. The place of consistent liberals is with the political dissidents, not at a drinks party in a four-star hotel celebrating the regime that locked them up.

(Have a read of the comments after Oliver's post - especially Richard Allan's reply. Pretty limp.)

I've long been aatounded by the number of otherwise decent people I know who think nothing of holidaying in Cuba - to "see it before it goes all corporate" as fhey usually put it. When I ask if they thought it proper to holiday in South Africa beofre the end of apartheid - to see it before it went all democratic - then they are usually incredulous that I could find the idea of holidaying in a communist dictatorship so repellent an idea. They simply don't understand what I mean.

The blogosphere has provided almost the only proper coverage of Castro's most recent bout of repression. The mainstream media seem - at best - not to care at all, and - at worst - to block it out as a rather inconvenient obstacle to their cherished notion of Castro as a brave bulwark holding out against American corporate imperialism. And we can't let the facts stansd in the way of that, can we?