Castro’s Comeback?

As the Devil gets ready to light Fidel Castro’s last cigar,* so to speak, an email from the Atlantic magazine alerts us to the forthcoming report by its star correspondent, Jeffrey Goldberg, on his conversations with the Cuban communist. The Atantic sent along a photograph of the dying dictator, dressed in a plaid shirt, and a visiting delegation. It was taken at the local aquarium. With his right hand Mr. Castro appears to be gripping the arm of an aide for support, and with his left hand he is holding a piece of paper. Looking on is the president of the Cuban Jewish community, Adela Dworin. Mr. Goldberg’s visage has what we would call his characteristic reportorial squint.

The wire from the Atlantic sent us up onto the Web to see what else might be happening with Mr. Castro. We discovered a dispatch, issued the same day that we received the Atlantic’s wire, on the Website of Foreign Policy. It reported that the Cuban dictator is readying what Foreign Policy calls an “image rehabilitation campaign.” The headline angle, in a post by Andrew Scott, is “Castro accepts blame for revolution’s homophobia.” No mention of Mr. Castro taking blame for his other crimes, like destroying a whole country, driving people into exile, wiping out a nation’s private property, fomenting revolution abroad, or crushing religion.

Mr. Castro , according to Foreign Policy, told the Mexican daily La Jornada** that “while he was not prejudiced against gays, the blame for the homophobic atmosphere lay only with himself.” The communist claims, according to Foreign Policy’s summary of the interview with La Jornada, that he was “‘too busy’ with other matters — such as trying to survive U.S. assassination attempts.” In other words, Mr. Castro seems to suggest that it’s America’s fault that, in the first decade of his rule, “Cuban homosexuals were,” as Foreign Policy put it, “branded as counterrevolutionaries and sent to detention camps . . .”

The dictator is quoted as also telling La Jornada that “he wished to stop what he believed to be an imminent nuclear war between Iran, the United States, and Israel.” We haven’t talked to Mr. Goldberg since he got back from Cuba, but it will be illuminating to see how he handles this, given that he is author of the cover story that was run out in the September number of the Atlantic under the cover-line “Israel Is Getting Ready To Bomb Iran — How, Why and What It Means.” Foreign Policy had another post about Comrade Castro, issued back in June under the byline of Clare Sestanovich, that was headlined: “Castro: swastika has become Israeli flag.” It all raises the question of whether Mr. Castro is going to try to rehabilitate himself via the Middle East. If so, guess at whose expense that will be.

________

* This is a reference to Elliott Banfield’s famed cartoon, “Castro’s Last Cigar,” drawn when the dictator’s health was failing fast and he was deemed close to death.

** “[T]he one independent newspaper in the whole hemisphere” is how, according to Wikipedia, La Jornada was once described by Noam Chomsky.