In what Mr Audrines describes as a barterarrangement (in which the Cubans seem to get the rough end), Caracas will trade them for eight macaws, two tapirs, a puma and four capybaras.
The perpetrator, in the first instance, is a former East German protester who got to the West through freikauf, a barterarrangement popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, that involved selling dissident flesh for hard currency.