You know the old Big Government incompetence saying about bureaucrats "being able to screw up a wet dream"? The Castros have that beat, my friends, because evidently they can even screw up a funeral:
As deacon at a Cuban cemetery, Miguel Pons has the difficult task of consoling the bereaved -- and calming their anger when the coffins break.
Besides officiating the funeral services at his chapel in Havana's picturesque Christopher Columbus graveyard....
They can't even allow the euphemism of referring to it as a cemetery, folks.
....the sixty-one-year-old often has to help shoulder the casket to stop it coming apart with the deceased inside.
Made of weak, green wood and lacking handles, the coffins are a poignant indication of how Cuba's public funeral service has never recovered from decades of mistrust between the Church and the communist government.
People are fed up. [emphases added]
Oh, did we mention, our Cuban friends, that our leader has now propped up your leader in perpetuity, so that your leader's regime will rule you FOREVER? Isn't that impresionante?
"I sometimes have to go out and hold the service in the street because the driver tells me, 'Father, we can't get the casket out. The corpse is very heavy and I'm afraid the bottom's going to fall through,'" Pons said. [emphasis added]
Oh. Mi. Dios.
In case you didn't catch the key detail above, wait for it....wait for it....
In Cuba, funerals are provided exclusively, and practically free of charge, by the state.
BOOM! goes the dynamite. Or your loved one's corpse, bouncing off the pavement.
Families who come to bury their loved ones lament that the coffins lack nails or are draped in threadbare cloth, Pons said.
Sometimes, the glass window in the casket comes loose and drops onto the corpse.
"People complain to me. They say, 'Father, look at this!'" Pons said. "And I say to them, 'I know it is very painful. But what can we do?'" [emphases added]
What can you do? Absolutely nothing, my Cuban friends. Barack Obama has seen to that.
It kinda gives the idea of "nationalizing death" a whole additional dimension, doesn't it? I'd recommend that Cubans switch to cremation for their funerary rites, except that the Castro brothers don't need any encouragement to immolate the living, and besides, they'd probably just snort all your loved ones' ashes anyway before they even made it into their urns.
No comments:
Post a Comment