Fidel Castro; The Man in the Green Suit Turns

There’s been a silence amongst our election 08 candidates, one writ bold by mainstream media’s incessant pick-up game of candidates’ bickering… sometimes seeming like a replay of The Bickersons– an old time radio show that consisted mainly of a man and a woman relentlessly harping at each other …

I keep wondering, what will our candidates say/ do about Cuba; the gem of the southern waters a mere 90 miles offshore the USA… the Cubanos living there, us living here…. but apart, like blood relatives who’ve somehow grown estranged from one another, even though we live on the same block in the neighborhood.

Perhaps this sudden news from Cuba today, will prompt some presidential-like discussion by the candidates, for it is said today on the Cuban Government website, that the Castro we know, the El Fidel of old will now withdraw from further governance of Cuba.

Like the old man who, rather late, gives up the keys to his Grand Marquis because he has grown too osteoporotic to see over the steering wheel, can no longer hear what is coming or going, peripheral vision greatly reduced, quickness of movement, instinct to dodge and veer gone, who has with such faulty vision elevated some and exterminated others… El Fidel, once the leading figure of a country, at the end becomes a wooden figurehead, as on a ship

… static, fastened to the bow by historic report only, but no longer being map, rudder, engine or sail.

It is over. We are witnessing the beginning of the end of an era of harm and harrowing, of division amongst the people in Cuba, ‘the resisters’… as well as those who say they are well pleased with Cuba’s policies. A different wind has begun to blow.

Cubanos… many love Fidel it is said. Cubano-Americanos, especially those who fled to the United States during the 1960s, and those who try to ride any manner of RubeGoldberg machines across the water to the USA… they have no love lost for Fidel. And that’s putting it mildly. The Elian Gonzalez’ debacle was as much a fight about Cuba-Cursed/Bad vs. USA-Blessed/ Good as any other heartrending fracas between the two countries… of which, in addition to Bay of Pigs, there have been several since the 16th century.

Yet, many of us who are artists, musicians, and authors have been allowed to go to Cuba as ‘foreign advisers’ over these many decades, to teach at university there, to meet the people in the streets and backlands, those who never speak to reporters… people who are filled with such jazzy passion, filled with nothing gray, most everything vibrant… including spirit and love, as well as detestation and valor… These are the Cubanos who have kept alive a hidden culture that is still terra incognita to most of the rest of the world.

And for years and years, foreign importers of cigars and rum, and foreign builders of Miami Beach model gaud of hotels have salivated over what would happen if only, if only Castro would die, if only the US re-normalized relations with Cuba, if only ‘virgin democracy’ was brought to Cuba to chase off that whore, Communism.

Yes, many ‘investors’ are lined up for years now, fanning their decks of dollars, jockeying to pillage the pristine and often poor Cuba. Again.

But now, the one who covered Cuba over as a kind of living museum of a time past, a place of beauty and dishonor, of poverty and excesses amongst the military… that one now stands away from the wheel. Fidel stands away.

And, Cuba’s ship of state, that is more like a galleon than a bullet boat, goes on. Heavy, slow, old. Still vibrant, even though carrying a dungeon below decks… a bloody moving prison that most of the mainstream media never view nor report on with regularity. But, the old ship goes on, because it is manned and womaned by the people… by just ordinary Cubañeros who are flower sellers and bicycle riders and 55 Chevy pickup truck mecanicos, and nurses and parteras, midwives, and sobadoras, masseuses, and rollers and pressers and road layers and un-earthers of wild songs… and dissidents.

There is a saying in our family: that when the dominant parent dies, the entire gravity of the family tilts and shifts suddenly …the world of the family hesitates on its axis. It can begin to spin… crazily, or in opposing direction, or blow apart creating several worlds where once there was only one.

As per Cuba… as the old man in the green suit turns, we shall soon see.

And perhaps the Bickersons of record, the 08 candidates, can stop their ankle biting one another long enough, to be alert instead of so natteringly argumentative…

to give us their serious thoughts on an immanent, once-in-a-lifetime change in a strategic and critical relationship between the USA and Cuba;

one that could bring a historic and demonstratively deep-hearted people to our gate a mere 90 miles away, a nation of Cubanos who have suffered and can be made more whole, rather than a nation imagined for 50 years plus, as renegade, as not being made of people with hearts and souls, but rather de-humanized, un-souled and thought of only as ‘the enemy.’

CODA

Granma, (literally ‘grandmother,’) the daily [6 days a week] Cuban newspaper is a most interesting periodical, you might like to take a look at… here. It covers Cuban interests, Latin countries and often contains daily messages/ memoir from Fidel. It ought be noted that in 2006, Castro turned control of Cuba over to his brother Raúl, but many Cubanos anticipated that Fidel would return to rule again, as Raúl … head of other affairs… has consistently said he does not wish to govern Cuba as its leader.

Cartoon by Christo Komarnitski, Bulgaria via Cagle Cartoons