A nation must think before it acts.
Like the Byzantine Empire, the Cuban revolution has taken a very long time to die. Although its principal ally and sponsor, the Soviet Union, expired nearly a decade ago, and although the international system which it freely entered in 1961 has likewise ceased to exist, the Cuban revolutionary state continues to defy all the laws of economic and political gravity. Its aging caudilZo, Fidel Castro, now travels freely to major capitals to attend international conferences, where he is greeted with courtesy and even deference. Meanwhile, his country is being transformed from a tropical version of communist Bulgaria to an unheard-of combination-a fraying Marxist police state in partnership with Club Med. Today tourism is the country’s principal source of hard currency, and tourism of a very special kind, where the chief draw is not so much beaches or gambling, as in the past, but more-than-willing fourteen-year-old Cuban girls.