CSotD: Fidel unto death
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Oh, wait … stand by … that was the wrong Castro, wrong country, wrong era … well, a lot further back in the era than intended … Satterfield, 1905 instead of …
Ah, here we are: Rodriguez, 2016. I like this cartoon for many reasons, but chief among them is the somewhat wistful "now what?" Uncle Sam, all dressed up and no place to go.
God knows, between the publication of those two cartoons, Uncle Sam found many occasions to step in and help correct problems in our hemisphere, including some that the people who lived in these countries hadn't realized even were problems.
I'm sure there will be lots of cartoons on Castro's death, mostly featuring cigars.
Rodriguez leaves a cigar under the bench to show who sat there, and it's a very nice touch, and I'll give Clay Jones credit for the fact that his cigar is all ash, smoked to the very stub, which comments on Castro's own life but also the policy of waiting him out, which might not be so dramatic had he not combined living to 90 with having risen to power before he was even old enough to have run for president here.
Cartoonists should not consider this permission to draw an extinguished cigar, collect a paycheck and knock off for the day.
Besides, I liked Jones' accompanying essay, which combined serious analysis with humor, including this line:
The media is trying to find out the cause of death for the 90-year-old former dictator. I’d say cause of death is he was 90.
As Mike Keefe noted two years ago, the thing with the really amazing longevity was the US embargo, which might have made sense a generation or two ago, but had not only proven inefficient but was being enforced by the same politicians who had vehemently insisted sanctions couldn't impact apartheid in South Africa and were not enough to counter Iran.
The difference being that neither Iran nor South Africa had a substantial, vocal ex-pat population in a critical swing state.
And it's not just about voters. It's about people willing to pitch in and help: If Nelson Mandela or the Shah had furnished burglars to break into Democratic Headquarters, it might have been different.
It's important to remember that the "Cuban Missile Crisis" was not between the US and Cuba but between the US and the Soviet Union, as seen in this 1962 cartoon that's all over the Internet but never attributed (sorry).
Castro was still a young pup and his value to the Soviets was proximity; it was not until later, with their patronage, that he began furnishing military and medical aid to others in South and Central America as well as Angola.
At that stage, Castro still had a lot of history to see. Thirty-six years later, when Pope John Paul II visited and, as ex-pat cartoonist Angel Boligan demonstrated, both men had to swallow hard in order to smile, but they did so.
What I noticed at the time was that, while high school kids shown this cartoon could easily identify the pope, only a few recognized Castro and none knew what he was holding behind his back.
However, a few years later, when a parental kidnapping overlapped onto our shores, it was different. Kids may not have known much about the dying economic form "communism," but they understood divorce and I think enough of them had heard noble-sounding but self-serving excuses for custodial interference on the personal level that they weren't buying it on the international stage, either.
(It was fun showing this Danziger panel to an auditorium full of students because you could tell how many knew Spanish by the amount of laughter that hit before you began the explanation.)
The incident, however, enflamed Cuban-American conservatives, and Michael Ramirez compared the worst person in America to the worst person in the world, an emotion reflected in the months-long process of returning a kidnapped child to his sole surviving parent.
I suspect the Elian Gonzalez case brought some difficult conversations to Cuban/American dinner tables, as hard-core exile grandparents sat down with second-generation American grandchildren while parents who had struggled with the growing generation gap found things boiling over.
And others, as Lalo Alcaraz noted at the time, were struck by the sudden outrage from conservative quarters where respect for the law had previously seemed particularly uncompromising and heartless.
Fidel's star began to fade less because of his advancing years than because of the fading economy of the Soviet Union, which was followed by the untimely death of Hugo Chavez, whose Venezuelan oil had filled in at least a substantial portion of the loss of Soviet support.
As Jim Morin noted in 2014, it dovetailed neatly with the arrival on the scene of a US President willing to buck the conservative bloc and try some Nixonian "constructive engagement" with Raul, who was, by then, running the show for his retired brother.
After all, as Steve Sack suggested, Obama wasn't winning any popularity contests over on the rightwing fringe anyway.
For the record, I've had exile friends starting at the time of the revolution, and I understand opposition to Fidel.
I also have seen the futility of waiting him out, and the question now is not how the onlookers will divide up the cake but whether they will be offered a slice at all. The Cuban people may, after all, prefer evolution to overthrow.
And if you know where that pic comes from, you know who I'm watching hover around licking their chops.
Disheartening Juxtaposition of the Day
Canadian Michael DeAdder (above) and Australian David Rowe (below) note that Cuba is not the only nation that has changed in the decades that Castro reigned.
Phil Ochs wrote his first political song while he was still a student at (the) Ohio State University and this partial is apparently all he ever recorded of it.
Anyway, I guess "inspiration" can be a two-edged sword and politicians ought to be careful how they wield it, lest it bite them.
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