A scorpion asks a frog for help crossing a river. Intimidated by the scorpion's prominent stinger, the frog demurs.

``Don't be scared,'' the scorpion says. ``If something happens to you, I'll drown.'' Moved by this logic, the frog puts the scorpion on his back and wades into the river. Half way across, the scorpion stings the frog.

The dying frog croaks, ``How could you -- you know that you'll drown?''

``It's my nature,'' gasps the sinking scorpion.

Every dictator ends up adopting the scorpion's nature.

Stalin sent doctors who treated him to prison so none would feel safe from his reach. During his last illness, as he planned another purge of physicians, one of them gave him a purgative that helped send him to his Marxist paradise.

Fidel Castro lives with sleepless suspicion of everyone around him. A chronic betrayer himself, he must assume that the world wants to do likewise to him, hence his perpetual defensive offense. He has to know what his perceived enemies dream or joke about so that he can take the proper neutralizing steps. This requires an enormous web of spies all over the world. The day that Cuba opens its secret archives will expose the extent of its espionage network and a shocking list of names.

Castro doesn't distinguish between friends and enemies. He had hero Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa under surveillance until the convenient moment when his jokes led to his firing squad. Ochoa was followed by hundreds of Castro loyalists guilty of friendship with the executed general. Of course, the Castro spies who learn too much must in turn be spied upon, lest they escape the eternal vigilance of the state.

It is strange to read and hear opinions pitching a close to the ``last chapter'' of the Cold War (as if China and North Korea are basking in pro-Western warmth) by embracing the ``changes'' that have taken place in Cuba or accepting Castro as a mellowed old caballero resting on his laurels. Already the new year has repudiated those arguments. Witness the Colombian president's humiliating plea to Castro to intervene in domestic guerrilla conflict and the round-up of Cuban spies in Spain. Perhaps Castro and Colombian guerrilla leader ``Tiro Fijo'' (Sure Shot) met and got cozy at an opera or poetry reading rather than over a map coordinating acts of violence. Perhaps the king of Spain is simply paranoid.

The scorpion that is Castro will never change his nature.
What excuse do Castro's defenders make for the reappearance of Cuban troops in Angola? Can they explain how Castro ignores his people's misery to finance strife in another African civil war? They would do well to recall Castro's comments at a recent Havana meeting of international economists to discuss the results of ``neoliberal globalism.'' Before a dismayed audience, he made an appeal anachronistic enough to have come from the mummified lips of Lenin: ``We must unmask tricks, sophisms and hypocrisies. It's time to sow ideas. Capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own system and give way to an inevitable socialist globalization.''

Whatever world Castro inhabits is far from the real one. He has utterly lost the sense of history. That should discourage the would-be frogs from helping him cross any rivers.