Swan Lake and memoirs - it's a busy day in Havana

As Cubans have learnt over the past 50 years, Fidel Castro has an opinion on everything and anything … from nuclear medicine to cheese-making, and from sharp-shooting to French politics.

In fact, there are very few subjects on which Castro is not an expert of sorts.

We now discover through our friends at Penultimos Dias that the man who changed the lives of 11 million Cubans forever, is warming up to ballet, too.

In his latest rambling “editorial”, dutifully published with great fanfare by the official media, the dictator-in-retirement reveals that he has spent some time watching a taped performance of “the well-known ballet Swan Lake”.

And he liked what he saw.

While modestly claiming that he is “far from being an expert” on the topic, Castro writes that watching dancers on his television screen “is an agreeable form of almost completely losing track of time”, especially “under the current circumstances”.

In other words, he is not allowed to do much else by his doctors.

The old man also uses the article to reveal (or threaten?) that he is considering writing his memoirs, if he can find the time … and a generous publisher.

This will come as a surprise to those of us who thought Castro had already written his memoirs in the form of “My Life”, the 700-page “biography” put together by the ever-loyal Ignacio Ramonet.

Not so.

“As I write these lines … I reiterate the idea, if time allows me to do so, of writing some memoirs,” he writes, adding that he would like to be paid for them.

Not that he’d keep the money, you understand. True humanitarian that he is, Castro says he would use all royalties to print medical books for Cuban health professionals.