Happy birthday to the Beard

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Beloved despot, dictator and commie holdout Fidel Castro is 75 today. Love him or hate him (and I’m personally not too keen on him) you have to admit he’s outlived a hell of a lot of his enemies. I can’t think of a single Kennedy administration person aside from Robert Mcnamara (sp?) who was around during the bay of pigs fiasco who is still alive.

I grew up in the last part of the cold war. I experienced the last of the duck and cover drills and remember my mom explaining how a hydrogen bomb was different from a regular atomic bomb. I became a cold warrier in the early eighties when the CCCP was still a going concern. It was still a slightly chilling thing to see Soviet Bear recon aircraft buzz the carrier. They’d fly so low we could clear see the dreaded red star and the guy in the tail turret. Of course every one of those planes was followed by an F-14 or two with a Sidewinder SEAM lock. I’ve seen gun camera films that showed us not more than a trigger squeeze away from a lot of unpleasantness.

What are your fond memories of the tio Fidel’s four decades in office?

2

Oh, I thought this was going to be a thread about your Van Dyke.

Too young to remember (or to have experienced, rather) the Bay of Pigs or the Missile Crisis.

I do remember how the Cubans and the Russians invaded the US and occupied that one small town, where the high school kids formed a guerilla group called the “Wolverines” for the the purpose of subjecting the invading troups to heavy resistance.

And there was that whole Elian thing.

3

Don’t even remind me.

4

And the current influx of Cuban pitchers to Major League Baseball. (Why are all of the Cuban players PITCHERS? Why don’t any of them seem to play second base or something?)