Happy Birthday Fidel Castro. Where are you?

Mick Gregory

Can’t brother Raul roll big brother Fidel Castro out in a chair to wave to his grateful legions of supporters? Is Fidel dead?

He’s 80 or 81 today. Hello Hugo Chavez! Are you going to tell your followers what great shape Fidel is in? If the Democrats get back “The Fairness Doctrine” we would be hearing that Fidel is fine, he’s excercising today.

If as Michael More says, Cuba has the best health care system in the world, why did Fidel fly in a doctor from Madrid, Spain? Better yet, why not fly one in from Houston’s M.D. Anderson, or Methodist Hospitals? That wouldn’t fit the propaganda machine. But it may have kept papa alive.

As Fidel Castro turns 81 today, Cuba watchers see the sick communist leader fading into a role equivalent to China’s Mao Zedong as his successors grapple with the need to reform the economy while preserving the Communist state.

Castro has been out of sight for a year, but not out of mind, thanks to regular newspaper columns dispatched from a secret medical facility and a video of Hugo Chavez and his idol chatting.

He spends his time “meditating in depth on the vital problems that threaten our species today,” Castro wrote recently, calling U.S. capitalism a threat to human survival.

The bearded revolutionary, who once toyed with the idea of abolishing money in a classless society, was forced to hand over power to his brother Raul last year after undergoing emergency intestinal surgery.