Feliz cumpleanos, commandante

Back in Havana. I hear all of these stories about dumps of snow in Vancouver and Toronto, and I have to sympathize. You know it's getting cold here too. I mean with 19'C at night you almost have to close the windows.

Fidel's belated birthday party is tomorrow. The old guy, is...an old guy.

From his hospital bed he has assured the nation that he still makes decisions and has a say. No one really buys it.

Last night there was a Happy Birthday concert for the old guy, and musicians from all over the Americas showed up to play.

Good times it was. Sure there is some hoopla about the old man's birthday. The Slogan is Viva Fidel, and his first eighty years. First eighty.

That's fitting really. Because now Cuba's great leader has officially moved from a position of governance and symbolism to just symbolism. The man can't actually do much from his hospital bed. But now he has become the simulacra, a mythical pressence of values, beliefs and thinking that is meant to transend governance and popular culture.

Like Jose Marti himself, this is the role of the man with the beard.

True Cuba scholars have known this for some time. Some of the most important and at times radical decisions regard foriegn and economic policy took place with Fidel's hands well off the wheel.

But now, with the 80 years celebration, the leader has become nothing more than legend.

Folks in Miami will continue to bark about the change that will come after he passes. Morbid bastards all of them. The man's death, when it comes, won't change a bloody thing. The system here is on its own legs. Giving the guize that one man in a green suit runs the show, the sacred truth is that it really runs itself.

There are many aperatures in Cuba these days. Ones to travel, to continue education, to gain hard currency through purely capitalist means (from selling gum to important blue Jeans from Venezuela). And like all complex societies, Cuba's does not live and die with one character.

But that character, now a myth more than a man, still plays an important role.