Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen is quoted in a recent issue of Time magazine as saying that he has “love” for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and respects that he’s been able to maintain power for so long.
Those thoughts obviously aren’t sitting well in Miami — a city with many Cuban descendants — and so a cleanup campaign has been put in motion.
Guillen held a closed-door meeting with beat writers on Saturday night, according to the Associated Press, and offered this: “I will apologize if I hurt somebody’s feelings, or I hurt somebody’s thought. I want them to know I’m against everything 100 percent – I repeat it again – the way this man (been) treating people for the last 60 years.”
The Marlins, meanwhile, have issued a statement: “There is nothing to respect about Fidel Castro. He is a brutal dictator who has caused unthinkable pain for more than 50 years. We live in a community filled with victims of this dictatorship, and the people in Cuba continue to suffer today.”
However Ozzie’s original comments to Time magazine came about, he clearly doesn’t stand behind them. And this certainly isn’t the first time Guillen has had a scatter-brained opinion about something.
But you have to wonder how this all is affecting the way Guillen is being viewed in south Florida. The team that employs him, after all, just opened a new ballpark in a neighborhood called “Little Havana.”
