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In the Democratic camp, Super Tuesday confirmed nothing more than the continuation of the Clinton-Obama battle—one that Salon's Rebecca Traister describes as one of "nasty psychobabble of identity politics" that forces her to "tap one underrepresented population on the shoulder and say, 'I pick you to advance first.'"

Identity politics distracts from the issues, but there's a reason. Identity matters—maybe not in terms of legislation or policy, but certainly in terms of image. And image can go a long way, especially when you're the leader of the free world and your face is on every television around the globe, 24 hours a day. As I noted earlier this week, the U.S. race between a woman and a black man is turning heads in Belgrade. And on voiceswithoutvotes.org, (a recent extension of Global Voices), a Haitian blogger explains why these two candidates matter abroad:

As a Third World-er, I have always thought that there is little difference between American politicians… I have never felt more segregated than when I was in the United States. Here in Haiti world music, art, and science are accessible to all. There's nothing out of the ordinary about a young Haitian to be mad about Celine Dion, Bocelli, Monet or the human genome… What I learned is that in the United States, if you are Black and you listen to George Michael, for example, you are considered "black with white taste," that there are movies for Whites and movies for Blacks, music for Whites and music for Blacks…

It is undeniable that Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama want to shake the status quo. A woman and a black carried by the same dream of presiding over the world's most powerful nation."

Even if identity politics challenges democracy at home, it may do a world of good for the image of American democracy abroad. And on that front, the U.S. is in serious need of damage control.

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BERLIN, GERMANY- German-born Turk Murat Kurnaz, a former detainee at the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison, as he waits for the beginning of his hearing at the German Parliament in Berlin to give evidence at a parliamentary inquiry.

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Nestor Kirchner may be the former president of Argentina, but there's one person who has refused to obey his ex-presidential orders: his 17-year-old daughter Florencia.

Daddy isn't happy that his adolescent daughter, whose mother is current Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has been posting wild-child photos on her blog. He is reported to have begged her to stop posting images. Like any smart teenager, though, Florencia simply changes her screen name. She has gone from "bananarepublic" to "coffelove" to her present "florkey."

Some photos are innocuous and reveal rare glimpses of the first family's life, such as a photo of Florencia backstage with her brother and two cousins at her mother's inauguration last year. Others, though, have alarmed some in the Argentine press, because they show her wandering around Buenos Aires with no security detail in sight (e.g. a photo of Florencia on the subway with a friend).

At least her parents may be happy to know that when she interviewed herself online, she said her favorite country was, "Argentina, I think."

It always makes me depressed to think about how little attention the vast majority of Americans pay to the rest of the world. Passport readers are, of course, an exception. But I'm reminded of how isolationist the general American public can be whenever I stumble across stories like this, Time magazine's Top 10 Underreported Stories of the year. Of the 10 stories on the list, seven of them have to do with international developments (OK, this item is arguably a domestic story, but I'm including it in my tally because it's about nukes). And of those seven stories, only one of them was a surprise to me: Brazil's announcement that it had made the largest oil discovery since 2000. (I'm chalking up missing this story to the fact that it happened around Thanksgiving time, when I wasn't paying attention to the news as I should.)

Granted, it's my job to pay attention to what's going on in the world. But honestly, should it really be new news to people that the U.N. reduced its estimates of those afflicted with AIDS, or that tensions are getting worse between Ethiopia and Eritrea?

At any rate, I suppose I should be grateful that Time is bringing its readers' attention back to these important topics. But for stories that really went underreported, check out FP's The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2007. And make your family and friends add "pay more attention to international news" to their list of New Year's resolutions.

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Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has been making great strides in Iowa polls over the last several weeks, and now he's starting to make a surge in national polls as well. A new CNN poll released Monday found that the Huckster has doubled his support among likely Republican voters in the whole country, bringing him into a a statistical dead heat with GOP frontrunner Rudy Giuliani. With a higher national profile, Huckabee has to start paying more attention to higher profile issues, too.

