So the Cuban government released a video on Monday of the ailing Fidel Castro having a meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Predictably, as I was paying for some groceries on Wednesday, the cashier looked at my name on the check and said, “I see your uncle Fidel is still hanging in there and causing trouble.”
For those of you who also share a surname with a communist dictator, the episode I describe is likely to be very familiar. For those of you who don’t, let me illuminate.
I was born in 1964, just a few years after Castro overthrew Batista and the U.S. was defeated in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Thus through a quirky combination of parentage, timing and geopolitics, my last name has always resonated in a very specific way with a fairly large swath of the population. Their visceral response has been surprisingly consistent over the past four decades: about two parts nonsense and one part confusion with just the tiniest dash of hostility. And this of course has caused me to react to my own name in a very specific way that I’m sure my parents never intended.
I can’t remember ever not hearing Uncle Fidel jokes, which of course means I was hearing them before I knew who Fidel Castro was. I was not a mensa tot. I was watching Sesame Street in kindergarten, not reading the op-ed page of The New York Times. And so I admit I wasn’t as fully informed as I might have been about the cold war buildup and the maneuverings between the U.S., Cuba and the Soviet Union that were going on around that time.
So I asked my father why I had never met my Uncle Fidel. My Puerto Rican father, who was more than a little irritated by the political and cultural ignorance of the joke, and that the butt of the joke was his six-year-old. “Tell them you’re PUERTO RICAN, not Cuban,” he told me. Unfortunately, declaring that I was PUERTO RICAN caused a second wave of confusion and nonsense. My father and his family had black hair, brown skin and riveting blue-green eyes. And, well, you know what I look like. As they say on Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the others.
But back to Uncle Fidel. I have heard that joke approximately 14 billion times. At this point I’m so bored with it I can’t even muster a polite smile. What I do still find interesting is that with almost 100% consistency over the decades, the people who say it 1) find it to be a huge yuk and 2) assume they were the first to think of it. THEY laugh. Hysterically.
What also has been consistent is that many while people react negatively to the name, they are as fuzzy on the political details as I was in kindergarten. Case in point: People have been giving me newspaper headlines about Fidel Castro for years, often rearranging the words to make them funnier. When I was in college, Castro and the U.S. were slap-fighting over one thing or another and there was a spate of headlines, which my roommates taped to the door of my dorm room. The doctored headlines were very clever and so I left them up. Then I began to notice that some people in my building were becoming a bit standoffish, averting their gaze in the elevator and walking past me in the hallway without smiling. Something was going on; I just couldn’t think of what it could be. Until a friend of mine suggested I take down the headlines. “The new freshmen think you’re a communist and they’re scared of you," she said.
And I did I mention a scootch of hostility, yes? A few years ago I received a letter at work from an angry customer. His problems with one of the company’s services had in his opinion become intractable and his interactions with our customer care staff unbearable. He ranted and raved about our stupid company, our stupid services and our stupid employees. At the end of the letter, he had signed his name and then added: “P.S. Nice job in Cuba, asshole.”
Much more recently, I was on the phone trying to confirm an order I had placed with a company. I had stated my name to the customer care person at least four times without getting her to accurately repeat it and knew it was time to resort to the dreaded but surefire way to achieve clarity:
Me: Castro
She: Casper?
Me: No, Castro
She: Castor?
Me: CASTRO! C-A-S-T-R-O!
She: Craspo?
Me: (Sighing) No. Castro...Like Fidel
She: Oh, Castro!...Oh...Oh my. It must be hard having such a...a...shameful last name.
And so on. In so many variations. And whenever he is in the news it only escalates. The cumulative effect is that I have always kept tabs on Uncle Fidel. Which of course is ridiculous since my connection to him is really no different from yours. And yet after a lifetime of constantly being reminded of him, I can’t help it. I see his name in the newspaper, I read the article. I see him on TV, I watch. And now that he’s old and sick and no longer in control, with so many people watching, waiting and in many cases hoping, I find myself curious. I’ve spent a lifetime with this guy. When he’s finally gone, how will people react to my -- our -- name? And will there finally come a time where they don’t react at all?
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