Neville recalls Fidel Castro's early acclaim in the United States -- including Ed Sullivan introducing him on television as "the George Washington of Cuba" -- before recounting how Castro conscripted the population into his military without consent and expropriated some two billion dollars of American-owned property, seizing more and more until the country was left, in Neville's account, enslaved and calling out to a god of its own choosing that could not save it. He offers the episode as a warning against surrendering one's own imagination to an external savior or centralized authority.