Here's a Communist knee-slapper

Hugo's Socket Logic

Socialism: The lights are flickering in oil-rich Venezuela, a victim of the same shortages that appear wherever socialism is tried. With the grid verging on collapse, the final irony is to see Hugo Chavez calling Cuba to fix it.
Most leaders serious about fixing a collapsing power grid call up companies like Bechtel or APR Energy because they're capable of swiftly setting up small power plants in emergencies, even in infrastructure wastelands such as Haiti.
But that's not whom President Hugo Chavez called when he got word that Venezuela's electricity is in a state of collapse and may go black in as little as four months.
Instead, he opted for Ramiro Valdes, a septuagenarian Cuban guerrilla who once fought with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Inside the decrepit Castro regime, Valdes is a high-ranking survivor comparable to functionaries such as Vyacheslav Molotov in Stalin's Russia. Henchman, lackey and torturer, he didn't make it to Cuba's vice presidency by thinking for himself.
In fact, Valdes knows nothing about electricity, other than how to make it as "efficient" as Cuba's. The latter communist island is subject to the same rolling blackouts that now affect Venezuela. The only reason Cuba hasn't gone completely black is the aid it gets from Caracas. Now with Valdes set to do for Venezuela what was done in Cuba, no sugar daddy will be there to bail the country out.
Already Valdes' Cuban technicians are making a hash of things. Last week, El Universal columnist Nelson Bocaranda reported that Cubans damaged six Venezuelan energy-generating engines at four hydroelectric plants by forgetting to put oil in before firing them up.
Whatever happens with Valdes, it's certain that the actual electrical grid problem isn't the problem Chavez really wants to fix. What worries Venezuelans is the other side of Valdes' background. His nicknames in Cuba are "Bloodthirsty" and "Ramiro the Terrible," and his familiarity with electricity is in administering electrical shocks to dissidents.
His new speciality is "Information Technology and Communications" — which is to say cracking down on the Internet. With Chavez screaming that Twitterers are terrorists, it's starting to look as though his real aim is not to fix Venezuela's electrical grid problem but to silence complaints about its failures.
It doesn't bode well for what's likely to be seen ahead in Venezuela as Chavez's internal disasters mount.