Fidel Lives
By Ned Sublette 

On July 29, 1953, three days after the failure of the audacious assault on Santiago de Cuba’s Moncada barracks, Fidel Castro was dead. The Cuban newspaper Ataja said so.

His obituary has been at the ready ever since. Editors have reached for it over and over, only to put it away again. With each premature burial, the obituary gets a little longer. Another sentence was added to it on July 31, 2006, when the world’s longest-running head of state temporarily transferred various administrative functions to his brother Raúl and to other officials, as provided by Cuban law, while he underwent and recuperated from surgery for intestinal bleeding.

Until they can run Fidel’s obit, the editors don’t know what to print.

They want him dead.

They really want him dead in Miami, where he is deeply hated in an extraordinarily personal way. For decades the headlines there have read: Castro will fall in six months. Castro has cancer, he has Parkinson’s, he fainted, he’s dying, he’s turning 60, he’s turning 70, he’s turning 80.

As the post-July 31 honking and waving died down, Republican Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart of Florida threatened the Cuban military with a hit list. “The military in Cuba is going to have a choice in the upcoming days and weeks and months,” Oscar Corral of the Miami Herald quoted Díaz-Balart as saying. “They either stand with the Cuban people or their names will be on a list of infamy that the Cuban people will have access to in the future…. It’s very important for the military to know that it’s certainly not on [sic] their interest to get on that list.”

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