EXPLODING FIDEL'S CIGAR

Happy 200th birthday, Edgar Allan Poe, quoth the Inquirer; and by the way Edgar was really a Philadelphian. I also read in this morning’s paper that Americans are bribing Afghan tribal leaders with Viagra. Remember the attempts to kill Castro with a cigar? An older friend and former neighbor worked in government in the ’60s and early ’70s. Robert Kennedy would phone him every Monday morning. “Is he dead yet?” Meaning Castro. My friend, a graduate of Yale and friend of Bill Buckley, never seemed able to remove a cigar from his mouth; he thus appeared to mumble. That was a cover, I thought; he was old but he was scary. The last time I saw him and his wife, she had purchased a huge bag of pigeon food and he was going into J & R Cigars. I’ve always figured killing Fidel with an exploding cigar must have been his idea.