Harry’s Place has a couple of examples of the encomia headed the Cuban dictator’s way as the world rejoices on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Here’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez showing that crawling to the caudillo is not yet a lost art:

“Ironclad discipline. The force of his imagination stretches him to the unforeseen. As important as learning to work is to learn how to rest…Nobody is more obsessive than him when he has decided to get to the bottom of something. There is no project, however colossal or tiny, that he does not undertake with an incarnate passion….His rarest virtue as a politico is that faculty of discerning the evolution of an action to its remotest consequences… but he does not exercise that faculty out of illumination, but as the result of arduous and tenacious reasoning. His supreme aide is his memory and he uses it to the point of abuse to sustain speeches or private conversations with overwhelming reasoning and arithmetical operations of an incredible rapidity. He requires the aid of incessant information, well masticated and digested.
His task of informative accumulation is a priority from the moment that he wakes up. He breakfasts with no less than 200 pages of news of the entire world. During the day he is sent urgent news wherever he is; he calculates that he has to read some 500 documents, to which one has to add reports from the official services and from his visitors and anything that might interest his infinite curiosity.”

I’d continue but nausea overwhelms me.

While you’re there, scroll down to see Zidane’s birthday, um, greeting.

You won’t regret it.