What a pitiful spectacle. Ozzie Guillen, the hard-partying eccentric who manages the Florida Marlins, sits weeping in the harsh glare of TV lights, forced by his bosses to recant his praise for Fidel Castro. He’s already been punished with a five-game suspension, but the baseball thought-police won’t be placated until he does a literal “mea culpa.”
So, in his wonderfully mangled English, he begs forgiveness for saying “I love Fidel Castro…I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that fucker is still here.” But what he really meant, he now says, is ever-so-subtly different: “Everybody in the world hates Fidel Castro, including myself.”