raul, the blithering idiot

Last night I was watching the news on local channel 41 and they showed a videotape taken some 10 years ago. The tape was of raul castro, who was apparently trying to impress some English speaking visitors. In the video he speaks in short sentences and we hear (but never see) the interpreter translating what he says.

The video begins with raul reviewing female sailors as they march by. You hear raul snickering as if he's complimenting the female sailors and then he jumps down from the reviewing stand and makes a gesture to caress the woman who is in the last row, on the end, closest to him. The woman continues marching off with the rest of the sailors but raul looks back at the camera with a childish grin and says "it's good to be in a unit now" and begins to tell a story.

He starts the story by saying that when he was a child in an all boys Catholic school that he had to take communion every day. But when one had sinned one could not take communion. Sometimes he'd skip communion for several days but it would be noticed by the priest that was his appointed spiritual advisor.

"Why haven't you taken communion?" the priest would ask. raul explained that he'd need to confess in order to take the communion and the priest would goad him into confessing his sins.

raul then tells that sometimes he'd confess that he had unclean thoughts. The priest would assign an easy pennance for that. Then raul said (and this floored me for an old man to say this, especially to a foreigner who was filming the occasion) that when he would confess to masturbating the punishment was much stricter. raul seemed to take delight in talking about his masturbatory sins, giggling the whole time.

He finishes the story by saying that now that the Cuban navy has women in it, the sailors won't need to masturbate any more, and laughed.

They just replayed the video and I have recorded it. I need to put it on the web.