This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Fidel Castro died in his own bed, at the ripe old age of 90, still beloved of a great many of his countrymen.
He ran Cuba with an iron fist for more than half a century, astonishingly immune to both the power manipulated — sometimes clownishly — by the United States and the expectation that his own people, so many of them victims of cruel repression and murder, would rise up and throw him out.
How'd he do that?
Ask Donald Trump. Or maybe don't, lest he get any ideas about how to trick his way into power, not just for four years, but for a lifetime.
Castro was very much like another 20th century despot, one who not only maintained the love of his people but also stood up to decades of U.S. hostility. In fact, like Castro, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh kept the loyalty of his people largely because he stood up to decades of American hatred.
Both styled themselves as communists, and, though neither ran a regime that Karl Marx would have approved of, it served their purpose in so many important ways.
Not because of the worker's paradise they promised, and failed to deliver, but because both enticed the sometimes rival superpowers of the pseudo-socialist world, China and the USSR, into being their sugar daddies.
Even more important, adopting the communist label goaded the United States into trying to bring them down. Which made both Castro and Ho more powerful by providing them with an external bogeyman that they, and only they, could fight off.
What Comrade Fidel and Uncle Ho had in common was much more basic, and much more effective, than any obtuse economic theory or dusty political philosophy.
They were nationalists. They fought to free their country from the political or economic control of outsiders. That gained for each of them very deep and very wide loyalty among their countrymen.
So much so that, later, when they turned out to be cruel dictators, they avoided any successful internal revolts because they had made themselves the personification of their newly freed homelands. Long after the new, and the freedom, had completely worn off.
It worked for Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin. It worked to convince hundreds of thousands of poor dirt farmers in the Confederacy to fight to the death to protect their "peculiar institution," a slave economy that devalued their own labor, and in which a tiny fraction of landed gentry actually owned slaves.
Because, as Franklin D. Roosevelt and other political realists are reputed to have said about all manner of deplorable characters, "They may be sons of bitches, but they are our sons of bitches."
Which brings us back to Trump.
He ran for office claiming not only that he would protect us from terrorists and foreigners and home-grown criminals who don't look like you, but claiming to be the only person who could. He said he'd jail his main political opponent.
Even after winning the election, Trump spouts total lies about millions of illegally cast votes. He doesn't say cast by whom, but the only reasonable inference is that he means sneaky citizens of other nations here illegally. It serves to distract his supporters from seeing that he is filling his Cabinet with the very Wall Street vultures who wrecked the economy eight years ago.
At least Castro knew to dress the part of a permanent revolutionary, and not show off his swanky dinners and gold-plated living room.
Trump mimics Castro by threatening to jail, or expel, people who burn flags. He says that anything critical you may hear about him is a lie perpetrated by the evil media.
He drags former critic Mitt Romney before him in a ugly display of groveling.
Aside from the conspicuous absence of firing squads, it's all out of the Castro playbook. Us against them. And if you don't want to be them, you have to follow him, because, warts and all, he's us.
The part that makes this all dystopian allegory and not actual fate is the fact that we have traditions and institutions that should guard against any president-for-life ambitions Trump may have. And the fact that he probably doesn't have a president-for-life attention span.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, is also developing attention-span issues. Maybe because his brain is full of memories of political events from 1968.