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Thursday, August 03, 2006


Already Gone?

Is Castro already dead?   Mario Loyola thinks there's a good chance, so I'll take his suggestion and order a mojito tonight just in case.  Of course, I hope my bartender knows what he's doing.  

Compare Loyola's thoughts and observations with this Reuters item today, titled "Cuba says communists in control no matter what."  

It turns out that a gentleman by the name of Mark Falcoff wrote a book, "Cuba, The Morning After-Confronting Castro's Legacy" released in 2003 that deals with the after-Castro question.  Jay Nordlinger has a review here.    

As I have mentioned here before, Ernest Hemingway is one of my favorite authors (he used to be the undisputed #1).  He is also most likely one of the three individuals most readily identified with Cuba (sorry Andy Garcia).  One thing that always bothered me about him was that I couldn't quite figure out his politics.  Between the time spent in Cuba and siding with the communists in "For Whom the Bell Tolls," I expected the worst.  Today I was inspired to try to sort it out.  Though there is a relatively famous picture of Hemingway and Castro together, it was apparently taken the only time the two met, and before Castro declared himself a communist.  The Cuban government has predictably latched on to the Hemingway legacy as a way of promoting tourism, though given that Hemingway refused to enter Italy while Mussolini was in power, I doubt he would visit Cuba today.  The best explanation I found was an editorial by J. Daniel Cloud of the Libertarian Party, in which he argues (also predictably, but also convincingly) that Hemingway was a libertarian or at least had libertarian leanings:

"I cannot be a communist ... because I believe in only one thing: liberty," Ernest Hemingway wrote in response to a letter from a young communist in the late 1930s. "First I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation. … I believe in the absolute minimum of government."
 
That I can live with.  

And finally (for today at least), our colleague from the Caribbean has some relevant thoughts on this topic over at The Foundation Dub Joint.  


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