Sad news indeed.

Funny moment about this. When my wife and I heard the news, she said "I loved him on Barney Miller", while I said "I loved him on Firefly". Just shows the disparate points of reference we have, even though we are less than 1 year apart in age. She watched BM with her dad (who was older than my parents by 15 years) when she was little, while I have never seen an episode of it, and she has never seen an episode of Firefly, which I watched in its first run.

I am in the middle of a shouting match on Facebook about Castro. He was pretty polarizing, but an editorial I just read had the right idea: "neither angel nor demon".

Castro was a dictator, and no dictator will ever have my sympathy for suppressing individual rights. But even among dictators, there are levels of ignominy. There is the genocidal type, like Cambodia's Pol Pot, who don't appear to have any redeeming qualities whatsoever. There are the Pinochet types, fascists to the core, who crush individual rights and fill their pockets without providing anything to their people. There are the religious integrists like Saudi Arabia's king, who impose cruel and (by western standards) absolutely barbaric laws. Then there are the ones who seem to mean well, but whose unshaking ideological resolve makes them do shitty things: the Lenins and the Castros of this world. If we merely judge them by what they did wrong, they end up looking very bad indeed; but if we have the honesty to also see what they did right, they become more nuanced characters.

Cuba's had it tough since Castro took over? Yes it did. But let's not pretend it was all honey and roses before; the reason Cuba's revolution worked is that Batista's dictatorship was equally crappy (and provided less to the people). Latin America has seen its share of strongmen or corrupt politicians, and its citizens have often suffered greatly. In all that mess, and acknowledging the fact that Cuba was a brutal dictatorship, it must be recognized that the country has a very, very well-educated population and an excellent healthcare system. Its infant mortality rate is lower than that of the US, which is something phenomenal for such a poor nation. This is way more significant that just saying "yeah, yeah, and under Mussolini the trains ran on time"; it shows a fundamental interest in the wealthfare of a nation as a whole. Few dictators can make such a claim.

Cuba today is on the brink of shedding all the bad that came with the dictatorship, and could retain all the good that came with it. I sincerely hope that this courageous and brave nation will be allowed to do so.

His character was one of my favorites on Barney Miller, as well as his guest appearances on other shows over the years. Sad that he's gone.

So basically, all the stuff mentioned earlier about how he dramatically improved healthcare, education and infrastructure in Cuba doesn't matter, because he did bad stuff, too? Seems to me some supposedly more civilized countries could learn a thing or two from Castro.

When Castro first rose to power, it's not like the state of Cuba could've gotten a whole lot worse.

So make even the most incremental of improvements, and of course there will be a segment of the poorest that is devoted to you.

Like how to make boats to escape from the homeland? Life was not a bed of roses under this militant putz.

The headline is rather poorly worded-it makes it sound as though he bonked all 35, 000 of them when he was fourteen, then had a cigar to celebrate. That sounds like one hell of a birthday for the kid...