CUBAN PRISON HELLHOLES: First there’s this one:

HAVANA – Dissident journalist Manuel Vazquez Portal tells of rats, bad food and a tiny cell in a diary smuggled out of prison by his wife, providing a rare look at life behind bars in Cuba.

Vazquez described his cell’s furnishings as a rickety cot, a dirty mattress without sheets and pillow, a fetid toilet bowl. Rats scurry across the floor and water drips down the walls, he wrote.

“The cell is a space of 1 1/2 meters wide by 3 meters long (about 5 feet by 10 feet),” Vazquez wrote in one entry. “A barred door partially covered by a plate of steel. A barred window, through which enters the sun’s rays, the rain, the insects.”

Then there’s this one:

Is America the only country in the world that could run a prison camp where prisoners gain weight? Between April 2002 and March 2003, the Joint Task Force returned to Afghanistan 19 of the approximately 664 men (from 42 countries) who have been held in the detention camps at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay. Upon leaving, it has been reported, each man received two parting gifts: a brand new copy of the Koran as well as a new pair of jeans. Not the act of generosity that it might first appear, the jeans, at least, turned out to be a necessity. During their 14-month stay, the detainees (nearly all of them) had each gained an average of 13 pounds.

Guess which one the international human rights folks have made the bigger stink about. Plus, the story on Castro’s prison has the “perspective” paragraph comparing its conditions to other prisons in Latin America; coverage of Guantanamo doesn’t do that.