Thirty-Five Thousand and the Beard (Fidel Castro)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You spoke for seven hours
at the United Nations
which is either
a filibuster
or a seduction
depending on whether
the audience
stayed because they agreed
or because
they could not locate
the exit
and you understood
better than any man alive
that the difference
between captivity
and fascination
is the quality
of the captor's voice
You seduced the microphone first —
the country followed
and the women
came in between
like commas
in a sentence
that never reached
its period

[Verse 2]
Thirty-five thousand —
that is the number
the biographers assign
to your romantic life
which is not a love life
but a logistics operation:
the schedule
of a man
whose bedroom
was a revolving door
installed
in a revolution
that promised
collective ownership
but practiced
deeply personal
acquisition
The women
smelled like Havana nightclub perfume
and the salt residue
of a coast
where the music
never stopped
and the music
was the background
to a foreground
that consisted
primarily
of the beard arriving

[Chorus]
Six hundred
assassination attempts —
the CIA sent
poisoned cigars,
exploding seashells,
a contaminated diving suit,
a former lover
with a pistol in her purse —
and the lover
could not pull the trigger
and you knew
she was sent
and you handed her the gun
and said: you can't kill me,
nobody can kill me —
which is either courage
or the specific narcissism
of a man
who has confused
his survival
with the universe's
opinion of his importance
and the confusion
lasted ninety years
which suggests
the universe
was at minimum
undecided

[Verse 3]
You nationalized the sugar
and the cigars
and the casinos
and the mistresses
were the one thing
you never nationalized
because the revolution
applied to every industry
except the one
you ran personally
and the personally
was the tell —
the single drawer
in the filing cabinet
that was labeled private
in a government
that had abolished
the concept of private
for everyone else
You exported revolution
and imported women
and the trade balance
was never audited
because you were
the auditor

[Outro]
The beard — 
the beard was the brand
before brands
had a vocabulary —
it said: I came from the mountains,
I do not need your barber,
I do not need your schedule,
I do not need your permission
to outlast
every president
who tried
to remove me
from the chair
and from the island
and from the century
You sat in the chair
for forty-nine years
and the chair
held a revolutionary
and a womanizer
and a dictator
and a survivor
and you
never saw the contradiction
because the beard
covered everything
including the parts
of the face
where the contradictions
would have been
most visible