Cubas Raging Bull

Cuba's Raging Bull
By David A. Einhorn | Monday, April 10, 2006

During his recent trip to Cuba, David Einhorn is struck by Fidel
Castro's frequent — and often quite bizarre — television speeches.
Indications are that Castro — now in an astonishing 47th year in office
— may be losing his grip on reality — as well as his influence on the
population.

If that great champion of American social justice Franklin Roosevelt is
remembered for his fireside chats, Fidel Castro the Cuban revolutionary
might well end up being remembered as the eternal rhetorical flame.

If nothing else, watching the one-time champ stumble through a speech
about megawatts and kilowatts was like watching an old boxer lose to a
punk whom he would have knocked out in his prime.

Love him or hate him, this is a man who cannot stop talking, even as he
turns 80 this year and increasingly looks and sounds every year of his age.

During a single week when I was in Cuba recently, Castro appeared on
Cuban television no less than four times, speaking on each occasion for
some two hours.

True, one speech was a repeat from the night before — for those who
might have missed it — but this was countered the next day by an early
morning discourse urging Cubans to participate in a protest march
against the United States.

TVs go off

The evening speeches preempted all prime-time programming, prompting
some viewers to exercise the only option available. “When Fidel comes
on,” remarked a 22-year old medical student, “the TVs go off.”

To watch and listen to Castro several nights running during the 47th
year of his socialist revolution is quite a different experience from
indulging one of his sharp-tongued sound bites that makes its way into
the foreign press.

Revolutionary turned old man

He started the week with a broadcast from Pinar del Río province
celebrating advances there in electricity generation. Simple enough, but
for aficionados of Castro’s renowned dialectic skills, if nothing else,
watching the one-time champ stumble through a speech about megawatts and
kilowatts was like watching an old boxer lose to a punk whom he would
have knocked out in his prime.

Castro mangled Anglo-Saxon names, jokingly apologized, and spit out the
occasional obscenity, either when he lost his place or when he got
especially wound up.

Fidel fumbled through his notes and furiously scribbled figures to add
up costs on the spot — not always correctly.

Adorned as he was for every speech during the week in his legendary
military fatigues, he scratched obsessively under his clothes at the
shoulder that was in a cast after a fall in 2004.

The image was less that of an imposing revolutionary as it was of an old
man struggling mightily — and understandably, as many sympathetic Cubans
were quick to point out — to grasp the complexities of the energy sector.

Running the economy — badly

Of course, the head of state is more or less obliged to be such an
expert when the government runs every aspect of the economy, often badly.

In a country with a reported growth rate in 2005 of 11.8% — a figure so
dubious that the United Nations omitted Cuba from its annual economic
report — university professors drive taxis and economists clean
apartments that lodge tourists in order to gain access to foreign exchange.

As they have for decades, Cubans obtain food staples such as beans and
rice using government-issued ration coupons.

Two person ‘roundtable’

Castro’s speech that Thursday, billed as a seminal discussion on “the
year of the energy revolution,” had to be postponed — because of
widespread electrical blackouts across Havana.
If Franklin Roosevelt is remembered for his fireside chats, Fidel Castro
the cuban revolutionary might end up being remembered as the eternal
rhetorical flame.
(There was no mention of the blackouts in Granma, the state-run
newspaper, but the television news blamed them on condensation in the
aging transmission system.)

The format for the rescheduled appearance the next night was said to be
a “roundtable.” However, except for Fidel the only other person at the
table was a “moderator” staring at a laptop computer.

He could best be described as the revolution’s Ed MacMahon, the
prototypical sidekick. His principal tasks seemed to be a timely
chortle, an affirmative nod — or a gentle correction about a date or figure.

Wandering the ring

Back to the boxing analogy, Castro again appeared to be simply wandering
around the ring, often repeating himself.

Occasionally, someone in the audience with a notepad would offer up a
few words of technical assistance. But no one at ringside at any point
asked a question, much less one that might suggest it’s time for the old
man to consider hanging up the rhetorical gloves.

Out lash against the United States

A Sunday speech focused on the island’s drumbeat of current events,
including the saga of the cinco héroes, Cubans imprisoned in the United
States for espionage; the U.S. government’s refusal to extradite an
exile accused of bombing a Cuban airliner 30 years ago; and an
electronic ticker tape installed by the U.S. Special Interests Section
in Havana that flashes international news and human rights statements.

“No president in the world works so hard, but he needs to delegate
more,” lamented a retired engineer.

Many Cubans find it impossible to believe that the vast majority of
Americans know almost nothing about any of this. One might have thought
that counter-punching such politically-oriented jabs would be better
suited for Fidel, the boxer of old.

But in the same raspy voice as his other speeches, and with the laptop
man chortling again at his side, a rather haggard-looking president for
the most part read — in painstaking, chronological order — a seemingly
endless array of news dispatches supposedly confirming such Quixotic
allegations as one that groups involved in the assassination of John F.
Kennedy are the same that now want to kill Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Required to march

Castro mangled Anglo-Saxon names, jokingly apologized, and spit out the
occasional obscenity, either when he lost his place—¡ay carajo!—or when
he got especially wound up, as when he said of his enemies in the United
States, no somos mierda como ellos.

The next morning hundreds of thousands of Cubans indeed joined a
state-sponsored march through the streets of Havana to protest U.S.
policies.

Many participants from schools, government offices and labor groups were
required to march — the medical students, for example — so it is
difficult to measure the extent to which the event reflected support for
Castro.

Feeling sorry for Fidel

However, even Cubans who fervently admire their president for standing
up to the United States increasingly cringe at his meandering discourses
and his obsession to project himself as an expert on every topic of
governance.

Cuba had reported a growth rate in 2005 of 11.8% — a figure so dubious
that the United Nations omitted Cuba from its annual economic report.

There is widespread discontent about the overly centralized and
inefficient economy and the government’s obstinate refusal to allow more
private enterprise.

And yet, as Fidel Castro ages and rages, as he stumbles, as he rambles,
it is common to find Cubans who, rightly or wrongly, feel sorry for him.
“No president in the world works so hard, but he needs to delegate
more,” lamented a retired engineer.

When another Cuban professional complained about the island’s frequent
blackouts, his son just back from elementary school countered
plaintively: “It’s not Fidel’s fault! It’s the people around him.”

He must not have seen the roundtable.

David Einhorn was in Cuba on assignment for the National Catholic
Reporter. This article was reprinted with their permission.

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