In the case of Cuba, it means a flip-flop. A few years ago, Huckabee joined a bipartisan crowd calling for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, saying it was bad for business. He even wrote a letter to President Bush in 2002 saying that it hurt Arkansas rice growers. On Monday, though, he took a hard right turn and said in a Miami speech that he supports the embargo and would not hesitate to veto any effort to end sanctions against Havana. Has he really had a change of heart? Or is this simply political move designed to appeal to voters of Cuban origin in Florida? Here's the presidential wannabe, in his own words:

Rather than seeing it as some huge change, I would call it, rather, the simple reality that I'm running for president of the United States, not for reelection as governor of Arkansas."

Credit where credit is due—Huckabee may be a flip-flopper, but at least he's being brutally honest about the reasons why.

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Here's a disturbing story. Jewish groups in Venezuela are protesting what they claim is intimidation by government forces on the eve of the country's national referendum.

The JTA and the New York Times report that Venezuelan paramilitary officers conducted a raid for suspected illegal weapons shortly before 1 a.m. on Sunday at the Israeli Union of Caracas synagogue during a wedding party; no weapons were found. The Jewish community in Venezuela has come under assault before: once in 2003 when Iraq war protestors attempted to vandalize another Caracas synagogue and again in 2005 when Venezuelan police raided a Jewish school looking for—you guessed it—weapons.

The small, 200-year-old Jewish community in the country has been critical of president Hugo Chávez. And for understandable reasons: Chief among their concerns is his relationship with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad, who have both made their thoughts about Israel well known.

But perhaps more curious than the details of this peculiar raid is that fact that very few non-Jewish news outlets in South America bothered to report the story. In Venezuela, the raid was mentioned in only a single major daily newspaper, El Nacional. In fact, searches for any stories related to the Jewish community in other major, Spanish-language Venezuelan papers proved empty. Perhaps the other news outlets were too busy covering Chávez's first electoral defeat but then again... perhaps not.

The folks at the Cuba Transition Project at the University of Miami send along this interesting report (not yet online). Turns out it's not so much Hugo Chávez or Hu Jintao that are underwriting the Castro government, but European financiers:

From processing Havana's secretive international business transactions to providing lucrative high-interest loans to the Cuban government, European Union-based institutions have collectively bankrolled the Castro regime since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Today, quietly and behind the scenes, more hard currency flows in and out Cuba via European financial capitals than through Beijing or Caracas. While Venezuela's and China's multi-billion dollar credit lines for Cuba have done much to offset the loss of Soviet-era subsidies, such politically-driven deals are largely in the form of in-kind aid (oil and refined fuels from Venezuela and "soft" trade credits from China for the purchase of Chinese-made goods) rather than in convertible currency.

With more than US$1.6 billion in hard credit lines from European lenders, Cuban authorities have been able to conduct strategic international transactions ranging from policy-motivated imports of agricultural products from U.S. Congressional farm districts to financing the expansion of the island's nickel industry, in turn a major source of foreign revenue for the regime.

And Spain, as you might expect, is leading the way: 

European capital also sustains foreign direct investment. Of 185 foreign-financed joint ventures with the Cuban government, two-thirds originate in Europe. The strong correlation between foreign financing and foreign investment is best exemplified by Spain's leading role in the Cuban economy. Home to nearly 40 percent of all joint ventures currently operating in the island, Spanish lenders are also the largest source of private capital -- upwards of US$581 million -- for the Castro regime.

It turns out also that the Netherlands and Spain are among Cuba's largest export markets.

I have to say, though, that I'm underwhelmed by the amounts here. $1.6 billion simply isn't a lot of money, and $581 million is even less impressive. Of course, nothing could be sillier than the unilateral U.S. embargo, which has failed to accomplish anything other than making Cubans worse off. If even a few hundred mil from the Europeans can prop up the Castro brothers, what's the point?

Days after King Juan Carlos of Spain told Hugo Chávez to "shut up" at the Ibero-American summit (after Chávez called former Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar a "fascist"), Chávez has fired back from Caracas, comparing the king's treatment of him to the persecution of Jesus:

Should he accept the king's injunction to shut up, "the stones of the people of Latin America would cry out", said Chávez, paraphrasing a comment by Christ in Jerusalem shortly before his crucifixion. The Venezuelan information ministry issued press releases identifying the relevant part of the Bible.

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I see that Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is now taking potshots at the U.S.-Peru trade agreement that is now going through Congress and due to hit the Senate in November. Speaking on Saturday in Newton, Iowa, Edwards summed up his reasons for opposing the deal:

In short, this agreement does not meet my standard of putting American workers and communities first, ahead of the interests of the big multinational corporations, which for too long have rigged our trade policies for themselves."

This is his big strategy for victory in Iowa? As FP documented in June, bilateral trade between Peru and the United States is small potatoes: barely $2.5 billion in 2005. And most of that trade, $2 billion, was exports from the United States to Peru.

In fact, the dirty secret about the new agreement is that it would benefit U.S. exporters the most, as this summary of the deal (pdf) from the U.S. Trade Representative's office makes clear:

Eighty percent of U.S. exports of consumer and industrial products to Peru will become duty-free immediately, with remaining tariffs phased out over 10 years. Key U.S. exports will gain immediate duty-free access to Peru. Peru has agreed to allow trade in remanufactured goods, and will join the WTO Information Technology Agreement. 

Peru already enjoys good access to the U.S. market thanks to previous trade agreements, so it's not as if the United States is suddenly going to be flooded with cheap chicha, alpaca wool, and mahogany. Edwards may think that spreading this silliness is going to help him win the Democratic nomination, or at least earn him points in protectionist Iowa. My guess is that Edwards knows better. That's probably why he chose Peru rather than, say, the South Korea deal, which is on a different scale altogether.

Photo: National Security Archive

One of the oddest cultural trends of our time is the Cult of Che Guevara. I was just down in Peru, where street vendors proudly peddle Chinese-made tapestries and t-shirts bearing Che's image to U.S. college students. Hollywood—most notably Robert Redford—has glamorized Che on screen. And in more than one European hamlet will you find a "Che Guevara Bar," inevitably attracting hipsters with the same, sad tapestries, fake Cuban cigars, and cheap rum.

Today, the Cult of Che hit a new low, when a 3-inch lock of his beard and other items went up for sale at a Dallas auction house. The starting bid? $100,000. Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez is rumored to be among the potential interested bidders. The seller is Gustavo Villoldo, a retired CIA operative of Cuban heritage who was involved in Che's capture and was present when Che was buried. Villoldo says he cut the lock of hair because, "I wanted proof that I had completed my mission." His motive for selling it now appears to be profit. (This month marks the 40th anniversary of Che's death.)

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It's disappointing to see Che glorified in this way. The man was a Marxist-Leninist of the worst kind: He presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads; he assisted in the persecution of homosexuals [see note below]; he imprisoned dissidents. Che preached a dangerous breed of martyrdom and hatred reminiscent of the most radical jihadists of today's Middle East. You may see some familiar themes in this, one of Che's choicest lines:

Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become...."

Today, we seem intent on remembering Che as a liberator in the Bolivarian vein, a freedom fighter. He was not. As Paul Berman has elegantly documented, Che inspired many middle-class Latin Americans to take up arms in insurgent campaigns that did nothing more than set the cause of Latin American democracy back decades. That a tiny lock of his hair can sell in Texas (of all places) for six figures is a sad comment indeed on just how severely his legacy has been distorted.

Editor's Note: This post was changed by the editor to avoid any confusion. It originally said that Che "assisted in the persecution of homosexuals and AIDS victims." Many readers asked about the original language. Mike explains here.

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There's a saying: Once a cheater, always a cheater. And now former Mexican presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo has proven that he exemplifies that saying perfectly. On Sept. 30, he completed the 26.2-mile Berlin Marathon in an astonishingly fast time of 2 hours, 41 minutes, and 12 seconds (or 6 minutes, 9 seconds, per mile). That time gave him a first-place finish in the men's age-55 category, a lot better than his humiliating third-place finish in Mexico's presidential election last year.

But the electronic tracking chip that runners wear on their shoes showed that Madrazo hadn't crossed two checkpoints and that he apparently ran a nine-mile stretch in just 21 minutes. (The world record for running 15,000 meters—or 9.3 miles—is 41 minutes, 29 seconds.)

Madrazo has a reputation for playing loose with the rules. Mexico's attorney general's office determined that his Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) had exceeded campaign spending limits by tens of millions of dollars when he was running—without sneakers, this time—for governor of Tabasco state in the '90s. He also faked getting kidnapped to gain sympathy.

"If he's a cheat at one thing, he'll cheat at anything," said one Mexico City cab driver upon learning of Madrazo's suspicious marathon performance.

Madrazo has now been officially disqualified from the race. From now on, this cheater shouldn't be running any races—that goes for both the political and the athletic kinds.

(Editor's aside: FP editor Mike Boyer was prescient in pointing out Madrazo's tendency to be a repeat offender when he wrote in 2005 how the politician could become the Vladimir Putin of Mexico.)

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It must be every power-hungry leader's dream to be able to control the hands of time. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a botched attempt at this feat last week when he advanced his previously-announced plan to turn to country's clocks back half an hour. Yes, he admitted, this might sound a bit nutty:

I don't care if they call me crazy, the new time will go ahead, let them call me whatever they want. I'm not to blame. I received a recommendation and said I liked the idea.

Unfortunately, the erratic South American leader didn't turn out to be as effective an implementer as he was a timekeeper. Without a proper public campaign to explain what the heck was going on, Chávez confused even himself when he initially told the populace they needed to move their clocks forward instead of back. So the plan was postponed until January, citing a need to complete a couple necessary bureaucratic steps with international organizations before they could proceed. And why the awkward half hour? It's a way to prove that Venezuela doesn't need to follow the "scheme of hourly divisions dictated by the imperial United States." If successful, the country will join the ranks of those who are in half-hour increments off from Greenwich Mean Time: Afghanistan, Iran, and Burma. Way to stick it to the man, Hugo.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nancy Soderberg's column in Monday's Financial Times (subscribers only) calling on Argentina to pay of its international debts and reject aid from Hugo Chavez, first raised eyebrows here at FP because of Soderberg misidentifying Mexico's current president as Vicente Fox.

Oops.

Fox was, of course, succeeded at the end of last year by Felipe Calderón, a fact that should be well known to anyone in a position to comment on Latin American affairs (not to mention the FT's fact checkers). The paper has since corrected the mistake, but the piece still warrants some further scrutiny. 

Soderberg—whose personal Web site describes her as an expert on a number of regions, which do not include Latin America—is described by FT as co-chair of the American Task Force Argentina. The ATFA, in case you were wondering, is a lobbying group funded by creditors, some of them so-called "vulture funds" or investment firms who bought millions of dollars worth of Argentine bonds when the country defaulted on its debts in 2001-2002. Whatever you think of the debt issue and the swing toward economic populism in Latin America that Soderberg denounces, doesn't The Financial Times owe its readers more context when it turns over its editorial page to a lobbyist for debt collectors?

For more on the role of vulture funds around the world, see David Bosco's article, The Debt Frenzy, from our July/August issue. His take may surprise you.

Unilateral sanctions on Cuba are probably the stupidest, least-effective U.S. policy going—and everybody knows it. And yet even though the Cold War is over, the policy stays due to an electoral quirk that has politicians like George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton "pandering to a cabal that has kept US-Cuba ties frozen in a 1960s cocoon," in the words of Steve Clemons. Cuban expatriates, you see, are a key segment of the vote in the electoral swing state of Florida.

MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP/Getty Images

I mention this because today, Libya proudly announced that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be visiting the country in October, the first such visit since 1953. Many pundits will no doubt beat up on the Bush administration for doing so, and there's plenty of ammunition in Libya's grotesque human rights record or its recent attempt to assassinate the King of Saudi Arabia. And then there's Muammar el-Qaddafi himself, a nutjob who is widely mocked across the Middle East—a region that knows a thing or two about terrible leaders. The mercurial Qaddafi refused to meet with Condi's deputy, John Negroponte, when he visited the country back in April. And still, the rapprochement marches on.

If only the Cubans were sitting on 39 billion barrels of oil reserves, perhaps Condi would meet with them, too.