The New and Improved Fidel Castro
Jeffrey Goldberg has been writing about his recent visit with Fidel Castro for The Atlantic. His first installment made news as the kinder, gentler Fidel, among other things, expressed regret at his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Goldberg’s latest chapter is really bizarre, involving bread dipped in olive oil, Che Guevara’s daughter, the weight of the average dolphin, a nuclear physicist who was made Director of an aquarium, and—oh, yeah—the pronouncement from Castro that “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” It also features a photo of Castro not only out of uniform, but dressed in a what appears to be a red-checkered flannel shirt, looking as if he were heading up to a mountain cabin for the weekend to see if the trout were biting.
In short, good old Fidel appears to have turned a bit loopy. Not enslaving-a-people-and-crushing-dissent loopy, but more like isn’t-uncle-Moe-acting-a-bit-strange loopy. It sounds weird, but Goldberg appeared to have a good time with the new Fidel, and I can understand why. He was fun. It was kind of encouraging to see that even a Third World Dictator can loosen up after a half-century and toss off wisecracks. It makes you wonder how Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would look in red-checkered flannel.
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Jul '10
Re: The New and Improved Fidel Castro
Peter Robinson
Kenneth Peter, I'm not sure that Churchill actually liked Stalin. My impression is that he pretended to, in order to placate Roosevelt. If you look at group photo's from Yalta, Churchill's body language is telling. · Sep 8 at 9:11pm
Edited on Sep 08 at 09:14 pm
Would that it were so. But we have too much on record--see Jock Colville's wartime diaries--to doubt that Churchill felt a certain admiration for Stalin. Again, it's understandable--almost. Churchill's aim was to defeat Hitler--that always, that above all. And at Stalingrad, and then at Kursk, Stalin inflicted devastating defeats on the Wehrmacht, producing the signal turning point of the entire War. · Sep 8 at 10:23pm
I dunno, Peter. Admiration and "liking" are two different things.
As for Stalingrad, I'd say that was Hitler's self-inflicted defeat. (As was Moscow).
Jun '10
Re: The New and Improved Fidel Castro
Why is it that old men almost always seem to be kindly, grandfatherly types, even if, like Fidel and Uncle Joe Stalin, they were vicious killers?
In the early days of my legal practice, we had a federal judge who, on first appearance, looked like everyone's conception of the kindly grandpa. In fact he was a mean, petty, biased creep who delighted in ripping the heads off people.