Care for a plate of duck — yes, duck — quesadillas?  Or would you prefer the grilled caribou marinated in blueberries and baco noire wine?  How about some wild Coho salmon in a rye whisky with maple syrup sauce?

These impossibly rarified culinary confections all are real menu items of not one, but two, communist feasts for the elite this weekend as Cuban and Venezuelan dictatorships and their admirers seek to woo each other. In regimes that claim to champion the little people, the excesses here resemble the last days of the Bourbons. But there are also the poor at the windows looking in,  so maybe this is a harbinger of the final days of these detested and rapacious regimes. They always go down like this. Remember the Ceaucescus?
 
A.M. Mora y Leon 03 20 05