There’s a wonderful riddle about the stranger traveling in the land of the two tribes — liars and truth tellers. Members of the two tribes look identical. The difference is that one tribe always lies, and one tribe always tells the truth. The stranger is walking along a road trying to reach the capital. Presently he comes to a fork, at which is standing one of the locals. The stranger is unable to detect whether the local is a truth-teller or a liar. But he needs to find out which fork leads to the capital. He is permitted one question. So what could he ask the local — who either always lies or always tells the truth — that would get him to his destination?

We thought of that riddle amid the excitement over the interviews that the Atlantic magazine’s star correspondent, Jeffrey Goldberg, has had with Fidel Castro. The dying dictator had summoned Mr. Goldberg, ostensibly to talk about the danger of a nuclear war between Israel and Iran and America. Mr. Castro had read, in the September Atlantic, Mr. Goldberg’s dispatch reporting that Israel is getting ready to bomb Iran. Mr. Goldberg, by his own description, has only limited experience with what he calls “Communist autocrats,” but he certainly doesn’t lack for gumption. At one point, after a three-hour dirge from Mr. Castro about Iran and Israel, Mr. Goldberg popped a question about whether Mr. Castro believed the Cuban model was, as Mr. Goldberg put it, “still something worth exporting.”

“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Mr. Castro replied. The response struck Mr. Goldberg as what he called the “mother of all Emily Litella moments,” a reference to the dotty commentator played by Saturday Night Live’s comedienne Gilda Radner, who extricates herself from her hilarious misinterpretations by turning to the audience and saying, “Never mind.”* In Cuba, Mr. Goldberg asked his sidekick, Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations, for an interpretation. She said the communist wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. Mr. Goldberg said Ms. Sweig said she took Mr. Castro’s statement to be an “acknowledgement,” as Mr. Goldberg quoted her, “that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”

Mr. Goldberg had barely set foot back in Washington, when Mr. Castro was propped up at the University of Havana, where he declared that he hadn’t meant anything of the sort. What Mr. Castro said at the University, as characterized by Reuters, was that “his recent comment that communist-led Cuba’s economic model does not work was badly understood and that what he really meant was that capitalism does not work.” Reuters reported Castro confirmed that he said the words Mr. Goldberg quoted him as saying (he called Mr. Goldberg a “great journalist”). But, Reuters quoted Mr. Castro as saying, “the reality is that my response means exactly the opposite.”

So there it is — a reminder that Mr. Castro is what he always has been, a typical communist. He is a member of a tribe whose language is fundamentally disconnected from truth. It is something to remember when he talks about economic reform in the captive island. It is something to remember when he talks, as he did to Mr. Goldberg, of his sudden and new-found affection for the Jews and for Israel. Communist dictators can’t tell the truth because they stand at the head of structures of inter-locking lies. When any one lie is exposed, the whole edifice is threatened. This is what happened in, say, the Soviet bloc when a free trade union, Solidarity, exposed the lie that the communists were for labor.

Can one have any useful conversation with a man like Mr. Castro? In the riddle about the stranger at the crossroads, the solution for the stranger is to put the question to the local is this way: “If I were to ask you tomorrow, ‘which way to the capital?’, what would you tell me?” The member of the tribe that always tells the truth would tell him the correct way. The local who always lies would have, on the morrow, told him the wrong way, but he must lie about what he would tell him on the morrow, so inadvertently tells the stranger the right way. It’s not so simple as that, however, to get the truth out of a communist. The Great Goldberg, who is a marvelous reporter and dealt with Castro’s dissembling in a post Friday evening, can take comfort in the fact that a long line of Cold War newspapermen learned the lesson he just learned the hard way.

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* In a typical episode, one of our favorites, Miss Litella gives a peppery broadcast opposing the “Eagle Rights Amendment,” only to utter, when informed by Chevy Chase that the issue is the “Equal Rights Amendment,” her trademark “never mind.”