According to Fidel Castro's older brother, the "socialist saints" are looking out for Fidel's wellbeing. The old monster is reported to be recovering and eating solid foods.
"He is doing very well, protected by the socialist saints!" a beaming 82-year-old Ramon said after lunch with Florida cattleman John Parke Wright, a good friend and frequent visitor to the island.
"Fidel is recovering well," added Ramon, who looks remarkably like Fidel — down to the now-wispy white beard. "All of us brothers are very resilient."
Ramon spent his life in agriculture and ranching and never held any major government positions.
Ramon Castro's positive assessment came one day after his 75-year-old brother Raul, the defense minister and acting president, told reporters of 80-year-old Fidel: "He's getting better each day."
He also said Fidel was exercising in brief comments to the news media at the opening of an international book fair. "He has a telephone at his side and uses it a lot."
Reporters had less luck earlier Friday getting a statement about Fidel's health from his son, Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart — known as "Fidelito" — who spoke at an international economics conference in Havana. He briefly greeted reporters and did not discuss his father before leaving.
Let's see, there's Saint Che Guevara:
How many people were killed at La Cabaña? Pedro Corzo offers a figure of some two hundred, similar to that given by Armando Lago, a retired economics professor who has compiled a list of 179 names as part of an eight-year study on executions in Cuba. Vilasuso told me that four hundred people were executed between January and the end of June in 1959 (at which point Che ceased to be in charge of La Cabaña). Secret cables sent by the American Embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington spoke of “over 500.” According to Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara’s biographers, a Basque Catholic sympathetic to the revolution, the late Father Iñaki de Aspiazú, spoke of seven hundred victims. Félix Rodríguez, a CIA agent who was part of the team in charge of the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia, told me that he confronted Che after his capture about “the two thousand or so” executions for which he was responsible during his lifetime. “He said they were all CIA agents and did not address the figure,” Rodríguez recalls. The higher figures may include executions that took place in the months after Che ceased to be in charge of the prison.
Who is but a choirboy next to Saint Joseph:
At least 720,000 people were executed in the terror that followed. Millions more died from hunger and ill-treatment in concentration camps.
Only the good die young. Apparently, Castro proves that point.
