| 01 August 2006 Ding Dong It is not time for dancing, not yet, but that is not stopping the people of Miami from stepping out. They are in the streets, in celebration of the moment the Wicked Witch is dead. Actually, power had been temporarily delegated to Uncle Fidel's brother, Raoul, another of the perpetual Saints of the Revolution. The Commandante is having a minor problem with internal bleeding, should be corrected by surgery, and everything will be as right as rain. Perhaps. There is a certain dolor in Havana, and this is the way they must play it, after the incident when Fidel stumbled and fell on live television. The evidence of his increasing fragility thus became a matter of public record, and even in Cuba they began to speak of how things would go when the half-century of Fidel was over. Forgive me if I digress a bit. We all go back a ways with Fidel, and he is a likeable rogue of only slightly larger than human scale. I prefer it to the other news, which has not human face at all except murder. The word from Iraq is bad again, the brief hopes that surrounded the elections having evaporated, and the young Sunni and Shia men are savaging each other, proxies for fellow believers, and acting out a generation or two of repressed grievance against women and children, and us and anything that looks like hope. The Iraqi Special Police, trained at such great cost and with such panoply, are being used as cover for the operations, and it is impossible to tell if they are the real thing, or costumed criminals. Perhaps it amounts to the same thing. Most of the American companies have decided, on their own, that it is no longer worth attempting to do new contracting in Iraq. There is no business case for it, and the security overhead precludes a decent profit. One of the targets in yesterday's outrage was the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce. We will stick it out, at least for the short term. We have to. But the continuing extensions of duty, and the heat, and the monstrous nature of the violence is corrupting the social contract that the government established with the all-volunteer force. “We will pay you a modest but regular wage. We will take care of your families. If we ask you to die for us, it will be in a cause we all understand, and we will end your sacrifice as soon as is practicable.” A contract violated. Israel continues operations in Lebanon this morning, and is expanding the ground component of the war. I am wondering if they are copying the war plans we executed in Iraq. It seems mad, though linear enough, if you accept the apocalyptic view of the consequences of failing to act ruthlessly. There is a lot of that going around. That is why Uncle Fidel fills me with a certain sadness. Of course he bankrupted his island. Of course he jailed his opponents, or emptied them into small boats to take their chances in the Florida Straits. Of course he was ruthless and guilty of all manner of crimes. He might even be complicit in the assassination of a President of the United States, though that appears to fall into a tit-for-tat category that I remember from a time when men wore hats, and sunglasses swooped up at the edges and Marilyn was a Goddess. Uncle Fidel was a rogue with a sense of humor, and he was extraordinarily good at what he did, even if he did not actually pitch in the Big Leagues. He was good enough to try it, but went his own way. He has tweaked the nose and tugged on the beard of Uncle Sam for a lifetime, and he will pass away on his own terms. He reminds me of that ancient Fascist in Spain, the other Commandante for Life, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. We used to go to the beaches where they say the Guardia would take the inconvenient prisoners and bury them deep beneath the sand. Word was that you simply did not mess with the Guardia. They could beat you, or kill you, and there was no recourse. Franco had a lot in common with Fidel. He was the last Fascist standing, after Europe ripped itself to pieces, and he died in his bed. He made the trains run on time. In fact, of all his contemporaries, he was the only one who had any trains left. It didn't work out that way for Uncle Fidel, but he certainly had a good run, wouldn't you agree? I can almost hear it. “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead….” I can't wait to visit Havana, legally. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |