Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

In a bitter criticism of the executions carried out last week in Cuba, Jose Saramago, the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer considered Fidel Castro's best friend among European intellectuals, broke with the regime Monday.

"This is as far as I go," Saramago wrote in a short but powerful essay printed in Spain's leading newspaper, El Pais, as the European Union, various countries and organizations around the world continued to offer public repudiations.

Killing three men by firing squad at dawn Friday for trying to spirit a ferry boat is unacceptable--especially since the would-be hijackers didn't hurt anybody, wrote Saramago, a communist.

"Cuba has won no heroic victory by executing these three men, but it has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, robbed me of illusions."

--From a story in today's Miami Herald.