Its hallmarks were an iron hand, military discipline, and total control wielded by a maximum leader, the president.
As it mourned the death of its revolutionary commander in chief, Havana was unusually quiet on Sunday, digesting the information that the "maximum leader" – the man who had launched the Cuban revolution and toppled a dictatorship only to rule with an iron fist himself – had finally died.
By Gene Williams The New Yorker, October 30 , 1965P. 52 At 4 30 a.m., Toby, the maximum leader of the Manhattan Front for Immediate Wars of Liberation, received a telephone call from Herman Speyer, his Minister of Internal Reliability, informing him that Karl, the Minister of Terrorist Activities, is planning to burn down the 42nd St. Public Library, using Molotov cocktails.
And among those many table companions, no one has mattered more to him than the maximum leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, with whom García Márquez has conceived a genuine friendship, based on shared vacations, a part-time career promoting Havana as a movie-industry capital and a history of defending the Castro dictatorship against its detractors in the Hispanic literary world.
On Tuesday the "maximum leader" emerged into the limelight again but this time there was no thunder.
And most crucially, the party's maximum leader has adopted the left critique of "free trade" almost in its entirety, a critique that I have spent much of my adult life making.
In terms of flat-footed plays on the name of Cuba's maximum leader, I prefer "The Fideliad" — which speaks to his epic, exhausting and endless run, which began in 1959.
El Comandante (variously referred to as "the tyrant," "the despot," "the Maximum Leader" and "El Líder") is preparing for his birthday celebration, which prompts him to reflect on what he knows are his last days.
A few weeks passed, from the time it was one more number on the list in the speech by the Maximum Leader.
President John F. Kennedy's 1961 attempted overthrow of the Maximum Leader by force and violence rooted in the reprehensible international law theory that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must unwittingly strengthened him.
He who chooses to dedicate himself to the news on this Island knows that all the media is in the hands of power, call it what you will: the State, the One Party or the Maximum Leader.
