WWTBAM Bored

jaybee wrote:Interesting to note:

1. Most people who die and get mentioned on this board are titled with "RIP"
2. Some less popular dead folks get "RIH"
3. Castro gets "is dead". And no comments at all despite this post being here for over a day.

Almost like a non-reformed Ebenezer Scrooge had died. I guess that speaks for his legacy.

Ralph De La Cruz wrote: I never expected to cry when Fidel Castro died.

Brought over from Cuba on a small boat when I was only four, I was too far removed. Too American. Besides, I’ve spent an adult lifetime resolved that the demon would not infect my soul. I would not allow him to make me angry. Wouldn’t let him affect my politics. Wouldn’t drink to his demise. Wouldn’t shed a tear upon his death.

Fuck Fidel.

But I cried when my millennial daughter walked into the living room and told me, “Hey, Fidel Castro died.” The daughter of a former journalist, she offered her source: “The BBC is reporting it.”

I did what any good American would do: turned on the cable news, grabbed the computer, and sent a text to my sisters. But then, inexplicably, tears came.

They weren’t for a despot, but rather, “Los Viejos.” My parents, Fidel’s peers.

Fidel ripped their rights away, killed or incarcerated tens of thousands in order to intimidate the population into compliance with his edicts. Potential rivals were killed. Property was confiscated. Children were forced to work cane fields. In Fidel’s Cuba, you work at whatever the state says you need to do.

Nobody voted or was asked about any of this. Quite the contrary. If you offered a critical view of any edict or policy – or worse, Fidel – you were beaten or had your home taken away or were imprisoned.

Faced with a future under those circumstances, my parents sent their two daughters, who were able to get permission to leave because they were girls and apparently dispensable, to a Catholic convent in Corpus Christi.

Imagine, those of you who are parents, the kind of hell they must have lived to convince them to put their daughters on a plane, uncertain they’d ever see them again.

Less than a year later, hidden under tarps in the hold of a wooden 20-foot fishing boat, my parents and I left our homeland in hopes of reuniting our family.

I’ve always believed that those of us who left should have thanked Fidel, because he gave us a pass into this amazing country. But then, I was 4 when we left.

Fidel’s peers, Los Viejos, had careers and homes. They were NOT, as some here in the United States like to postulate, simply the elite of the island. That may have applied to those who left in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. But as the diaspora grew, it swept out the Cuban middle class.

And they never got over it.

My mother was unable to ever see Fidel’s face on TV without going into hysterics. My father would go to the University of Texas whenever he saw anybody speaking on the virtues of Fidel's Cuba, so he could offer his perspective on Cuban life under Fidel.

On the wall in the living room of the house in which I was raised hung a small tattered, cloth Cuban flag with a single word on it.

“Volveremos.” We will return.

I don’t know whatever happened to that flag. It wasn’t on the wall when they died in the Rio Grande Valley.

So many people were hoping to outlast Fidel, who died at age 90. And most didn’t.

No. The tears weren't for the despot who didn’t so much die as fade away. They were for Los Viejos, the pain they – we – lived, and the hate spawned by that pain. As I expressed in a text to my sisters Friday night: “Such a weight of hate for so long. Lifted.”

I cried, not so much in celebration, but in relief.

Shortly after I sent that text, one of my sisters and her daughter fulfilled a commitment she had made to my parents. She opened a bottle of champagne they had bought, “to be opened upon Fidel’s death.” It was 25 years old.

I heard it was sweet.

I’m just glad we’re finally rid of it.

SportsFan68 wrote:

jaybee wrote:Interesting to note:

1. Most people who die and get mentioned on this board are titled with "RIP"
2. Some less popular dead folks get "RIH"
3. Castro gets "is dead". And no comments at all despite this post being here for over a day.

Almost like a non-reformed Ebenezer Scrooge had died. I guess that speaks for his legacy.

He's been out of the public eye for a long time following his resignation in 2008, and it looks like he was near forgotten. I guess that's his legacy here in the U.S., I dunno about Cuba.

Bob78164 wrote:It's been days. Is he still dead? --Bob