I read the reports while I was away of Louis Michel's visit to Cuba, and wanted to scream at him. Oliver Kamm has done the next best thing, putting Cuba - and the EU's ghastly representative's behaviour - in the right context in The Times. As he says:

Support for the overthrow of Castro’s tyranny ought to be as much an issue for progressive opinion as was opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

I recoil when friends tell me that they have been to Cuba for a holiday, adding more often than not that they want to go before everything changes. (What they are really saying, of course, is 'before a brutal communist regime is overturned and the Cubans are given freedom'.) I cannot imagine any of them saying the same about a vacation in Chile under Pinochet or South Africa under apartheid.

(The same warped sense of values is also still applied to Che Guevara, a man whose politics were equally loathsome. The Motorcycle Diaries, which eulogised him, was a film which should have been regarded as being as disgusting as would a hagiography of any of the other Marxist tyrants.)