From our Bureau of Quirky Noble Savages Who Attract The Wrong Kind of Attention From Superior Human Beings with plenty of assistance from our Bureau of Local Colour and our Bureau of Most Famous Cubans Ever
Wow. What a follow-up story. You’ve got to hand it to Lino, the “Wacky Iron Man.” He sure knows how to draw the world’s attention to himself and away from Cuba’s painful descent into a horrifying dystopian collapse.
He’s become an internet star overnight, maybe even an influencer.
His act is exactly what the world needs and loves to see. P. T. Barnum became a wealthy and very famous man by featuring and exploiting freaks in his circus shows, such as Tom Thumb, the Micro-Midget; Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy; Myrtle Corbin, the Four-Legged Girl; Isaac Sprague, the Human Skeleton; and the Siamese Twins Chang and Eng, joined at the sternum.
Aaah, but Latrine America is the Freakiest Freak Show among all Freak Shows, isn’t it? And Castrogonia is the Freakiest Freak Show within the Freakiest Freak Show on planet earth.
Thank the Lord for “impactful” distractions such as this (no pun intended). It’s so much nicer to read about freaks who smash their limbs with sledge hammers than about prisoners of conscience who are beaten half to death by their jailers.
Keep Cuba news happy and light. Yes, keep it happy and light with sledge hammer ascetics. Never mind how heavy Lino’s sledge hammer might be. His inspiring feats are light-hearted and just what all potential apartheid tourists need. And thank the Lord for a Cuban such as Lino, who so fully and intensely sums up what being Cuban is all about.
So proud of you, Lino. So sorry the rest of us “diaspora” Cubans fall so short of achieving as much as you have. Our apologies. You are a true child of the Revolution, and your self-denial brings you so close to being a second Che (except he would have been hammering the skulls of dissidents and queer folk rather than his limbs). Thanks for learning your lessons so well in Castro, Inc.’s indoctrination mills. You embody self-sacrifice as fully as any medieval saint, but you do it for Fidel, Che, and yourself rather than for God. (Who needs Him anyway, when you are a “Wacky Iron Man”?)
Just a thought: Has anyone around you suggested that you might benefit from a visit to some mental health professional?
Oh, never mind that stupid slip, Lino. You live in Cuba. How silly of me to suggest that any medical expert could help you in any way. Hammer away, hermano. Hammer away. Your approach to coping with life in Cuba might be among the most reasonable of all. Bang!
From the one and only Daily Mail (UK)
A Cuban body builder claims hitting himself with a mallet 1,000 times a day makes him stronger.
Lino Tomasén Camacho has become an online sensation after videos of him hitting himself went viral, earning him more than 106,000 Facebook followers who can now watch numerous videos of him showing off his unusual daily routine.
One clip shows Camacho – known as ‘The Cuban Ironman’ – pretending to square up to a boxer in a city square before taking off his boxing gloves and hammering his hand with his mallet.
The video also shows Camacho cracking open a coconut with his elbow and performing push-ups on his wrists while a friend sits on top of him.
In another clip, Camacho is seen thumping his hands with his mallet in time with salsa music being performed by nearby musicians.
Camacho said he has been hammering each of his hands every day with his Thor-like mallet since he was 15 years old, a habit he said he inherited from his father, known as ‘The Magic Man’ in Cuba.
Following his online fame, Camacho started receiving invitations to perform at festivals and concerts across Cuba.
Last week, he announced he would perform at the Rodeo Parque Lenin in the Cuban capital Havana.
He wrote on social media: ‘I never thought they would invite me to open one of the most glorious and established concerts in Cuba.’
Full tabloid story HERE
All right. His name doesn’t start with a Y. He’s not in costume. He’s not brandishing a cigar the size of a baseball bat. He’s not wearing a Che or Fidel T-shirt. I mean, what more can one ask for? Yes, he wants attention, and he’s got a, well, eccentric way to get it, but we’re talking Caribbean island savages, OK? The tourists will LOVE this, though he should probably go for a more, uh, primitive look. A loincloth should do it.
Let’s be honest with ourselves, we can’t expect empathy or understanding from the mainstream media. If they are not featuring some cigar-chomping mammy, it’s some other amusing native: I’ve seen guy with six fingers on each hand, guy who has chicken that laid an enormous egg, guy who build a huge bicycle, woman who is allegedly 117 years old, etc…
It’s getting harder and harder to wax poetic about Cuba’s “amazing healthcare and education system,” so they have to create these distractions to make Cuba an amazing place to visit.
Problem is that we don’t own any newspapers or publications that can counter this bullshit. Reinaldo Arenas wrote in his award-winning biography, Before Night Falls, that he had a meeting with Cuban American movers and shakers in Miami and he mentioned that we needed to create publishing houses and newspapers/magazines to get our words out since the mainstream media was so hostile to us and their response was, “there’s no money to be made in that.” We would publish one of your books, because you are famous and your books would make money, but no money in founding a publishing house or a newspapers.
That is why we are in the situation we are in. Look how Jorge Mas Santos has money to bring in Messi, but ran the Cuban American National Foundation to the ground.
No doubt we could have done better, but the willfully blind would still be ignoring the truth. What we have always been up against is worse than ignorance, meaning it is malicious and perverse.