Economic news

You can always trust The Guardian in London to find something nice to say about those lovable Castro brothers.

The otherwise readable Left-leaning newspaper has just published a summary of how the global financial crisis is impacting the economies of different countries, including the United States, Britain, Spain, India, China and ... Cuba.

“Cuba's isolation from global financial markets has largely protected it from capitalist contagion, allowing it to watch the turmoil with relative equanimity,” the paper concludes, quoting Fidel Castro as saying the financial crisis was “expected”.

Now, that's a word you don't often hear in reference to the 50-year-old economic basketcase that is Cuba: equanimity.

By the way, the photograph above, taken by Javier Galeano of Associated Press over the weekend, shows stalls at a public market in Havana. As you can see, the stalls are overflowing with equanimity.