Required Reading

Jeffrey Goldberg spent three days with a self-reflecting Fidel Castro. Today’s is the first of several parts — and I’m going to be following them all. A sample:

Castro’s message to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, was not so abstract, however. Over the course of this first, five-hour discussion, Castro repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism. He criticized Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the “unique” history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.

I don’t mean to imply that Castro is a changed man — he clearly isn’t. But there are some pleasant surprises in here.