Word: castros
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stronger reaction at two early screenings of Che last week if Ernesto Guevara himself had shown up. (The old soldier would be 80, if he hadn't been killed in Bolivia in 1967.) In Miami Beach, a few dozen protesters, mostly pensioners who had fled Cuba after the Castro takeover on New Year's Day, 1959, protested the showing of Steven Soderbergh's bio-epic. "The Jewish community would never allow any kind of film about Hitler like this to play here," Abilio Leon, 65, told the Miami New Times. "It's the same for us." A younger man walked...
...days later, Soderbergh and his star, Benicio Del Toro, presented Che at the Havana Film Festival. The authorities had warned they would not allow the picture to be shown if it was critical of Fidel Castro, and they found nothing objectionable. (One scene included in the original Cannes Film Festival version of Che, showing Castro the commandante in an ambiguous light, was apparently cut.) "The Cuban public gave its endorsement with a strong ovation," reported Granma, the island's official Communist Party newspaper, which hedged its bets by observing that the Castro character (played by Demian Bichir) lacked "charisma...
...critics, of course, fear that if he's allowed indefinite re-election, he'll simply morph into another Fidel Castro. Despite - or because of - the Cuban leader's longevity in power (or the record of other would-be rulers-for-life), Latin Americans look askance at lifetime presidencies. That's why even voters next door in Colombia look set to deny their remarkably popular conservative President, Alvaro Uribe, a third term when his second expires in 2010. Chávez does have an authoritarian streak and is indeed a gushing admirer of Castro, and with the legislature and judiciary firmly...
...whole island feels on a similar knife's edge. Should Raúl Castro weaken, there are still a dozen aging Ahmed Chalabis waiting in Miami to return from exile and divide the spoils among themselves. Should there be rebellion in the streets in Havana, there's still a state militancy that could bring blood to the Malecón. But the new generation of Cubans both here and abroad are of a milder bent, with gentler aspirations. A cabdriver I met launched into a familiar refrain: most of his family fled to Tampa when Fidel Castro stole their lands...
...radiant daughter Zenia, 5. We'd been out late dancing a few nights earlier, and Yusimi was giving me a postmortem on my performance. (Her bemused verdict: "You have Caribbean feet, but I have no idea what your butt is doing.") Just then, "La Jinetera" by the staunchly anti-Castro Miami singer Willy Chirino came through the speakers. It must have been the driver's CD--the song would never have been allowed on state-run radio. Chirino, a Cuban-born exile, has always been a little too naked in his politics for my tastes, and this song...