THERE’S AN OLD joke — maybe you’ve heard it — about a man who leaves his cat with a friend while he’s on vacation.
On the second day of his trip, he calls home to ask how the cat is doing. “Oh, your cat died yesterday,” the friend says.
Naturally, the man is miserable for the rest of his trip. When he finally comes home, he tells his friend “You know, that was the most insensitive thing I’ve ever heard. At least you could have eased me into the bad news.”
“What do you mean?” the friend asked.
“Well, you could have told me the cat was playing on the roof and wouldn’t come down. Then, a day or two later, you could have told me she had fallen and you’d had to take her to the vet. Then, a couple of days later, you could have told me she didn’t make it. That way I would have had time to steel myself.”
“Gee, I’m sorry,” the friend says.
“Well,” the man says, “there’s nothing to be done about it now. I’m going to go say hi to my sister. How’s she doing, anyway?”
A long pause follows.
“Well,” the friend says, “she’s on the roof.”
OK, we’ve all had a good chuckle. So why the joke?
It just seemed to fit. You see, Fidel Castro is on the roof.
The news has been going around for a while that Fidel Castro is sick. That gained a little more urgency over the weekend when the Associated Press reported that the Cuban dictator likely wouldn’t live through 2007. Given how slowly Communist nations release news, that may mean he’s already dead — remember all those Soviet leaders in the ’80s with “bad colds”?
Now, this is not a sympathy column. If I made a list of the 10 people least likely to be missed in this country, Castro would probably come in a bit behind Saddam Hussein and a few spots ahead of Geraldo Rivera. But it does mean we have to consider the two most dangerous words in this country’s history.
What next?
We’ve been able to put off that answer for a while. After a bungled invasion and a series of assassination attempts that bordered on the comic, U.S policy has basically been to pretend that Castro doesn’t exist. No trade, no diplomacy, not even any acknowledgment unless Russian missiles or Cuban orphans are involved.
Now, I’m not saying it’s necessarily been a bad policy. A harsher approach might have ended up turning Fidel into a hero or a martyr. This way, when Castro dies, it’s likely that Cuban communism (or “Castroism”) will die with him. But by definition, it’s an answer with a limited timeline.
What happens when we win the waiting game?
We’ve waited out opponents before. Against the Soviets, it ultimately helped lead to freedom for half a continent. Against the Chinese, it meant students bent on freedom were slaughtered in Tiannemen Square while we watched, unwilling to even cut trade ties. “Wait and see” can be an answer, even a good answer, but sooner or later something has to be done.
And “sooner” is about to become “now.”
Will we restore trade ties? Send aid? Send troops? Send a lot of speeches and little else? Any of these are possibilities; not all of them are good ones. But whatever we want to do, we need to be ready. If nothing else, Iraq has shown us what happens when you act with good intentions and no plan for the long term. Even waiting is better than that.
The cat’s on the roof. Eventually, someone’s going to admit it’s dead.
Washington needs to be ready for that. Otherwise, it could be faced with a real cat-astrophe.