Mañana, around 4-ish
Catastrophe! The Irishman says he will not continue. An immoral godless charade, he calls it. Lord save me from thespian Celts with gigantic misshapen heads and mellifluous speaking-voices!
I did my best to remain aloof, but I fear the effect may have been undermined by the counterrevolutionary high jinks of Fidel’s monkey, Kennedy, which chose that moment to lower itself from the ceiling fan to rub a banana into my hair. I know that Fidel expressly wished in his will that no harm should ever come to the creature (who, let us not forget, helped us formulate many of our most dramatic economic policies), but sometimes I long to sew him inta a pillowcase and fire him out of a cannon in the direction of Miami. Is this wrong?
Oh Fidel, why did you leave us? Why did you abandon your brother to negotiations with seedy body-doubles about the price of prosthetic beards? Why could we not have found a Cuban actor, some keen enthusiast who would have taken your place these last 10 years for nothing but the odd cigarillo and free prostate examinations? Liam Neeson, they said. Get Liam Neeson. The spitting image of Fidel, they said. But did they say anything about his temper? His fees? His penchant for introducing himself at banquets as Qui-Gon Jinn, mentor of Obi-Wan Kenobi and liberator of modern Ireland? Nothing! Ten years, brother! The smell of porridge and potatoes clings to every wall in the Revolutionary Palace. I dream in an Irish accent.
And now he is going. I should be jubilant. I have never forgiven him for ordering the cabinet to watch him battle a small rubber fish in his bath. Bathroom cabaret, he called it, The Old Man and the Sea on a budget. And yet what will we do without him? What will we tell the world? The truth? Impossible. The island would never survive if the imperialists learned that you had choked on a crouton during a cheese fondue for nudists at your Revolutionary Chalet on Lake Geneva in 1996.
Mañana, post-siesta or thereabouts
I toss and turn fitfully. The ceiling-fan grates. I must think. A drive in the presidential limousine will do me good.
Mañana, sort of evening-ish
I am refreshed. The 1956 Buick is a splendid vehicle. I hardly felt the potholes on Che Guevara Boulevard of Solidarity Toward a Worker’s State. I think I hit a chicken hawker, though. Note: send his family a portrait of Fidel and a year’s worth of free prostate examinations. The Irishman is on the balcony, singing Danny Boy in shaky Spanish. It is horrible. El muchacho del Danny, las pipas, las pipas está llamando — I must get out of here again. Another drive.
Mañana, sunset or perhaps later
Yes, definitely a chicken hawker. I will send the Revolutionary Ambulance Brigade Trabant to fetch him once I have had the Buick’s fender resprayed. A visit to his bedside in the hospital will be a splendid opportunity for the imperialist media to photograph the new hypodermics that arrived last week.
Mañana, bedtime in a bit
Diablo! A call from the hospital: the chicken hawker has been found abandoned in a private ward, trying to attach defibrillator paddles to his chest. I had forgotten that all our doctors are in South Africa. I asked if he had been given a thorough prostate examination, and the duty nurse said he’d been given three already in the absence of a specialist, so there is little more I can do, other than send him a signed portrait of myself in the morning. I can hear Neeson sniggering in the room next door, gloating about not having to do hospital visits anymore and — Hospital visits — Caramba!
I have it! Dear revolutionary diary, our troubles are over! Tomorrow Neeson will check himself into St Hysteria Generalissimo Hospital. We will deny everything. The air will be thick with denials! They shall fly like little summer swallows all the way to Miami, where the fools will dance in the streets. How they will dance, and how we will laugh. And then — tragedy. A grim discovery on the operating table; a heroic struggle by our titanic leader; an inevitable decline; a tearful announcement, a brother finally laid to rest. I will tell Neeson at once.
Mañana, at once
I wish to die. He says he is staying to spite me. He says the hospital trope is the preserve of soap opera, and that if he is going to be written out, it must be in a scene involving a lion-hunt in Africa. Oh, Fidel, why did you leave me?