Granpa speaks to Granma
El Comandante en Jefe: "My elemental duty is not to cling to positions, much less to stand in the way of younger persons..." Two brilliant jokes in such a short space! For those who didn't get the punchlines, Fidel Castro Ruz is 81 and has been Cuba's ruler since 1959. He has now decided not to stand in the way of Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz, who is but a modest 77. What's even funnier is that the two are brothers, but be careful about using irony in their presence as both like to wear military fatigues complete with holsters. They may be packing heat, in other words.
Yesterday, the ailing dictator addressed the proletariat using some delightful dialectical flourishes: "I distrust the seemingly easy path of apologetics or its antithesis the self-flagellation. We should always be prepared for the worst variable. The principle of being as prudent in success as steady in adversity cannot be forgotten. The adversary to be defeated is extremely strong; however, we have been able to keep it at bay for half a century." Eh? Either an apparatchik translator made a mess of the original Spanish or else el máximo líder really writes like that. But it could be that this stuff is composed by the secret police patching together random phrases that fluttered off the platforms from which Castro sprayed his harangues during the past half century.
The theory that Fidel Castro is daft was given further credence yesterday by none other than the man himself. Referring to the benefits of being absent from the world stage, he notes that "I was able to recover the full command of my mind as well as the possibility for much reading and meditation." All this hilarity can be found in Granma, the mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. Priceless. Just like Chris Bertram's smug apologetic for the dictator.
