No Cigar for Turner’s Castro ‘Conversation’ : Television: The usually voluble CNN founder just lobs up soft questions and listens to the long-winded Cuban leader’s answers tonight.

We learn from Ted Turner’s interview with Fidel Castro that Turner can listen as well as talk.

In “A Conversation With Fidel Castro” at 6 tonight on CNN, the Cuban President talks . . . and talks . . . and talks, while Turner--whose own nonstop verbosity is legendary--this time listens . . . and listens . . . and listens.

CNN-founder Turner’s interview with Castro was taped in Havana during Turner’s June 8-10 visit to Cuba.

This duel of epic talkers is a massacre from the start. Assisted by simultaneous translations, they face off in leather chairs, with Turner the batting-practice pitcher lobbing mostly soft ones across the plate and Castro, speaking through an interpreter, blasting them out of sight. You eye the bullpen, but no one’s warming up.

One appreciates any TV interview that liberates its participants from the tyranny of the sound bite without deteriorating into a noisy debate that eclipses the person being interviewed. Just as the Bush Administration has attempted to invade Cuba via Radio Marti and now TV Marti, moreover, it’s only proper that Castro get a crack at the United States through CNN. Furthermore, some of Castro’s global observations and criticisms of the United States have merit.

Yet this program is much less the “conversation” promised by CNN than a Castro monologue. Turner is his all-but-silent prop, appearing at times to ask questions from a TelePrompTer or cue cards, then sitting through the lengthy responses, his eyes glazing into shiny mirrors.

Boy, this journalist business is grueling. Popping a few questions is one thing, but no one told Turner he’d have to sit there and endure the answers.

With all the legitimate journalists at CNN’s command, why is Turner sitting there?

“We know Castro watches CNN on his satellite dish,” a CNN spokesman said. “So we’ve been asking him for an interview for years, and been getting turned down. No matter what correspondent we’d suggest, he’d say no. Finally, we suggested Ted, and that changed his mind.”

Smart guy, Castro.

Other than the Cuban leader in effect getting to chose his interviewer, no preconditions were set down by Castro, CNN said. None needed. In an hour displacing “Larry King Live” (and which repeats at 1 a.m.), Castro is never pressed or challenged. CNN could have achieved the same result by mailing the questions to Havana and having Castro read his responses to the camera.

Most of Turner’s contributions to the “conversation,” as it were, were edited out of the version of the interview airing tonight. They are contained in a transcript of an earlier version that’s otherwise almost identical to tonight’s.

These omitted comments are noteworthy only because they indicate Turner’s frame of mind and friendliness as an interviewer.

In the transcript, which CNN provided, Turner is quoted either thanking Castro after each of Castro’s replies (“Thank you for that difficult answer”) or stating his own agreement with the answer, as in “This is true” or “Touche.”

The latter comes after Castro, while endorsing the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, draws a questionable analogy between it and such other “walls” as economic blockades and the controversial U.S. campaign to seal its border with Mexico.

Castro: “When will that wall disappear, which is much more difficult to overcome than the Berlin Wall?”

A more aggressive interviewer would call Castro on that, distinguishing between walls that keep citizens in and those that, rightly or wrongly, keep non-citizens out or that bar trade. From this interviewer, however, there are no dissents or follow-ups, even when Castro masterfully pirouettes around Turner’s question about violence in China’s Tien An Mien Square by attacking the United States. Like a teacher, Castro lectures and ,like a student, Turner nods. Or perhaps he’s nodding off.

Turner is one of TV’s greatest visionaries and nobody’s fool. He deserves credit not only for creating CNN but also for being that rare mogul who thinks cosmically while being as devoted to social causes as the bottom line. And obviously, the thinking was that Castro/Turner was better than no Castro at all. Well . . . maybe.

For a broader, more searching view of the topic, try “Castro’s Cuba: Two Views” in August, a PBS packaging of two highly opinionated films with clashing perspectives. Saul Landau’s “The Uncompromising Revolution” is sympathetic to Cuba under Castro, while “Nobody Listened” by Nestor Almendros and Jorge Ulla is a bitter condemnation of Castro’s human rights record.

But first comes Turner. “Hi,” he begins. “I’m Ted Turner, and I’ve just spent two very interesting days here in Cuba traveling around with President Fidel Castro. . . .” The interview wasn’t much, but they’ll always have Havana.