Fidel Castro

Years ago, Heberto Padilla, the Cuban poet, was made to apologize in public for criticizing that country's revolution, thus becoming a symbol of censorship and intolerance in the island. Thanks to international pressure from people like Susan Sontag, he was able to leave for the United States; he told me once during a conversation that if Fidel Castro dies, Cuba will quickly be annexed to the United States, becoming the 51st state. "I'm sorry the Bay of Pigs was such a failure," he added.

These are lonely days for Fidel Castro. Cuba's jefe maximo always fancied himself a special character on the world stage--a key actor not just in Latin America, where he was a symbol of revolutionary change, but also in the Soviet Bloc, for which he was an outpost near the U.S. mainland. But even Fidel's friends have been wondering lately whether time has passed him by. The answer is yes. And events of the last few weeks only emphasize just how much of an anachronism Castro has become.

Asserting that peaceful pressure is growing on Cuba in response to "the dying gasps of a failed regime," President Bush on Wednesday called on Cuban authorities to abandon their iron grip and promised U.S. assistance if the island took a democratic course in the post-Fidel Castro era. Bush said the United States would spearhead an international fund to support Cuba if it provided broad freedoms to its people.

IMAGINE STOCKHOLM IN DECEMBER, when it is nearly always nighttime. A 54-year-old son of Colombia's Caribbean coast has come to collect his Nobel Prize for Literature. It is 1982, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez is already famous as the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which is selling better than the Bible in some Spanish-speaking countries. Garcia Marquez counts powerful men, including Cuban President Fidel Castro, among his closest friends.

President Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul, led hundreds of thousands of marchers Thursday past the Spanish and Italian embassies in Cuba's capital to protest the European Union's hardening position toward the Communist island. Fidel Castro, in a four-hour TV appearance Wednesday, blamed Spain and Italy for the 15-member EU's decision last week to end high-level visits to the Caribbean island, reduce cultural exchanges and invite government opponents to members' Havana embassies.

Nearly 30 years ago, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times interviewed a rebel-with-a-cause most people thought was dead. Matthews' scoop in the tangled jungle of the Sierra Maestra proved the man was alive. His name (which in its entirety was but four syllables) would soon come to be known the world over. To his followers, the first two would suffice: "Fidel." Castro's quest to topple Fulgencio Batista captured the imagination of millions.

Driving toward the fertile Cuban countryside and the tranquil beaches east of Havana, cars squeeze through a pre-revolution toll booth. The fare collectors lost their jobs in 1959, dispatched with the cry: "The highways are for the people!" And yet the forsaken toll booth remains, fouling modern-day traffic like a spectral speed bump. All of Cuba's clocks seem to have stopped three decades ago.

It's both the archival footage and the life story that make "Fidel Castro," a biography of the longtime Cuban leader airing tonight on PBS as part of its "American Experience" series, good television. In this fair-minded and compelling two-hour documentary, written and produced by Cuban native Adriana Bosch, we get the whole of Castro's life, including his early years as both an unruly youth and a budding leader.

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's daughter, Alina Fernandez Revuelta, has fled the Communist-ruled island and been granted asylum in the United States, the State Department said Wednesday. Fernandez, a former model now in her late 30s, has long sought to defect and for decades has been a critic of Castro--whom she has called a "tyrant." But Cuban authorities refused to permit her to leave the island. She left behind a teen-age daughter.

American writers Arthur Miller and William Styron and Colombian literary great Gabriel Garcia Marquez discussed everything from World War II to the battle over 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez during a dinner with Fidel Castro that stretched into Saturday. Later, three of the most famous writers of the 20th century made a pilgrimage to the former residence of another literary giant: the late Ernest Hemingway.