An Interview with Gore Vidal: "I'm Jealous of Cuba"

Gore Vidal was in Cuba for five days, following a frantic and packed program that took him from the University of Computer Sciences, the Latin American School of Medicine, the University of Havana's main campus, to the National Ballet School, from Old Havana to the park in honor of John Lennon where a bronze replica of the lead Beatle is found, seated as if he were a nearby neighbor.

For the brief span of an hour, Gore Vidal agreed to chat with us for this interview. He is the most erudite American writer of his generation and the most corrosive critic of the present Republican administration. But Vidal does not simply speak to us. He interprets what he says. Modulating his voice, he brings to life George W. Bush, Eisenhower, FDR, an obscure Pentagon bureaucrat, and even himself, mocking all of them with the irony contained in a visage that belies his 81 years of age.

He is more interested in being remembered as an historian than as a novelist. Although his works easily triple his age (we can find in his bibliography novels, tragedies, comedies, memoirs, essays, film and television screenplays), he has a singular obsession: the loss of the Republic. "The main bit of wisdom that I learned from Thomas Jefferson, and he from Montesquieu, is that we cannot maintain both a Republic and an Empire simultaneously. We have been rapacious imperialists since the Mexican War in 1846."

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