CASTRO: FIDEL OR (IN)FIDEL ON MARXISM…GREAT EDITORIAL IN THE NEW YORK SUN
Castro at the Crossroads
Editorial of The New York Sun | September 11, 2010
http://www.nysun.com/editorials/castro-at-the-crossroads/87073/
There’s a wonderful riddle about the stranger traveling in the land of the two tribes — liars and truth tellers. Members of the two tribes look identical. The difference is that one tribe always lies, and one tribe always tells the truth. The stranger is walking along a road trying to reach the capital. Presently he comes to a fork, at which is standing one of the locals. The stranger is unable to detect whether the local is a truth-teller or a liar. But he needs to find out which fork leads to the capital. He is permitted one question. So what could he ask the local — who either always lies or always tells the truth — that would get him to his destination?
We thought of that riddle amid the excitement over the interviews that the Atlantic magazine’s star correspondent, Jeffrey Goldberg, has had with Fidel Castro. The dying dictator had summoned Mr. Goldberg, ostensibly to talk about the danger of a nuclear war between Israel and Iran and America. Mr. Castro had read, in the September Atlantic, Mr. Goldberg’s dispatch reporting that Israel is getting ready to bomb Iran. Mr. Goldberg, by his own description, has only limited experience with what he calls “Communist autocrats,” but he certainly doesn’t lack for gumption. At one point, after a three-hour dirge from Mr. Castro about Iran and Israel, Mr. Goldberg popped a question about whether Mr. Castro believed the Cuban model was, as Mr. Goldberg put it, “still something worth exporting.”
“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Mr. Castro replied. The response struck Mr. Goldberg as what he called the “mother of all Emily Litella moments,” a reference to the dotty commentator played by Saturday Night Live’s comedienne Gilda Radner, who extricates herself from her hilarious misinterpretations by turning to the audience and saying, “Never mind.”*
In Cuba, Mr. Goldberg asked his sidekick, Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations, for an interpretation. She said the communist wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. Mr. Goldberg took Mr. Castro’s statement to be an “acknowledgement,” as Mr. Goldberg put it, “that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”
Mr. Goldberg had barely set foot back in Washington, when Mr. Castro was propped up at the University of Havana, where he declared that he hadn’t meant anything of the sort. What Mr. Castro said at the University, as characterized by Reuters, was that “his recent comment that communist-led Cuba’s economic model does not work was badly understood and that what he really meant was that capitalism does not work.” Reuters reported Castro confirmed that he said the words Mr. Goldberg quoted him as saying; (he called Mr. Goldberg a “great journalist”). But, Reuters quoted Mr. Castro as saying, “the reality is that my response means exactly the opposite.”
So there it is — a reminder that Mr. Castro is what he always has been, a typical communist. He is a member of a tribe whose language is fundamentally disconnected from truth. It is something to remember when he talks about economic reform in the captive island. It is something to remember when he talks, as he did to Mr. Goldberg, of his sudden and new-found affection for the Jews and for Israel. Communist dictators can’t tell the truth because they stand at the head of structures of inter-locking lies. When any one lie is exposed, the whole edifice is threatened. This is what happened in, say, the Soviet bloc when a free trade union, Solidarity, exposed the lie that the communists were for labor…..
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