This is real sugar cane from Cuba, growing in Venezuela's Yaracuy state. Yaracuy is the heavenly, I mean, heavily, agricultural state where our good friend Daniel lives.

It's loaded with Cuban sugar fields. It also has sugar processing, refining and export facilities. Some of the sugar goes to make rum.

A Cuban farmer who lives in Venezuela took me through the sugar fields and several times I had to ask him to ... stop the truck, because it was so beautiful I just needed to look at it. It looked like ... heaven.

He had grown Cuban sugar in his family for generations, always doing the backbreaking farm labor, working, improving the land, amassing capital when times were good and saving it for when times were bad. He and Daniel took me everywhere. Contrary to stereotypes of farmers, my Cuban farmer was a college graduate of a good U.S. university, majoring in agricultural science.

His farm is now under seige, by Venezuelan land expropriators. He had to call his wife on his cellphone every couple hours to assure her that out in the fields he had not been kidnapped by the expropriating thugs.

Horribly enough, castro is behind all of these actions that have put even these distant Cuban sugar fields under siege.

After fleeing castro in the 1960s for the then-undeveloped farmlands of remote parts of Venezuela, my farmer now sees castro coming right back for him and his productive and beautiful sugar lands. Make no mistake, castro continues to harbor dreams of retaking dominance in the sugar industry he already drove into the ground in Cuba. That's why he's looking further afield to Venezuela. He will do the exact same thing to Venezuela's sugar fields as he did to Cuba's.

It's not well known but castro has taken over every key office of the Venezuelan agricultural office. And castro's special target is Cuban immigrants who made this land in Venezuela flourish.

I will write and post more later but I just wanted to post a picture I hope you might enjoy for the beauty of its own that once also graced Cuba before castro for now.

Gotta run off to a conference for work, back later on...