“Good morning, Diego. What time is it?”

“Time for every good revolutionary to seize the day and go for the gusto. Time to live!”

“Then it must be Wednesday. What news do you bring me this morning, Diego?”

“Unfortunately the news is bad, Fidel. I’m afraid that our plan to crash the U.S. economy by distributing illicit MP3 files of Metallica and Dr. Dre has failed.”

“That is not good. It means that we cannot have the summer concert season that we had hoped for. Weird Al Yankovic, and the Acura Music Festival featuring John Fogerty will not come to Havana this year. Our amphitheatre stage will be silent. Our gold circle seats will remain empty and our lawn seats barren.”

“Perhaps with the upcoming United States elections, things will be different. The Americans have already lifted their ban against selling us food and medicine.”

“What good is medicine without music, Diego? No matter who wins, life will remain the same. Gore will maintain the concert embargo that has cursed us for the past 40 years. Bush will paint me as a stage door johnny, a tour hungry despot, willing to book Rage Against The Machine with Beastie Boys at any cost. No, some things never change, my faithful friend.”

“Perhaps a meeting with your security council?”

“A bunch of cigar-chomping fools. Empty chatter about guns, ships and ammo. Times have changed, Diego. If we want to see Britney Spears gyrating against a tropical Havana moon, we must strike the capitalistic pigs where it hurts.”

“But how, Fidel?”

“We will invite that San Mateo software company, er, what is it? Rapster, or Slapster, something like that.”

“Napster.”

“Si. We will invite them to relocate to Havana, where they will be out of reach of the bourgeois recording industry. Together, we will spread the major labels’ intellectual property to the far corners of the globe. Joe Cocker, Destruction, even Lonnie Brooks will feel the wrath of a music-loving dictator scorned.”

“I’ll get on it right away.”

“It’s a different world, Diego. To be renaissance men, we must play by different rules.”

“Yes, Fidel.”

“Oh, how I long for the simpler times of a generation ago. The days when I used to sit on the beach, eyeing the lovely señoritas while listening to Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett beaming out from a Miami radio station.”

“But you had that station jammed, Fidel.”

“Because they would not honor my request for an all Diana Ross & The Supremes weekend. Which reminds me. She is playing in Houston tonight. Have our operatives buy up the remaining 15,321 tickets. Let the Lady of Motown think she is playing to a full house. Just like the old days.”

“I will, Fidel.”