Almost Lifelike Dictator Fears He Won't Be Lucid In Four Years

I hate to break it to Fidel, but he hasn't been making much sense for a few decades at least. Naturally, he's also swept up in Hopenchange, yet fears our neophyte president will be crushed by the evil American system.

Fidel Castro suggested Thursday that his health is failing, saying that four years from now he doesn't expect to be following current events. In an online column titled "Reflections of Comrade Fidel," the 82-year-old Cuban leader appeared to be pondering his own mortality, saying Cuban officials "shouldn't feel bound by my occasional Reflections, my state of health or my death."

"I have had the rare privilege of observing events over such a long time. I receive information and meditate calmly on those events," he wrote. "I expect I won't enjoy that privilege in four years, when Obama's first presidential term has ended."

He didn't elaborate, but suggested he was stepping out of government affairs, writing: "I have reduced the Reflections as I had planned this year, so I won't interfere or get in the way of the (Communist) Party or government comrades in the constant decisions they must make."

The bulk of the column was devoted to praising Obama, in part for his decision to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, recalling his thoughts Tuesday as he watched Obama assume the "leadership of the empire."

"The intelligent and noble face of the first black president of the United States ... had transformed itself under the inspiration of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King into a living symbol of the American dream," he wrote.

However, Castro suggested Obama would soon fall victim to the U.S. system: "What will he do soon, when the immense power that he has taken in his hands is absolutely useless to overcome the unsolvable, antagonistic contradictions of the (American) system?"