Following the Equator.com - Comrade Joe the Only

Strong-man with a college degree.

Heritage? Anglo-Hispanic-African-Chinese-Portuguese-Congolese, you name it. Comrade Joe is a pleasant, cultured, and handsome man schooled at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. Currently Commandant of the current military junta running the island (it's a very small junta). His official title is President-for-Life.

Vice-president George Bush after being briefed on coup in Poco Cabesa.

Comrade Joe used to be Staff Sergeant Joe Jones in the People's Army of Poco Cabesa. But, a little while back he and a few other sergeants overthrew the President-for-Life at the time, Comrade Joe the First (who also happens to be Joe's Uncle Joe), and took charge.

The new Comrade Joe, whose idol is Lee Kuan Yew (the man who made Singapore what it is today), dreams of turning Poco Cabesa into a resort and banking haven to rival the Caymans.

Joe thinks a parliamentary dictatorship guided by laissez faire economics is just the ticket for stable growth and social order. And he's sure that, if he can aggregate the island's meager total monthly stipend into a lump sum for collateral, he can scrape up the seed money he needs to get his dreams started.

"Papa" Willie Maloney Yu, legendary Cold War era ambassador-at-large to the world.

Unfortunately, Joe's understandably miffed uncle took off into the jungle with the island's tiny treasury, so Joe's current economic realities include late payments to BP Amoco for the island's generator fuel-oil and soldiers who thought revolution meant finally getting paid.

Cadet Joe Jones was an honor role student at military school.

Comrade Joe does control the disbursement of monies from the Hyman Trust and, although the people are guaranteed the dole, a little supplication to the boss is always necessary in order to receive your full allotment.

But, try as he might, he cannot get his countrymen to pool their money and put it toward a common goal.

And his international banking connection, Phillipe Hemelman is doing eighteen months in Dade County Jail for misusing hurricane relief fund donations. This means Joe's options are severely limited for the moment. But he always has an eye out for an opportunity.

As leader of the government, he owns and operates various businesses and services, including the cable TV system, which runs off of Joe's satellite mini-dish -- the picture's good, but you better be ready to watch what Joe watches.

Phillipe Hemelmann being detained at Miami International Airport in 1983 (from police video).

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What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows -- it must grow; nothing can prevent it.
-- Mr. Twain