Jon Lee Anderson

Sort of jokily, but it was black humor, you know.

he was expressing a kind of existential despair, really, because this is someone who spent his life in the service of the ideals that brought about the revolution and sustained it for many years, has been critical over time of failings of the revolution, many.

It's not one of those things that people can easily reconcile.

It is a contradictory existence.

So having given themselves over, that generation, I'm talking about people in their 60s and over, right?

They wanted to own their own country.

And then what happened, happened.

You know, the Cold War, Fidel Castro, Marxism-Leninism, it became a socialist state.

And so they have lived with many contradictions.

But in their hearts and in their, I guess, you know, las entrañas, their entrails, as they say in Cuba, you know, they feel themselves to be proud Cubans.

That's what they want to be.

That's what they wanted to be when they were 15 or 20 years old, when they joined the revolution.

And of course, they've seen that eroded and eroded ever since in many different ways.

So to say something like that, where's Delta Force, which of course is the special forces unit that went and captured Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and precipitated this current mess in Cuba, was just a bleak acknowledgement of where they are in history and the kind of failure of, well, their own failure, the failure of their leaders,

but also the kind of unrelenting or the merciless nature of the current U.S.

government.

That's right.

And they appear to be talking with at least one of those members.

So you're right.

Raul Castro is, he's sort of, in a sense, he's the supreme leader, right?