Death of A Salesman?

I’ve often compared our favorite tyrant, Fidel, with Ralph Kramdem because he was always peddling some grandiose quick rich scheme to the Cuban people, like the famous 100 Million Ton Sugar Harvest ( de que Van, Van) or the Coffee Gardens around Havana or his milk producing bovine experiments. All the time, promising paradise and he couldn’t even provide toilet paper.

I was talking to a non-Cuban friend the other day trying to convince him that Castro has pretty much been a failure at everything except lying and wrapping his lies in certain key buzz words that put utopians world-wide into a trance. You the reader, may make any connections you like, I won’t. I can lead you to the fountain of wisdom but I cannot drink for you.

As we were talking, we started to evolve the idea over a few bottles of Bavarian wisdom juice and we basically agreed that Castro was a salesman, a marketer. Willy Loman. And although few were buying what he was selling at home-he had to force people to buy it with a monopoly, his ideas sounded good from afar. Besides we like the Willy Loman anology because Loman dies.

A few more bottles of Hops and Barley Elixer later and we were well on our way to realizing that the junior Castro, the one with the sad Chinese eyes, was the same. Another salesman.

Only little brother wasn’t pitching ideas and revolutions and utopia. No. He’s not good at wrapping his lies up in buzzwords. Little brother is much more mundane, much more pragmatic. He’s selling chatzkies. He pushing cell phones, PC’s rice cookers, anything he can get a good mark-up on. Rumor is, he’s going to start selling used government cars soon. How appropriate.