Castro’s Pledge: No Dream Puffs

--Cuban President Fidel Castro’s resolve hasn’t gone up in smoke, even though he’s had some close calls in his dreams. The 60-year-old Castro, who gave up smoking in August, 1985, as an example to others, told a recent gathering at the residence of the Spanish ambassador to Cuba that he sometimes dreams that he has a cigar in his hand but that his pledge not to smoke wins out in the end. According to a tape recording of the conversation, Castro said: “Three times I’ve dreamed that I am smoking. In fact, just last night I dreamed that suddenly I had a big cigar in my hand, then I said, ‘Holy mackerel.’ I let fly a big exclamation, ‘I’m smoking, by golly.’ But . . . the three times that I have dreamed that I am smoking, on realizing that I am violating my pledge, I throw the cigar away.” Castro said the campaign against smoking has met with some success, and that Cubans spent $100 million less for tobacco products in 1985 than in the previous year.

--A yellow golf cart may not be par for the course on city streets, but one can often be seen in Sea Isle City, N.J., with the driver’s black veil floating behind her and the rosary beads hanging around the steering column jiggling. “They call me the flying nun,” Sister Isabel Goineau, the driver, said with a grin. For the last seven years, the 75-year-old nun, who never learned to drive a car, has used the vehicle to visit the sick and lonely. She carries a special permit from the mayor and police chief to drive the cart, which has a top speed of 10 m.p.h. Even cold winter weather doesn’t keep her from her rounds. “I’m bundled up like a teddy bear,” she said.

--It seems the country should be prepared for more winter weather. Punxsutawney Phil, the prognosticating Pennsylvania groundhog, predicted six more weeks of winter. “The only reliable weather forecaster, Punxsutawney Phil . . . stood proud for a moment and then saw his shadow at precisely 7:29 a.m.,” a top-hatted James Means, president of the Groundhog Club, told about 1,000 spectators in Punxsutawney, Pa. Club member Bud Dunkel pulled Phil from his electrically heated burrow and held him aloft to the cheers of the crowd, then placed the groundhog to Means’ ear for Phil to whisper the forecast to him in “groundhogese.” Legend says that when the groundhog sees his shadow he returns to his den and spring is six weeks away. If he fails to see his shadow, spring is just around the corner. Only six or eight times (depending on the source) in the last 100 years has Phil failed to see his shadow. The groundhog, or woodchuck, predicted an early spring last year, and “we played golf the first week of February,” said William Null, a Groundhog Club member and director of the Chamber of Commerce.