Saying Goodbye to the Comrade

Not sure if you've heard, but apparently Fidel Castro has resigned as president of Cuba. That's pretty big news. It's almost like when Pope John Paul II died, in the sense that he's been a world leader for longer than I've been alive. In a sense, up until 5 minutes ago, I have never known a world in which Fidel Castro was not president of Cuba. Kind of interesting when you think about it.

What's going to be even more interesting is what comes next. George W. Bush has been saying for quite a while that the United States won't have anything to do with Cuba until Fidel is either out of power or dead (mainly because they thought the two would happen simultaneously). So, what is going to happen? Are we finally going to be able to travel to Cuba without making a layover in Paraguay? ...I doubt it. I think the whole "Fidel is evil, wait for him to die" argument was because politicians are lazy and don't actually want to go through the work of opening our borders to Cuba.

Of course, ol' W's on his way out, so what he says doesn't really mean much anymore. I'm not sure what the current candidates think about the Cuba thing, and goddammit, I'm too lazy to find out. What I do know, though, is that Fidel's younger brother Raul (a man who looks like a chubbier, Latino version of my high school econ teacher, Mr. Logan) probably won't make it past one election. He just doesn't have the presence for it. I mean, the man is like Luigi to Fidel's Mario.

Now, I will make no comment on Fidel's policies, communism, or politics in general (one interesting note; not even THE_BOLSHEVIK is communist). What I will comment on, though, is that he was part of one of my earliest real photoshop attempts (back before I was even using Photoshop, but rather something called "PhotoDeluxe" [a program discontinued in 2002]). It was for a Spanish project where I had to write a journal about a vacation through various Spanish-speaking countries. Well, I decided to make one of these countries be Cuba, and since I included a picture with each journal (I forget if that was required), I decided to make this one be with "Nuestro Amigo Fidel."
Yes, that head on the left did belong to me, once upon a time.

So, Fidel, the former president of Cuba, so long, and we'll always have our photo-manipulation.