Quien no tenga enemigos ....

I once spend an entire evening staring at an aluminium foiled and ducktaped package at the centre of a coffee table, wondering to open it or not.  The wrapping had been handed over to me earlier that day along with visa papers kindly inserted and not stamped into my passport for passage into Cuba.

This was on the occasion of flights scheduled to New York and Miami and this time I really felt to fulfil an old desire to extend to Cuba before capitalism would enter this island of funky formed Georgism and change all the tangible and intangible effects along with it.

Perhaps I should add this was about midst September in the year 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks on the US.

No one is indifferent to Fidel Castro.  People either hate or love him.  No one can deny he took his 24/7 job very seriously and has managed to stick to his principles over time, generating followers in all walks of life. We will not be seeing large numbers of young and educated people genuinely crying their tears out over the death of a political leader in the future.

I have to admit I find it difficult to isolate or even highlight Fidel Castro's acts of dictatorship away from the so many extremist political leaders we have seen coming and going in most countries in the Americas, many of which went for an international price much less than Fidel Castro did, which possibly says something about their convictions, if any, for the people they tried to rule.

Think of Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, as a matter of fact to keep this simple, just think of Costa Rica as the only country in and around the Caribbean basin which did not significantly clash internally without ignoring good and bad neighbour policies.

Maybe too much credit (and debit) is attributed to Castro.  After all he was but one of several followers over history wherein Simón Bolivar and José Marti spearheaded contemporary history with the instruments available to them:

Fidel Castro just happened to step in when  most of the former colonising nations were busy with cleaning up a world war II mess leaving only two apparent world powers to align with and only one of them invented public television broadcasting, also a powerful tool, to this day.

I suppose we will find out soon enough how much of a true hurdle Fidel Castro was in life towards bilateral or multilateral relationships which would entitle Cubans their place at a round table of prosperity, just like almost everybody else.  After all we do presently live in a time where true leaders should be able to appreciate the mere agent role they occupy between peoples and in that respect no one lives on any island anymore.

If you are wondering what was in the package, just a pair of used tennis shoes, a hairbrush and two bars of soap.  In exchange for handing this to a perfect stranger somewhere near a phone booth in Havana, I received a big thankful hug.