(Photo credit: HO/AFP/Getty Images)
by Matthew Hay Brown
Well, he did say he wasn’t going anywhere.
In the message this week announcing his resignation as president of Cuba, Fidel Castro said he would continue to write the idiosyncratic essays that have been his main means of communicating to Cubans and the world at large since he dropped out of public view in 2006.
While the erstwhile Maximum Leader promised himself a vacation after that announcement appeared in Granma, it’s now just three days later, and he’s back in the Communist Party newspaper. With a presidential campaign underway in the United States, Cuba’s leading pundit apparently couldn’t contain himself.
“I enjoyed watching the embarrassing position of all the candidates” after his announcement Tuesday, he writes. “One by one they were obliged to announce their immediate demands of Cuba in order not to risk losing a single voter. …”
“Half a century of blockade seemed little enough to the favorites. ‘Change, change, change!’ they cried in unison.
“I am in agreement, change! But in the United States. Cuba changed a long while ago …
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” ‘Annexation, annexation, annexation!’ responds the adversary; that is what they are really thinking deep down about when they talk of change.”
Under the heading “Reflections of Fidel” – until today, the occasional column was called “Reflections of the Commander in Chief” – Castro also mocks the response of President Bush to his resignation.
“Bush Jr., in a country of Africa … where nobody knows what he is doing, said that my message was the beginning of Cuba’s road to freedom; in other words, the annexation decreed by his government.”
In the typically wide-ranging essay, Castro touches on the declaration of independence by Kosovo, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. He notes protests “by important countries” against the U.S. shootdown of a spy satellite – “one of the many artifacts that, for military purposes, the United States has sent into orbit of the planet.”
Castro, exhausted by the “days of tension” leading up to the meeting of the Cuban National Assembly on Sunday to ratify his brother and chief lieutenant Raúl as president, writes that he had planned to refrain from issuing any further reflections for at least 10 days after his announcement. “But,” he concludes, “I had no right to keep quiet for so long.”