(Marvel)
Pop and Hollywood stars (Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Rihanna, Beyoncé) and sex-tape creators (Paris Hilton) have been flooding Cuba by the boatload ever since the United States and Cuba announced that they would reestablish diplomatic relations late in 2014.
You might forgive your average paranoid Cold War communist from the island if it seemed something like a cultural invasion by the Americans.
And now, in the most recent issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man,” Peter Parker supposedly heads to Cuba – however, in the very first panel of the comic book, there is a red flag. Or, at least, a flag that has red in the wrong spot.
Spider-Man is crouched on the side of a building, looking into the central square of what we are told is the town of Remedios, Cuba. Flying proudly from a nearby building is a red, white and blue flag ... the Puerto Rican flag.
It’s a common mistake for non-natives of the two islands to confuse them. The Cuban flag has three blue and two white stripes with a white star inside a red triangle, while the Puerto Rican flag has three red and two white stripes with a white star inside a blue triangle.
Jose Molina, the Puerto Rican-born author of the issue, took to Twitter to apologize and held himself responsible for the mistake.
“I have to apologize for a mistake that appeared in issue 1.2 of #AmazingSpiderMan, which I wrote and which hit stores today,” Molina tweeted last week. “In the book, Spidey arrives in the town square of Remedios, Cuba ... which is inexplicably flying the Puerto Rican flag instead of the Cuban flag. We screwed up, and I'm sorry.”
He added, “As a Puerto Rican born-and-raised, I can't tell you how embarrassed I am by this mix-up. It was an honest mistake; I can't explain how it happened.”
Molina declined to make any additional comments to Fox News Latino.
The comic book’s editor, Nick Lowe, also issued his own apology on Twitter, saying that “on the edge of the deadline and in the rush to get it out, we made this bone-headed mistake.”
“The embarrassing flag-mistake in Amazing Spider-Man #1.2 will be fixed for all digital and collected editions. My sincere apologies!” he tweeted.
He also shared the corrected page with the Cuban flag.
No word about the flag controversy from Cuban Pres. Raúl Castro.
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