Castro’s Poetic Demise
Thursday, January 18th, 2007 2:29 pm by Neal |
| Fidel Castro with his concubines. |
Wow. Don’t miss this great essay, “Castro Shuffling in Place” by Emmett Tyrrell at today’s townhall.com. Tyrrell notes that Castro’s bungling and suffering are a fitting — and final — poetic justice.
In these last months of Fidel Castro’s moribundity, there is delicious irony in the film clip of him that is repeatedly shown on cable television. Wearing a clownishly incongruous jogging suit, the fabled maestro of revolution and progress is filmed shuffling metronomically, gray and feeble, blank-faced and apparently going no place. Maybe he is on a treadmill that we cannot see. Maybe he is merely picking up his tired feet and putting them back down with no forward motion. Possibly this whole idiotic scene is a fabrication created by our CIA. Well, if so, it is a job well done. There is poetry here.
The cadaverish dictator shuffling in place is a perfect metaphoric rendering of Castro’s Cuba over these many decades. He took his country from prosperity and a place at the head of Latin America in material terms to the bottom. In practically every material measure his country is a slum. In terms of freedom it is one vast jail. Had he, when he came to power after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista’s seven-year dictatorship, made good on his promise to return Cuba to the democratic condition in which it had existed in the 1940s, his country today would most likely be the richest and freest country south of our borders, and possibly Castro would be in the pink and deserving of the accolades now paid him by the American left’s rich and fatuous.
According to reports in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Castro and “his entourage” rejected the conventional medical approach to his intestinal disorder. Instead they opted for a surgical procedure that is to medicine what Castro’s socialism is to economics, to wit, brute stupidity. Consequently, after the botched operation his body filled with feces and infection — again a poetic touch.
Delicious! Read more for some choice quotes from the fawning, Castro-loving, Hollywood nimwits like Stephen Spielberg and Jack Nicholson.