Wednesday, February 27, 2008
GEORGIE ANNE GEYER
Words of
wisdom
from Fidel?
Spare us
WASHINGTON — Those of us in this curious business of writing columns for a “living,” if you can call it that in terms of ever getting even moderately well-to-do, are quite aware of how wonderful it is in other terms.
Two or sometimes three times a week, we write what are in effect classical essays, taking a subject of general news or public interest, dissecting its component parts and then weaving them together in forms that we hope offer new clarity and understanding.
Most columnists consider each other to be colleagues, and even when we disagree fervently — as, indeed, we do — there is general respect when we accidentally meet at the embassy receptions and conferences that feed our news needs.
But fair is fair and genuine competition is genuine competition — and now we are faced with a new “columnist” so unfair, so unreasonable and so grotesquely unjournalistic that, well, what is one to say?
Fidel Castro has become a columnist.
Real love
He has declared his real love for his new profession after 49 years of working ceaselessly and with some success at trying to dominate the world. He had planned on taking a break from the column, now called “Reflections of Comrade Fidel,” for at least 10 days.
The night before he resigned from the presidency last week, he slept better than ever, he wrote recently. “My conscience was clear and I promised myself a vacation.” But, he decided, “I didn’t have the right to keep silent for so long.”
This event brings up a number of questions. And these questions are of special interest to those of us who humbly see being foreign correspondents, covering the world and writing the columns that are the fruits of that passion, as a reason for existence, not as some hobby splotched on at the end of life.
Are we now to face other leaders who will shamelessly attempt to push their way into our respected profession? Can readers really be made to believe by ignominious men like Castro that they are capable of shedding light on the same world affairs that they cast their shadows on in ages before?
Can we not note that Fidel, at least in his exclusive venue of Cuba, has some advantages that we do not have in the United States? For instance, his “columns” appear mainly in the Communist Party newspaper Granma, but, as the 50th anniversary of The Revolution approaches in January 2009, Cuban TV is featuring daily film clips of Fidel fighting in the Sierra Maestra alongside Che Guevara and Fidel’s brother, Raul, this weekend named the new president of Cuba.
So, by doubling up with his column in Granma and his historic film clips on TV, Fidel is effectively competing with himself for reader and viewer attention across Cuba.
And what is Fidel writing about in his column?
Cuba and Fidel
Well, recently he (not surprisingly) focused on the United States and its political campaign and election — and he interwove those themes with — what else? — Cuba and Fidel!
“I enjoyed observing the embarrassing position of all the presidential candidates in the United States,” he wrote. “One by one, they could be seen forced to proclaim their immediate demands to Cuba so as not to alienate a single voter.”
As for the American demands for “change, change, change,” he wrote, “I agree. ‘Change!’ But in the United States.” What President Bush really thinks, he went on, is “annexation, annexation, annexation.”
One is surprised that, at least so far as I have noted, the new commentator has not commented on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s ongoing discussion about whether an American president should meet personally with unpalatable foreign leaders like Fidel.
Obama, of course, has been more liberal in offering to meet with leaders of unfriendly states (Raul Castro and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are the ones usually mentioned), while Sen. Clinton has stressed the importance of preparation beforehand.
Universal Press Syndicate