The Cooler

Just a few things caught my attention this morning in SoFla's mainstream media. Here's your Cooler.

A- Herald: Deep South barbecue in the heart of Miami-Dade.

On weekend evenings, a drive down Northwest 22nd Avenue beginning at 119th Street is a Deep South barbecue symphony. Old smokers sit outside antique churches, homes and forgotten buildings, their smoky psalms winding toward the firmament.

This pocket of Miami-Dade is jeweled with plaza pits, barbecue rigs and shade-tree operations based on family recipes as secret as any Da Vinci code. Men and women with molasses-dipped Southern drawls fellowship over flesh that falls off bones and lands indelibly on your memory.

[...]

''Selling barbecue is how we were able to purchase a church building at a time when it was very difficult for black churches to get loans from banks,'' says [Bishop Albert] Watson, whose family operation has been going since 1953.

``We were serving barbecue when there were colored-only water fountains and when they were just building the I-95.''

B- Herald: Editorial, yet another example of how blatantly pro-Castro the Herald is.

In South Florida, there will be proclamations and receptions Wednesday marking the 107th anniversary of Cuba's independence from Spain.

But in Cuba, now in its 50th year of totalitarian rule under Fidel and Raúl Castro, there will be nothing but more repression. Cuba doesn't commemorate the date, based on the brothers' outrageous belief that only their 1959 revolution brought ``freedom.''

It is in this surreal totalitarian landscape that 11 million Cubans must navigate day after day, in between standing in line for food rations and trying to find cement on the black market to patch up decaying homes. Those who complain publicly about their country's sorry state and lack of freedom can expect harassment and jail time.

The universal rights of freedom of speech, association and assembly are systematically violated in Cuba's one-party state, but you wouldn't know that from the regime's apologists in this hemisphere.

C- Sun-Sentinel: Just remember, it's not the breed.

FORT LAUDERDALE - The early-evening tranquility of the Victoria Park neighborhood was shattered Wednesday by screams of terror when two pit bulls bit a woman, killed one of her dogs and seriously injured another one.

It was a moment that neighbors said they had been dreading after weeks of living in fear of the pit bulls that had moved into a house on the 500 block of Victoria Park Road. The dogs had been seen roaming the streets unleashed on previous occasions, neighbors said.

Kailen Gonzalez, 25, and her brother Carlos Gonzalez, 28, had been walking their three dogs at about 6 p.m. along the 500 block of Victoria Terrace when the two pit bulls charged out of their backyard.

"There was no mercy," said Carlos Gonzalez, blood staining his T-shirt and shorts. "They were just attacking, attacking."

D- Sun-Sentinel: Video, South Florida animals rob man in wheelchair.

E- CBS4: Video, Don't mess with Sweetwater PD.

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