![]() ![]() From the son-in-law of a powerful pro-Batista politician, to New York Times’ correspondent Herbert Matthew’s “anti-communist”, to the “mighty penis come to life” of Alan Ginsberg, to the delusional self-made expert on agriculture and genetics, to the jealous autocrat executing his own army officers, we have seen it all-Castro’s many masks and his poses-heard it all and discussed it minutely for decades.Īnd while statesmen like Trudeau and Jean-Claude Juncker praised Castro as a hero, to us he seemed to have ended his days ironically more as the title character in his friend Garcia Marquez’s “Autumn of the Patriarch,” an aged and angry mummy filled with bile to the end. We have seen close-up his legend and his history in our mind’s eye and in our nightmares, seemingly, forever. To Fidel and his regime, we who fled were “maggots, lumpen and trash” but we saw ourselves as maggots who fought back. I remember having a sticker on a school notebook in Miami of a smiling worm (a gusano), with a Cuban straw hat, carrying a machine gun. ![]() Fidel was our own intimate pain and personal demon. In the United States, one saw the irony of the head of the Green Party, demanding a recount in the presidential vote in Wisconsin, while praising a man who never allowed a multi-party election in 50 years of ironfisted rule.įor Cubans and Cuban-Americans, the reaction is deeper, sharper and more intense. Many world statesmen used the opportunity to praise the long-time Cuban strongman, with political leaders in democratic countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, and the President of the European Union being particularly effusive. The death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has unleashed a flood of commentary.
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