A Hard Reign’s A-Gonna Fall: Guest Blogger Fidel Castro Salutes Bob Dylan

Guest Blogger Fidel Castro wraps up his weeklong musical tribute to Cuba with a toast to Bob Dylan

“Say what you will about Fidel Castro — I am a communist, a fascistic leader, an oppressor of millions, a pigheaded ideologue — but without me, Bob Dylan would never have written one of his greatest songs. So take that, capitalist pigs!

Dylan himself has said that he wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” over the weekend of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. The 21 year-old vagabond didn’t mention the war specifically, but channeled society's fear of Armageddon and nuclear war into seven minutes of visionary poetry over a melody lifted from the Scottish highlands.

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was his first truly epic composition and to this day is one of his greatest songs. While I love the folkie version from Freewheelin,’ I also have a soft spot for the sped-up version he played on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975 (see below).

Few people know this, but Fidel played congas with Rolling Thunder when they swung through Miami in ‘76. I figure, there are so many commies on stage — Joan Baez, Sam Shepard, Bob Neuwirth — what’s one more?

I guess the three-way nuclear chess game that was the Cuban Missile Crisis must have really freaked Zimmy out, because he wrote two other songs that allude to it: the unreleased obscurity “Cuban Missile Crisis,” very much in the spirit of his early protest material, and the Guthrie-esque “Talkin’ World War III Blues.”

But I have to take my army cap off to Bob. We started our revolutions at about the same time. Yet while I stepped down from power last month, he’s still on the road in Mexico, headin’ for another joint. I guess we always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view.”

mp3: Bob Dylan, “Cuban Missile Crisis,” 1962 (from Broadside bootleg)
mp3: Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Live 1964, No Direction Home Soundtrack
mp3: Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Concert for Bangladesh, 1971
mp3: Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue
mp3: Bob Dylan, "Talkin' World War III Blues," Live 1964: Philharmonic Hall Concert


YouTube: Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” 1962


YouTube: Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Rolling Thunder Revue, 1975