El Viandero made a stop by the Babalú kitchen this morning and provided our chefs with some fresh pickins' for your Tuesday ajiaco.

• Cuban defector and baseball phenom Yoenis Cespedes passed over the Miami Marlins and signed a $36-million deal with the Oakland A's. Our sources in Cuba tell us there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth in Havana over this news. Not because the Castro dictatorship lost one of its most talented baseball players, but because they lost the 95% management fee they normally get from selling their slave labor.

• The Castro dictatorship has publicly condemned the "misleading campaigns and media war" against their dictatorial ally, Syria. Apparently, the media is making a big deal out of nothing; repressing a population and murdering your opposition is absolutely normal and part of the typical activities of just and democratically elected governments like that of Syria and Cuba.

• It used to be that spies looked like Sean Connery and carried out dangerous missions with nerve gas spewing pens and umbrella rifles. Now, according to the AP and the Castro dictatorship, they are sexagenarian balding men carrying out humanitarian missions and packing network routers.

• With the Obama administration declaring a free-for-all on American tourist travel to communist Cuba, you would think approval for a ferry service between Ft. Lauderdale and Havana was a given. But after waiting for two years, Havana Ferry Partners has still not received permission from the U.S. government to join in on the Obama administration's "Operation Castro Profit."