Leftists love to point to the nationalized health care and high literacy rate of communist Cuba as examples for the US to follow. Now they'll have another item to add to their list - government subsidized electric rice cookers! In a nearly 6 hour speech yesterday, Castro announced that Cuba would be subsidizing the cost of rice cookers imported from China.

This article suggests that the new pressure cooker plan is part of a larger (more despotic) economic centralization agenda designed to reduce the number of private, local makers of home-made pressure cookers. Yes, comrades, entrepreneurship and innovation are capitalist evils that must be suppressed!

But this news item also raises the question of whether all is well in idyllic, centrally planned Castro-land. Why are Cubans celebrating the importation of something as mundane as electric rice cookers? How can this possibly be a big deal to some of the most highly educated, highly medicated people in the world? How is it the government can afford to provide all this "free" health care and top-notch education in a country where citizens are too poor to afford rice makers at market rates? And what's with the references to frequent gas shortages/outages - could government-run gas companies be less efficient than the private monopolies we have in the states? Also, how bad of an energy crisis must a country have in order to actually BAN rice cookers? (Do you think Fidel gave up his use of electric appliances during that time as well?)

But surely these concerns are foolish...one can only imagine how good the health care must be in a country that will soon have an electric rice cooker in every home!