No one lives forever, not even the Miami folks dancing to news of Fidel Castro’s heading for the shade. The Cuban president came young to the stage and has stuck around for the Cold War acts and the peacetime curtain calls.
When Castro came down out of the Sierra Maestra Mountains in 1959, Jack Parr was the host of The Tonight Show. Oh, yeah, and a guy named Dwight Eisenhower was finishing his eight years in the White House. The Tonight Show has had two additional hosts since the bearded Marxist chased Fulgencio Batista out of power. The White House, during the same period, has been home to nine other U.S. presidents.
Unlike with presidents, Tonight Show hosts aren’t encumbered by term limits. The enigmatic Paar served only five years, but his successor, Johnny Carson, did almost 30 years, and Jay Leno, the car collector, is cruising in his 15th year. Both TV comedians and chief executives have made a good living off Castro over the years.
In the early years, the silhouetted Cuban cigar, beard and fatigue cap became as recognizable an international symbol as Coca-Cola. Nightly, the island leader was caricatured on the Paar show. The hazing continued with Carson, and Leno has picked up the pace.
“Today marks the 53rd anniversary of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba,” Leno quipped last week. “Anybody know what Cuba’s main export is? Cubans.”
As comedians cabbage Castro, U.S. presidents make hay off the dictator 90 miles from Florida in the Caribbean. The anti-Castro sentiment is so strong in that state that national politicians and even presidents line up to troll for votes and money in the streets of Little Havana, Miami. Some expatriates are eager to get the United States involved in a post-Castro Cuba that will restore the good life lived by the elite under Batista.
These days, on the surface at least, the politicians seem poised to assist only in a peaceful transition. This was not always the case.
After the failure of the U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, agents of John F. Kennedy’s administration reportedly tried to have Castro humiliated – and/or even murdered. Various accounts percolated through congressional hearings involving shadowy elements of the Mafia and CIA operatives. Such lethal accounts supposedly involved bombs, poison and gunshot.
One nonlethal scheme reportedly had CIA operatives attempting to spike Castro’s shoes with thallium salts. The depilatory powers of the thallium were intended to deprive the Cuban premier not only of his life but rather of his macho image – the hair of his robust beard and eyebrows. Lab experiments have shown that thallium sulfate will affect follicles in such a way as to stop hair growth in rats as young as 4 days old. With the help of the KGB, it’s been said, Castro somehow managed to evade these snares and also has escaped attempts on his life by land and by sea.
Sometimes, it appears, the operatives and planners who dreamed up the schemes were better suited as comedic guests on the Tonight Show.
The trouble with dictators is not that they don’t do the masses some good during their revolutionary days. It is rather that they don’t know how to remove their war paint – or when to leave the stage. We see this with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, a true national hero who has led his country since 1980, and we perhaps are witnessing it with Castro.
In communist Castro’s rise to power, the fiery lawyer booted out a thieving despot along with the parasitic henchmen feeding off the drug dens and gambling houses run from the United States by the Cosa Nostra. Unfortunately, the young revolutionary also drove off far too many solid citizens needed to rebuild Cuba under an economic system other than the socialist one he installed, a system that failed so miserably in the Soviet Union.
What, indeed, will happen to Cuba after Castro?
