Castro turns 81

Cuban caudillo Fidel Castro celebrated his 81st birthday yesterday, to the apparent yawning indifference of most of the world. Granted, we used to care about how old Fidel Castro was, because each birthday Fidel celebrated roughly coincided with Cuba spending another year under his thumb.

However, Fidel ceded power to his only slightly less elderly brother Raúl over a year ago, before disappearing from the public eye completely. Fidel's golden years haven't exactly been kind to him. Since undergoing extensive intestinal surgery for reasons that are still classified as a Cuban state secret, the frail dictator has been seen only by a select group of cronies (like Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chávez) and foreign leaders (like Vietnam's Nguyễn Minh Triết). The Cuban people, the alleged beneficiaries of Castro's dictatorship, haven't seen hide nor hair of Comrade #1 in over year, making do instead with Raúl's Fidelismo sans Fidel.

Castro's disappearance from public view naturally sparked rumors that he died, but frankly, I don't buy it. No conspiracy theory is required for the dull, ugly truth that while the dictator himself is holed up in a palatial compound, wearing his colostomy bag and receiving foreign dignitaries, Cuba itself continues to decay at a slightly slower pace than the man himself. The "revolution" has, as all revolutions centered on a single authoritarian personality eventually do, stagnated from lack of fresh political energy. The next Cuban revolution will only take place after Cuban finally dumps the rotting corpse of Fidel's dictatorship alongside his skeletal remains.