I was born when bearded Fidel Castro swept into Havana, expropriating hotels run by businessmen who wanted to turn Cuba into a tourist and cane paradise. Dictator Batista was a bastard all right. He took bribes, debauched, but he had never swanked in a sort of Stalin-like shirt and had never sent away prostitutes to a croc-infested, swampy small island off Cuba. What a crazy thing to do! And, mind, that was done by the young Fidel, the very young and then very good-looking guy whose photos - along with Hemingway’s - adorned homes of practically every “progressive” Soviet family. The mere mention of this horrible fact is still enough to make hair stand up on the back of my neck. Castro, not to mention Papa Hemingway with his hatred of the bourgeoisie and their lace-curtain world, served as a rebuke to pot bellied Khrushchev. I recall a funny Soviet film of that time which starred the then very young Oleg Tabakov … his character slashed with a sword a polished finish wood cabinet in protest against petty middle-class values.

There are many people that find his image of a revolutionary, ascetic, and a man of the people very appealing. But they have forgotten about Castro’s prison camps that surpassed the brutality of Batista’s jails. They have forgotten that thousands of poor prostitutes had died of malaria on that small “red light” island. They have forgotten that many hundred thousand Cubans had lost their jobs and working skills through Castro’s inspired addiction to mass meetings and brandishing guns at America. They have forgotten about the “Caribbean Crisis” that brought the world on the brink of nuclear war, the stand-off that was provoked by Castro (and Khrushchev, furiously banging a shoe on the rostrum at the UN session and shouting “We will bury you!) who was afraid people would remember him only as a senile dotard repeating in his booming voice his ideological trademark slogan “Socialism or Death!” They have forgotten that U.S. President Kennedy had paid for this peace with life -- too many people had wanted war. They have forgotten that “Mañana” (Tomorrow) has become the key word in Cuba.

Socialism is tomorrow, too. Starving, poor, and deprived Cubans … they are braving the ocean on rafts and boats risking being attacked by sharks and storms in order to get to Florida. Castro does not tolerate any kind of opposition. Even Catholics had been kept under a very tight rein until the Pope’s visit to the island. Frequently, Cuban courts didn’t even bother to pass a judgment, letting drunken cops do whatever they wished to do with dissidents. That’s why Cuban exile groups opposed to the government have pled the CIA to help them poison Fidel. I believe there are many interesting details in store for us about the Castro-related struggle between various security services. Since it was KGB agents who had guarded Castro and helped him in every way possible. In a gesture of gratitude, he had sent his hungry soldiers to fight in Angola and Grenada, adding fuel to endless civil wars in those countries and increasing the suffering of local populations from guerillas looking like thugs or thugs looking like guerillas.

It’s quite symbolic that the return to the post of prime minister of this beautiful Ukrainian woman who has been waging a war against Ukraine’s Soviet legacy for many years occurred on the day when Castro has said in a letter that he would not hold on to his positions. Interestingly, Yulia Timoshenko was born at the time of the Cuban Revolution. Like myself, she grew up in a city consumed by the petty bourgeois envy of the wealthy, but proud of being part of the Soviet missile legacy. It was Dnepropetrovsk, Timoshenko’s home city, which used to make the Soviet SS-20 missiles that could destroy half of the United States. It so happens that of all places Timoshenko is most hated in Dneprovetrovsk, where people, despite their moral depravity, used to take pride in their missiles, submachine guns, and outward austerity.

Seeking independence, Timoshenko has dared to grow rich and then to strike off relations with her “bosses” and defy all those Castro’s admirers who have forced hundred thousand girls to seek attention of the curb crawlers or flee to brothels in the West. The “bosses” believed her place were among those girls, not in politics. She went through jail, the infamous Lukyanovka where aspidistras are flying high in the corridors but the prison food is so meager that everyone is giddy with hunger. Her home city refused to give her support, she reworked her image because pro-Westerners supporting her did not trust a typical blonde from the East. She saw street meetings and demonstrations, faced endless checks and mudslinging, and insulting nicknames from Ukraine’s macho who swore allegiance to Russia and sold her hugely overpriced rockets and tanks. Just like Castro, who used money from cocaine and diamond smuggling to fuel civil so called wars of principle. She survived the betrayal of Viktor Yushchenko, the man she dragged out from the dusty stillness of the National Bank, the man who told her to cut short her hubble-bubble while discussing the Declaration (Universal) of National Unity in 2006. She burst into tears and for this Ukrainians would never forgive him.

What Timoshenko should do now is to avoid advice from people who, being faithful to the old times, still wear beards and sweaters posing like Papa Hemingway, under Fidel.

Fidel is dying, let a priest visit him. Maybe he will want to confess, he still has some time. Timoshenko is thinking when to dissolve the band that is still called the army in Ukraine, the army that had serviced those deadly missiles in Cuba. Moving to new flats was considered to be good reward for this job. I personally know some officers tempted by the chance. And they hate people like Timoshenko because she bought her flat, using money she earned in business, and because she was not going to sell her soul for the sake of the oil game played by Putin and Schroeder. Likewise, she has no intention to look like a poor creature and continues to wear expensive and eye-catching clothes.

And now that braid crowning her head! Why can’t the woman have trademark hairdo like, say, Fidel his trademark cigar. In Soviet-era Dnepropetrovsk, many shops had Cuban cigars on the shelves as a symbol of the Cuban-Soviet friendship, for which there was no demand as nobody smoked cigars there at the time.