Cuba's Al Gore: Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart

What fame, if any, Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart has acquired in his nearly 60 years by being something other than his father's son, is confined to a footnote or two in some obscure science journal, where he is identified as a "nuclear scientist." That was definitely the thing to be 40 years ago. Nuclear scientists were considered the smartest people. They represented the future and that future wasn't in plastics. It was nuclear energy that would liberate mankind from the "slavery" of fossil fuel. Or so it was thought 40 years ago when Fidel, Sr. decided what Fidel, Jr. should study; but as with his embrace of Communism as an economic system, Fidel the father committed a grievous miscalculation. Not as bad a miscalculation as plunging 11 million people into abject poverty; but bad enough as concerned the future of his first-born.

Unfortunately for Fidelito, nuclear scientists are not much in vogue nowadays. In fact, they represent all that is considered vile and unregenerate in society. Can't get much traction from that. So Fidelito had to be repackaged as something more benign and fuzzy though just as addlebrained and fanatic. Whom else? Al Gore.

Yes, Fidel Castro, Junior (as he's soon to be styled) has been tansmogrified into an expert on the environment and global warming. He has even authored a book — well, he's edited it, anyway, no pidas peras al olmo — where he presents the same Doomsday scenario as the Sage of Tennessee and calls for the same life-draining "solutions."

Fidelito really needs a better editor and copywriter. The name of his book is poison: Science, Technology and Innovation. It was Granma that presented the stage for Fidelito's enthronement as Cuba's embassador to Greenpeace. He gave a lecture to the editors of the party-screed and received prominent coverage in it. The lecture, according to Granma (May 9), concerned "the grave consequences of global warming and the crisis that would be created by the depletion of non-renewable energy sources." Wow! That would create a "crisis?" Why doesn't Fidelito, nuclear scientist and sometime head of Cuba's Nuclear Energy Commission, tackle that problem? Because that man is dead. Daddy decreed that, too. Now Fidelito is an expert on global warming and saving the planet because his father has discovered the "evil" of ethanol, and though he may not succeed him as his political heir, Fidelito will certainly carry-on the family tradition for spurious expertise in all areas of human knowledge (again, shades of Al Gore).

The article notes that Fidelito gave out copies of his book to the grateful editors of Granma, who will certainly know what to do with them. He is seen in the act of autographing his (other people's) rather thin book.