Ode to Fidel: (non)seculargirl‘s post in her blog
“We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there’s an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn’t for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I’m not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.”
Fidel Castro is dead. Which sounds like the name of a band that never rose past its B-sides, but instead is a simple fact of the news today: the man can die, like any other man.
I’ve written about Cuba before on this blog, a place I love more than any other place I’ve visited outside the U.S. I traveled to the island twice in my early 20s because of a job that provided me legal license to bypass the travel ban. I was a young leftist, and though I had studied Cuban history and understood the horrid realities of Castro’s dictatorship–or thought I did, having grown up too with the daughter of Cuban exiles and spent years in and out of love with the son of other Cuban exiles–I couldn’t help but be enamored by the island’s and its leaders defiance toward problematic truths I had recently discovered: imperialist history, the…
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Sohochari 