Wednesday, July 05, 2006


Fidel Castro
ate all of
Cuba’s tobacco.

Astudent of mine, working on a paper about Cuba, provided the following four pieces of evidence that "Cuba would have better economic health and world relations if Fidel Castro had not come to power:"

1. Fidel Castro did not allow U.S. citizens to visit Cuba.
2. Fidel Castro cut off all trade with the U.S.
3. Fidel Castro lied about things such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and all.
4. Fidel Castro ate all of Cuba's tobacco, so they couldn't sell anything to make money.

With much prompting, I finally convinced said student to try turning at least two of these pieces of "evidence" into paragraphs, which resulted in the following:

1st Evidence Paragraph

When Fidel Castro came to power he decided to make Cuba a Communist country. Because of bad relations with the United States, Fidel Castro cut off all trade with the United States. He also didn't want Mr. Muhr to be a part of his leadership because writing papers makes him tired. Muhr had a history of papers. He once wrote three in one day. But then he ran out of cool pencils. This caused many problems with other countries because when they read his papers, they couldn't understand them.

2nd Evidence Paragraph

Yes, it is true. Castro did eat all of Cuba's tobacco in the years of 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, and finally in 1988 when he discovered Cuban people didn't want to grow tobacco because they knew Castro would eat all of it. He found out that the people started to grow sugarcane so he ate all of Cuba's sugarcane in the years of 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, and finally, 1997. This badly hurt Cuba's economy. People were very poor and could not provide for themselves. The government had to pay for every trip Castro had to the hospital. The grand total of his charges during all of the years he ate the tobacco was $1,314,321,645. During the years he ate the sugarcane, he added up a grand total of $6,108,342,123 in hospital charges.

No comments: