While it doesn’t pertain to Cuba per se, this excellent article in the New York Times takes a look at the current socialist salon being created by Hugo Chávez’s socialist government in Venezuela.
In hotel corridors where oilmen in business suits once hatched deals over glasses of whiskey, delegates in Birkenstocks and guayaberas discussed Marx and Antonio Gramsci, the leftist Italian writer. Such meetings have become a staple of life in Caracas, with Mr. Chávez’s government flush, at least for now, with petrodollars that can be used to attract sympathetic members of the chattering classes the world over.
Officials here have organized international encounters for philosophers, women’s rights advocates, the government spokesmen of nonaligned countries, poets and, in September, specialists in body painting.