[Marxism] Fidel's Illness

[Roger Baker]

The US is moving  surface ships to the Gulf of Hormuz for the following 
possible options:
1. The invasion of Iran
2.  Blockade of the  Persian Gulf
3.  Pure bluff

Having no control over this I choose to invest my time reading the football 
bulletin boards because thinking about any of the above is purely our of my 
control and pure speculation.

Roger A. Baker,
Texas




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Walter Lippmann" <walterlx at earthlink.net>
To: "Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition" 
<marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 10:18 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Fidel's Illness


> Fidel's illness if considered a state secret in Cuba, and what some people 
> outside
> of Cuba are doing is engaging in speculation. But speculation to what end?
>
> Fidel Castro is 80 years old and physically ill. I personally saw Fidel 
> the day whe
> he gave his last public speeches: July 26th, in Bayamo. He looked and 
> sounded
> just fine. Later that day he went to Holguin and gave another major speech 
> there.
> I was too tired and watched that one on TV. I conclude that he did one 
> speech too
> many and something snapped. But beyond that, I have no interest in 
> spending any
> time trying, on my own, as a retired children's services social worker 
> currently in
> Los Angeles, California, to figure out what Fidel's "actual" diagnosis 
> "actually" is.
>
> Why should anyone care what Fidel's "actual" diagnosis "really" is???
>
> Only three things are possible:
>
> 1-Fidel Castro will get better and come back to work full-tilt.
> 2-Fidel Castro will get worse and one of these days will die.
> 3-Fidel Castro will get neither better nor worse, but will stay
>   stable and relatively on the sidelines, as he is as of today.
>
> Having no control over any of this, I choose not to invest time myself 
> engaging
> in speculation about it. On the CubaNews list I post lots of such 
> speculations due
> to their being most of what passes for discussion of Cuba in the U.S. 
> media.
>
> For the U.S. media, Fidel Castro is "the man you love to hate" and I must 
> say it
> will be a hard act to follow, as it already is, for them to learn to hate 
> Raul as they
> have trained themselves to hate Fidel.
>
> Fidel is a larger than life figure. He tends to tower over everyone else 
> around him.
> This both protects them, in a way, but it also means they cannot have the 
> practical
> experience of making final decisions, as Fidel has long had. Well, my 
> sense is that
> most of Fidel's decisions over the past 47 years have been either right or 
> suffiently
> right that Cuba has been able to survive as an independent society. What 
> countries
> elsewhere in the world have that kind of enviable success record?
>
> For those who want to ponder what will happen after Fidel, I strongly 
> recommend
> Saul Laudau's Post Castro Cuba and Ned Sublette's Fidel Lives, both 
> outstanding.
>
>
> Walter Lippmann
> Los Angeles, California
>
>
>
>
>
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