From our Truth is Far Weirder Than Fiction Bureau:
Yes, a record has been broken in Castrogonia, an enslaved island nation that is currently holding an international cocktail-making fest.
And the world’s largest Cuba Libre (a.k.a. “rum & Coke”) has been made with Havana Club rum, a label stolen from Bacardi, at the Habana Libre Hotel, which was stolen from the Hilton Hotel chain.
Aaah. Life doesn’t get any better than this! Giant cocktails named after something that doesn’t exist — a “Free Cuba”– involving stolen property in one of the most repressive and un-free hell-holes on earth.
From Euronews:
Cubans have set a national record for the largest Cuba Libre cocktail ever made.
The glass, measuring two metres in height and specially made for the event, was filled with 20 cases of Havana Club rum, 200 litres of tuKola soda, ice and lemon.
Speaking after setting the record, the president of the organising committee, Jose Luis Brito, said: “It is the largest Cuba Libre that has been made in Cuba and has only rum — 20 cases of rum. That is to say in addition to cola and ice, but it has really been a party where there was a great cocktail and now we have to drink it.”
Dozens of bartenders participated in the event in Havana, Cuba, on August 26, which kicked off the Pan-American Cocktail Championships.
Around 200 professionals are taking part in the week-long tournament at the Hotel Habana Libre in the Cuban capital.
tuKola? I don’t think so. Well, fraud is very “revolutionary.”
You’ve got to give the regime credit! They constantly come up with all of these stunts, its all one massive never-ending smoke screen, so that you don’t have time to think of the repression, executions, human rights violations and 60 year old tyranny. Whether it’s the largest Cuba Libre in the world, Diana Nyad swimming from the US to Cuba, the largest bicycle on the planet, some man with 12 fingers, some chicken that’s laid he largest egg ever recorded, some old lady that has just celebrated her 109th birthday, or one of Mariela’s gay pride parades, Cuba seems like one helluva fun place to visit!
Given Cuba’s miserable reality, this contrived, frivolous nonsense is an insult to ordinary Cubans and their intelligence. Still, the real issue is not such PR stunts but the fact there’s a market for them–and make no mistake, this sort of thing is primarily intended for foreign consumption (like the constitution circus). Just imagine the scorn that would be heaped upon this giant-mixed-drink BS if it came courtesy of Botha’s government in apartheid-era South Africa. You get the idea (and so does Castro, Inc.).