After 47 years of megalomaniacal misery-infliction, Cuba’s Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro has stepped down at least temporarily, handing the reins of maximum lider-ship to his younger brother (although no spring chicken) Raul. There’s dancing in the streets of Miami, although speculation in Havana that every last known dissident who’s not already in prison may be rounded up and jailed in order to forestall the spread of the merriment across the Caribbean.


Best comment on Fidel’s apparent impending demise comes from National Review Online’s Richard Brookheiser, who recalls his trip to Cuba in 1984, when the dictator made one of his periodic show-releases of his numerous prisoners to Jesse Jackson (Brookhiser is quoting from his book “Outside Story”):


“The New York Times reported, days later, that the prisoners had played a ‘visitor’s game’ of baseball-so-called because it is a recreation permitted them only when visitors come. Since Jackson was his usual hour or so late, the game went seventy innings.”


Says Brookhiser:


“Seventy innings of prison baseball – one metaphor for Castro’s reign.”