Quotable

“I never thought that my existence would be so prolonged, or that the enemy would be so clumsy in his hateful profession of eliminating adversaries that are committed to fighting.”

   – Fidel Castro before the National Assembly last Sunday

A lukewarm endorsement

Today Granma published an interview with Fidel Castro that was done after he voted last Sunday.  It was “revised and updated by the interviewee” before publication.  An excerpt where he was questioned by a Telesur reporter:

Fabiola Lopez:  Comandante, what do you think of the changes that are taking place now in Cuba?

Fidel Castro:  You say the changes, but the big change was the Revolution.  What changes are you referring to?

FL:  I mean the changes that are taking place now with the lineamientos and everything happening to update socialism.

FC:  Well, in general I believe it is a duty to update it and improve it, but this is a stage where it is indispensable to proceed with lots of caution, we should not make mistakes.  We are moving from a unique and very complex time in history, life has to have taught us things during these 50 years.  The country that has done the most to come close to a deep revolution, in the neighborhood of the empire, is Cuba.  Not everything has turned out perfectly, but it is an unavoidable obligation to perfect and improve upon what we have done.

Death of a rumor

Fidel has done it again, making news just by being alive.

For about 10 days, skittish editors around the world sent reporters to chase rumors of Castro’s death.  From Caracas, one Nelson Bocaranda claimed that Fidel’s sister Juanita had been summoned to Havana, which she denied in an interview with Wilfredo Cancio at Café Fuerte.  She said it is “irresponsible to circulate unfounded rumors” and added that she is “very busy with the campaign for the re-election of Obama, who is the candidate I like and seems to be the best for the country where I have lived for 48 years.”

The rumors became more intense and the editors more skittish last Thursday when the Miami Herald ran a bizarre story with details of Castro’s purportedly abysmal medical condition presented by a Venezuelan doctor who resides in Naples, Florida.

The front page of today’s Granma (pdf) has a photo of Fidel holding last Friday’s newspaper and a story with Fidel’s byline (“Fidel Castro is in agony”) denouncing news media “stupidities” incited by “the henhouse of imperialist propaganda.”  More than the photo, that phrase proves he’s still kicking.

“I don’t even remember what a headache is,” Fidel wrote.  He recalled the Cuban missile crisis, Cuba’s “ethically unimpeachable” conduct in it, and he noted that after half a century “we’re still here with our head held high.”  He’s finished publishing his reflexiones, he says, because “surely it is not my role to occupy the pages of our press, which are dedicated to other tasks that our country requires.”

On Saturday, Wilfredo Cancio examined how this story, which has sprung up several times in recent years, took off last week in a new context where anyone can publish anything immediately and worldwide on social media.  In fact, on the day that the story is true there will be no scoop, Cancio writes, because “it will be known when Cuba announces it officially.”  I agree.  I also agree that, as he writes, it will mark a turning point in Cuban history but “whenever it comes, it will be less and less transcendent for the course of the country.”

Fidel is still alive and his tongue is still sharp, but the post-Fidel era has been with us for some years now.

[Granma photo, credited to Alex Castro]

JFK vs. Fidel, Fidel vs. JFK

The Herald’s Glenn Garvin reviews Brian Latell’s new book on the Cuban intelligence service.  He zeroes in on a defector’s report that, owing to statements Lee Harvey Oswald made at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, Fidel Castro may have known in advance that Oswald was going to assassinate President Kennedy.  And thanks to a double agent, Fidel knew that JFK was after him.  Latell: “I don’t say Fidel Castro ordered the assassination, I don’t say Oswald was under his control.  He might have been, but I don’t argue that, because I was unable to find any evidence for that.  But did Fidel want Kennedy dead?  Yes.  He feared Kennedy.  And he knew Kennedy was gunning for him.  In Fidel’s mind, he was probably acting in self-defense.”

Odds and ends

· More on the case of deceased prisoner Wilman Villar: His widow appeared at a press conference at the home of human rights monitor Elizardo Sanchez and said that Villar’s legal troubles began in a domestic dispute between the couple where he had been drinking, and things ended with her mother going for police assistance. After that, she said, Villar joined a dissident group. She has now joined the Damas de Blanco. There is a lot more back-and-forth among family members and others about who hit or did not hit whom, and more. Sanchez says that this is a moment where “the truth has to be brought to light” because either the government or the dissidents “are lying.” See stories from AP and AFP Spanish.

· The Herald takes an interesting look at the evolution of church-state relations in Cuba since the 1980’s.

· Cuba flights are about to begin from Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

· New Times, the Miami weekly that is really one of the best newspapers in America, gave me honorable mention in a recent blog ranking for being the “only blogger in Miami reporting on the Cuban economy.”

· In the comments, a reader pointed out an essay by Cuban blogger Ivan Garcia on Fidel Castro’s experiments and failures over the years. It’s here in English and Spanish. Not to be pigeonholed, he is also in favor of taking Bush, Blair, and Aznar to the Hague for starting the Iraq war (here and here).

On another July 26

“Cuba and the Cuban revolution will continue fighting and resisting even if we should wake up one day to the news, which we hope would never occur, that a great civil conflict has arisen in the USSR and even that the USSR has fallen apart.

“The revolutionary movement is going through difficulties. We cannot even say that supplies, which have been arriving in the socialist camp like clockwork for the past thirty years, will continue arriving with that reliability and punctuality. It is possible that in the future we may have to continue working and exerting ourselves and making miracles.”

– Fidel Castro, July 26, 1989