Reply #85: And it was very interesting to get the inside track on the matter

[Joe Chi Minh]

from you. Thank you.

It seems you have Battista-worshipping terrorists in Miami, but most Miami Cubans are just ordinary folk with the kind of chip on their shoulder re Fidel most other people would, if they'd had their property, carefully garnered and passed on down the generations, confiscated by a revolutionary government.

The kulaks in Russia could never wear that, either. It's human nature not to trust politicians to introduce a utopian kind of society with you contributing all your worldly possessions to the common weal. The fact that Fidel has done so much good in Cuba and indeed, to other oppressed countries elsewhere in the world is very anomalous, to say the least.

It is almost a hard and fast rule, that left-wing politicians are simply opportunists, who will betray the cause they speak about with such stirring passion, once, they themselves, ascend a few rungs of the socio-economic ladder, ending up on the hard right. The list must be virtually endless. Tebbit, Reagan, Thatcher, Blair... so many... either ex trade-union leaders or descended from them. Fidel and Che Guevara came from privileged backgrounds and might have spared themselves the trouble had they been a little less magnanimous.

Before I came to realise this, a fiancee of mine, of the toff persuasion, told me that the upper and upper middle classes ensured certain standards in society. Which I thought at the time was a pretty barmy thing to believe, but with the passage of time, my respect for at least the better ones among the old-money types has just kept growing. In fact, bizarre as it may seem 'prima facie', the public schools in the UK (what you more sensibly call "private" in the US) have proved to be one of the last and most significant bastions of Christianity and essentially Christian culture. And did people but realise it, Christianity is our main protection against the worst excesses of our worldly leaders, when it is shared by them. We don't have to search too far to recognise the godless vandals and their barbarous hordes at the apex of both our countries, however vocal their religious pretensions.

What I meant to say was simply that the more complete the picture we can get of everything, the better it feels. Little truths, or big truths from a small context, enable us to make better sense of everything else, the wider context of our existence. It's like important things falling into place; key pieces in a jigsaw.