Castro is accusing Bush of trying to assassinate him. This reminds me of the disaffected and marginal activists who haunt the corridors and graduate offices of the academy, largely comatose except for the occasional anti-sweatshop petition or teach-in. They're are so desperate to convince themselves that they matter, that they’re ''dangerous to the Establishment,'' that they construct elaborate theories about how the government is trying to ''suppress them.'' The fact that the government doesn’t even acknowledge their existence is taken as evidence for just how deep and subtle the plot is (or, even more creatively, as proof of how total government control over the media is - because the government knows that if the activists' radical message got out, people would throw off the chains of their capitalist oppressors, free themselves from wage slavery, and flood into the streets to take up a glorious rendition of Workers of the World Unite. Why else would Ted Koppel refuse to take their calls?) Irrelevance is a tough thing for people to handle, whether they’re an unkempt Marxist literature postgrad at Columbia or an unkempt Marxist dictator in Cuba.