The Week

And now—a desk for Dan Ortega at the Kennedy School?

Imagine the scene in the comfortable book-lined library of the Nomenklatura Club in downtown Moscow. Members are snoozing after lunch, playing a quiet game of chess, leafing through back numbers of Literaturnaya Gazeta and Time magazine. A new member enters the room—which at once empties as apparatchiks remember pressing appointments and KGB controllers flee to their wives. The last time they were trapped by him, it meant a five-hour lecture on the socialist morality of sugar quotas. Yes, it is Fidel Castro, reduced by the 1990 Cuban revolution to being the club bore of the Comintern. Better perhaps to be hanged by the heels from a lamp-post in Havana’s Revolutionary Square.

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And now—a desk for Dan Ortega at the Kennedy School?

Imagine the scene in the comfortable book-lined library of the Nomenklatura Club in downtown Moscow. Members are snoozing after lunch, playing a quiet game of chess, leafing through back numbers of Literaturnaya Gazeta and Time magazine. A new member enters the room—which at once empties as apparatchiks remember pressing appointments and KGB controllers flee to their wives. The last time they were trapped by him, it meant a five-hour lecture on the socialist morality of sugar quotas. Yes, it is Fidel Castro, reduced by the 1990 Cuban revolution to being the club bore of the Comintern. Better perhaps to be hanged by the heels from a lamp-post in Havana’s Revolutionary Square.