Well, actually, no, I don’t. But, what if I did? Would that disqualify me from working in a largely Cuban community?
That’s the crux of the issue in Miami today, where the Marlins suspended their manager Ozzie Guillen for positive comments he made about the aging former dictator. Guillen is reported to have said to Time magazine:
“I love Fidel Castro … I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last sixty years but that [expletive] is still there.”
The substance of the comment is comical — it fails to take into account Castro’s actual legacy (health care for all Cubans on the one hand and death sentences for opponents on the other) and treats Castro’s survival as though he were a gang banger on some urban backstreet.
Guillen has long since given up the right to be taken seriously. He’s been hot-headed and loose-lipped and often makes little sense when he makes incendiary pronouncements. But he has the right to support Castro if he wishes, regardless of whether he manages a team that plays its games in Little Havana. Has Guillen gone too far, as Dick Shoenfield says? It’s an absurd question. No further than any other time he’s opened his mouth.
But the obscene over-reaction to Guillen shows how strong the old anti-communism still is, even as the old communism has given way to a sort of market-socialism (neither free market nor socialist) in China. In a sane world, Guillen’s comment would have gotten little play. Guillen, as I said, is not exactly the second-coming of athletes like Muhammad Ali or even Carlos Delgado, intelligent athletes who made clear their political beliefs — and who also were the victims of sports’ McCarthyist streak.
Do the Marlins have the right to suspend him? If he was speaking as Marlins’ manager, as a representative of the team, then it’s the Marlins’ call, I guess, and certainly not the press corps’ — even if I think all of them should just let Ozzie speak his mind.
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Hank Kalet 