Comrade Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is an extraordinarily interesting interlocutor. Some intellectuals even published entire books of conversations with the eternal revolutionary. Now the president of the Russian Federation has been able to confirm the Cuban Communist caudillo’s gift of gab for hours on end. The Russian mass media — and I mean primarily official media outlets — covered the visit of Vladimir Putin to Cuba as a tremendous Russian foreign policy success.
I agree with this appraisal. It really was a success. It succeeded in creating an illusory Russia that more and more reminds one of the Soviet Union — to be sure, like a little granddaughter can remind herself of her old grandfather: she glues on a cotton beard, puts on enormous high leg boots, and goes to scold her parents with a fictitious bass voice. It is funny, of course, until the lass begins to imitate a dead one: look, daughter, we buried him yesterday, and now you are running around with this pasted beard like a billy goat. Cut it out!
Who is going to tell Vladimir Putin to cut it out? Since he runs a country that actually exists, a country with enormous economic and political problems, huge foreign debt, not to mention an unstructured economy... One must solve these problems already now, as long as there is a chance for it because of high oil prices. Meanwhile, time is being wasted on approving the Stalinist anthem and small talk with an old pal of Leonid Brezhnev. A young man by political standards, the Russian president looks more and more out of date.
He is not likely to understand this. For him the Soviet anthem or Fidel Castro mean a return to lost grandeur. The fact that this very grandeur did not help the Soviet Union to avoid a profound crisis and disintegration does not interest the president just now. To the sounds of this music, to the news about trading kisses with Fidel he felt as good there as he did in the German Democratic Republic, as an intelligence officer of the world’s most powerful secret police. In this sense Vladimir Putin indeed strikingly resembles his constituency, so nostalgic for the past. He is a Soviet man and only due to this is he a people’s president. But is it not the duty of a leader to see just a little farther ahead than those who voted for him?
