BERMUDIAN apologists for the Cuban revolucion, those who will do anything for Fidel Castro and his ebbing-and-flowing dictatorship except actually live under it, are prone to celebrate supposed accomplishments of this Stalinist relic that more properly belong on Esquire's annual Dubious Achievements list.

A surprisingly large number of Castroistas have emerged from the cedar woodwork since the Transport Minister rewarded Havana's latest crackdown on freedom of conscience with the dubious gift of Bermuda's old bus fleet.

It seems Bermuda boasts an entire legion of what Castro's spiritual and philosophical godfather Lenin colourfully termed "useful idiots" - foreign champions prepared to whitewash a left-wing regime's crimes and excesses, only countenancing the iron-bound official version of events handed down from on high. Without question; without compunction.

Putting their critical faculties into cold storage, these political propagandists operate on that dangerous combination of faith and willing suspension of disbelief which all too frequently anaesthetises rational thought.

Faith, Arthur Koestler (himself a reformed dupe for Soviet totalitarianism) said, is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, it can convince you that a herring is a race horse. Or, in the current climate, a drab, ethically bankrupt and remorseless dictatorship is, in fact, a paradise.

So in what might be termed the Useful Idiots Guide To Totalitarianism, chief among the man-made miracles Castro has wrought is a medical system that is held up as the socialised jewel of the Caribbean.

Of course, this is the same health care system that treats Aids patients by forcefully quarantining them in the medical equivalent of concentration camps. This is a concept that may actually hold some appeal for those Bermudians who fought against an Aids hospice at Spanish Point on the basis that the prevailing winds there might serve as a magic carpet for "sissy germs" and infect the whole locality - the NIMBY syndrome in its full Bermudianised glory.

Then there are the millions of increasingly scarce dollars that Cuba's scientific elite have squandered attempting to cure cancer with a quack vaccine that is actually the synthesised equivalent of shark-fin soup. What might very loosely be termed the thinking involved in these experiments is that what chicken broth is to colds, shark cartilege must surely be to cancer. This is a correlation that does not actually exist outside the febrile imaginations of Cuban doctors who seem to have matriculated on a combination of Nazi pseudo-scientific texts and pulp fictioneer Robin Cook's medical thrillers.

Then there's the much celebrated Cuban literacy rate, one that is close to a hundred per cent, far higher than that which exists in the US or even Bermuda, for that matter - an island that spends more money per head than any country in the world on students in its public school system.

However, the Cuban achievements in education have to be understood within the context of a society that still dictates what its citizens can and cannot read - a situation that makes universal literacy somewhat superfluous. Not to mention dangerous from the readers' point of view. When flipping through Of Mice And Men or The Shining or The Collected Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. carries with it the risk of a 27-year jail term, the joy of reading does tend to lose some of its appeal.

Of course, making people do hard time for freely expressing their thoughts or political convictions may also hold no little appeal to some in Bermuda.

Recently, the Bermuda Government has taken to leaning on web site operators who have allowed users to violate what the Cabinet Office deems to be the cardinal principle of netiquette - posting messages critical of this Government at online forums.

An entertaining and often hilariously scabrous bulletin board at Bermuda.com has been wiped clean - less because anything posted there was libellous in law, more because the hatchet men at the E-Commerce Ministry (never mind that an E-Commerce Ministry is actually an oxymoron in this post-dot.con era) seem to have objected to their Minister - who, of course, pulls double-duty as the Tourism Minister - being so frequently held up there as an object of ridicule.

Usually, this ridicule took the form of quoting her latest capricious whims verbatim.

Since the web site in question is the chief portal to the online presence of the island's vestigial hospitality industry, the overt or covert influence exerted on Bermuda.com by the Tourism/E-Commerce connection (or the "Axis of Evil" as it is more commonly referred to by the online Bermudian community) has been the source of intense speculation.

TO be fair, an off-ramp on the information superhighway aimed at visitors and potential visitors is not necessarily the most desirable online location for gangs of Bermudian political activists (and satirists) to rumble.

But that having been said, aside from sanitising the bulletin boards to the extent that even passing references to crimes against visitors are now verboten the comprehensive and entertaining round-up of the week's events that used to appear under a "Bermuda News" section has now also vanished into the Bermuda.com Triangle. The "news" now consists of press releases from hotels and restaurants announcing the latest room rates and bills of fare.

When there is apparently no crime against tourists in the "New" Bermuda, when even posts detailing no-go areas for tourists are regularly deleted, the information that remains has to be regarded as the sanitised, officially sanctioned version of the Bermudian reality, not the genuine article. Much like the officially sanctioned version of the Cuban reality now making the rounds here, in fact. The same Cuba the Tourism/E-Commerce Minister favours for her R&R - where she apparently picks up authoritarian traits as souvenirs, including the newly acquired authority to keep charter flights grounded by decree.

Another Bermuda web site, one operated by a group of young people - the same young people who are so regularly derrided for being disaffected and apathetic - has been targeted with particular vehemence by a Government that apparently subscribes to the one-sided precept of free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee.

The TGTMaster web site was the subject of a news media teapot-tempest a few weeks back because of the political juvenalia posted there, nondescript and entirely non-threatening ramblings and rantings about the current Government and its policies. Of a decidedly conservative nature - its operators supported the Anglo/American military campaign against Saddam Hussein and oppose many initiatives of the left-of-centre Progressive Labour Party Government - the web site was gutted on Government's instructions.

The E-Commerce Minister announced that from now on she would decide what constituted acceptable free speech on the Internet (another add-on to her powers), forgetting the Churchillian maxim that free speech in its most deplorable form is in fact the most worthwhile kind a democracy can strive to protect. The kind of pro-Government noise pollution that can, of course, be heard on Bermuda talk radio every day, for instance. For when official censure crosses the line into out-and-out censorship, a society has of course started down the primrose path that leads to bonfires of books and magazines.

Last weekend a former Education Minister with nothing better to do posted a message at the largely denuded TGTMaster forum objecting to a user who had railed against the Government's Cuban bus deal. The former Parliamentarian said he "has never heard of (sic) such rubbish being published at a wesite" (sic). He might not have much of a grasp of basic spelling and grammar. He did, however, remember to affix the prefix "Honourable" before his name and the prefix "JP" behind it - illustrative of why the operators of that web site are so disaffected with a Government that's increasingly obsessive/compulsive about the perquisites of office and largely oblivious to its responsibilities.

WHILE taking umbrage with a member of the public's argument (an accurate one, too) that Cuba is, in fact, a dictatorship, the former Minister seemingly has no problem with "rubbish" voiced by his confreres either on the floor of the House of Assembly or in Government news releases: the United Bermuda Party running the drug trade; the need to defang and declaw the constitutional powers of the Auditor General so he can no longer review cooked Government books; even the latest promise that the Berkeley Institute construction project will be completed on schedule and within budget. These are three particularly egregious examples that spring nimbly to mind.

He concludes what must be regarded as a semi-official Jeremiad against the web site's content by saying Cuba will one day be free of "the travel restrictions the US now imposes against its citizens". Given that a trio of Cuban dissidents who attempted to hijack a ferry to Florida were executed in Havana on Monday, it would seem the travel restrictions Castro now imposes on his citizens are far more onerous than anything Washington could ever come up with.. Shopworn but still as wildly unpredictable as the course of a tropical storm, Commandante Castro has lost none of his capacity for dubious achievements.