Friends, let me tell you about a highly unusual auction, taking place on eBay:
here. The item up for bid is a baseball card — signed — featuring Fidel Castro. The proceeds from the sale will go to the Center for a Free Cuba, which, as the name will tell you, is dedicated to Cuban democracy and human rights.
Interesting story behind this. I have a friend who’s a young Wall Streeter and a freedom-lover. A hobby of his is to collect baseball cards. And this is not just a hobby, but also a form of investing.
Used to be, baseball-card companies made . . . well, baseball cards. But then they branched out into other athletes: My friend has Michael Jordan, Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky, Tiger Woods, and so on. Many of these cards include signatures, by the way.
And then the companies branched out into world figures: for example, Orville Wright, Einstein, Edison, Neil Armstrong. My friend has all of those, too.
He also has a passel of Founders: Franklin, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Jefferson, Madison. Again, these are signed: The cards include “cut signatures,” which is to say, signatures that are taken from letters or other documents, then imbedded in the cards. I should say that my friend also has arguably the greatest American of them all (us all): Lincoln.
You may have noticed that, in listing the Founders, I didn’t mention Washington. So my friend lacks him, huh? In a way. But he has a Washington hair — two of them.
Anyway, last year, my friend noticed that Topps put out a Fidel Castro card. It shows him in a baseball cap, and is all cute and cuddly. My friend was disgusted at this sweetheart treatment of a murderous dictator. So what did he do? He bought the card. He didn’t want it in anyone else’s possession.
Then the question was, “What do I do with this card? Do I have some kind of ceremonial burning?” My friend decided against this — too much like book burning, and you can’t burn an idea. So he decided to deface the card and auction it — giving the proceeds to the anti-Castro, pro-freedom cause.
Part of his inspiration was Rush Limbaugh — who took the sow’s ear of Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats and made a beautiful silk purse out of it.
My friend has noted on the Castro card that the man is a dictator, murderer, and tyrant. He has even noted that Oscar Elías Biscet, the imprisoned dissident, won the Presidential Medal of Freedom (from GWB, of course).
I hope that this card fetches a lot of money: drawing attention to Cubans’ suffering, shaming admirers of Castro, and helping out the Center for a Free Cuba.
Again, the auction is taking place
here: Godspeed.
In
yesterday’s Impromptus, I wrote about France — specifically, the river cruise that
NR just took. Before that, I wrote about the World Economic Forum conference in Sharm El Sheikh. You can find that five-part journal in the Impromptus archive.
And between France and Egypt? Some days in Florence — Italy, not South Carolina — about which I’d like to throw a few notes at you.
There have been some changes since I was a student there. For one thing, outside the Palazzo Vecchio flies the EU flag (along with the Italian flag and the Florentine). The EU flag — ugh. But, they chose it, I suppose. Or, if they didn’t choose it: They don’t mind much.
In the realm of demographics: There are many blacks in Florence now — black Africans, living and working. And many, many Chinese. That is really new. (New to me.) I was told that there is a town outside of Florence that is almost all Chinese. And they specialize in laundry.
A stereotype, maybe, but a fact.
Also, I saw something highly, highly interesting: Indian tourists. Never in my life had I seen an Indian tour group. But there they were, at the Piazzale Michelangelo. This is a mark of the rising middle class in India. People are starting to take foreign holidays. A very, very good sign.
CONTINUED 1 2 Next > 
