Official media claims that Cuba without Fidel Castro would be plunged "into the darkness of hell."

One could expect nothing else this Tuesday, August 13, than Granma assigning one of its official journalists to sing new praises for the dictator Fidel Castro, who would be turning 98 today had he not passed away on November 25, 2016, while reflecting on longevity under the shade of a moringa tree.

To this end, the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) turned to Pastor Batista Valdés, its correspondent in Las Tunas, who gratefully sang the civic and patriotic virtues of the absent leader, who has not passed away. "What would Cuba have been without Fidel?" Pastor asked as a forced opening to sketch a portrait of the dictator that did not smell of a worn path.

Millions of Cubans would take less than a second to respond to such a question, and they would also agree. They would shout in unison: "We would be better off!". First of all, Cuba without Fidel would still be Cuba, because no matter how much the propagandists from the Palace and the PCC indoctrinators have shouted, Cuba is not Fidel, nor is Fidel Cuba.

So Cuba without Fidel would have been a lively nation, perhaps in construction, in search of greater levels of freedom, but with all the instruments of a democracy and a rule of law influenced by a vibrant, pluralistic civil society aware of its rights and freedoms. All of that disappeared after Castro came to power.

But let Pastor be the one to answer his own question, with his peculiar stylistic twists. Fidel "was born to be Himself," says Pastor. His mother knew it "upon seeing the beautiful man she had just given to the world," but "probably history itself also knew it, in some foreseen way."

But, what would Cuba have been without Fidel? Here, Pastor does not poetize but rather turns to the history manual for the indoctrinated and responds with the same old argument: we would be the "backyard" of the United States. The PCC pamphleteers will never approach the issue with another lens: Cuba's relations with the United States were those of a neocolony, and that's that.

Therefore, "it is easy to imagine" what Cuba would have been without Fidel: "it would have continued sinking into the darkness of hell."

Then Pastor takes out the hoe and starts to weed the old moringa plant that the dictator left planted in the minds of his followers. That if Fidel was resistant to "political corruption, servility before the empire, the surrender of the nation." That if "honesty, a spirit of sacrifice, attachment to the humble, perseverance, the ability not to yield weapons or principles before anything or anyone always flowed in his blood." And so on.

“He wanted the love of a night, perhaps of moonlight filtered through wood or of a window to the open sky, to bring to the world one of the most transcendent beings of humanity. What Cuban gratitude that torments the ungrateful,” said Pastor.

Two more paragraphs like this and Pastor will earn the "cult of personality" scholarship offered in Pyongyang.