Baby Elian

Elian Gonzalez, America's Famous refugee

doy. At second glance, i didn't think i'd like it (at first glance I was listening to it for the first time), but now i discover it's not so bad at all.

oh and by the way, this album is hugely underrated.

"We follow a shining path/That you will never destroy" - Pretty sure this is an allusion to the Maoist rebels known as The Shining Path who have been waging a civil war in Peru for some time now. Their name comes from a quote of their founder: "Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution." Anyway, that's where that lyric comes from, which would make sense given the song's pro-Cuba message...

I am absolutely in love with this song's melody, I think it's beautiful, so hearing the studio version for the first time just now was really disappointing, as the live acoustic version I'm accustomed to shows off the melody so much better :( Normally I don't like the stripped down, acoustic version of a track, but the this song sounds kind of wrong so produced. Oh well.

Nicky Wire's brother named his son Elian. Poor little sod.

Elian Gonzales was a young Cuban boy found clinging to an inner tube off the Florida coast in Nov. 1999 and became the subject of an international dispute between the U.S. and Cuba after the boy's American relatives and the U.S. Cuban community demanded that the six-year-old refugee remain in Miami rather than be returned to his father in Cuba, arguing that American democracy would benefit the boy more than life in Castro's Cuba. A dramatic raid by armed federal agents on April 22 ended the stand-off, and the boy was reunited with his father. The influential Cuban-American community lost a good deal of public sympathy by pitting political ideology against familial bonds. For Castro it was a publicity bonanza, emphasizing the intransigence of the official U.S. policy toward Cuba, which has imposed a 38-year-old trade embargo and other cold war-era sanctions.

The music and song are great. The lyrics are shite. Sounds less like the genius Nick Wire lyrics of old, and more like a college freshmen after attending a Campus Marxists meeting.