Minutes into his five-game unpaid suspension for having praised Fidel Castro in a community filled with, and animated by, people who think Castro comparable to Hitler, Manager Ozzie Guillen of the Miami Marlins tried to explain that he had hoped to say he was surprised Castro had stayed in power so long, and that someone who had hurt so many over so many years was still alive.

The problem is, it turns out he had made similar remarks about Castro four years ago in which he renounced Castro’s politics and called him a dictator and still ended by saying “I admire him.”

As Rick Telander of the Chicago Sun-Times noted late last night, he interviewed Guillen, the managing the White Sox for a Men’s Journal Q-and-A: