“The United States will come talk to us when it has a black president and the world has a Latin American pope,” Fidel Castro supposedly told the world in 1973, a joke or prophecy that predicted the rise of Barack Obama, Pope Francis and the work to bring the US and Cuba together again.
Or so the internet would have you believe, with memes, portraying the elder Castro brother as a cigar-chomping Nostradamus, spreading online ahead of the pontiff’s historic trip this month through both Havana and Washington.
But facts – or the absence of them – should give pause to those ready to believe that the octogenarian revolutionary either sarcastically stumbled into divination or really knew that a priest named Jorge Bergoglio would become pope or that Florida and Ohio would vote Democrat in 2008 and 2012.
Several Spanish-language outlets, at least one French one, and untold retweeters have reported or re-reported the quote, citing an anecdote writer Pedro Jorge Solans told in the Argentinian paper El Diario. Reporting from Cuba in March, Solans relays a colorful story of how his Havana taxi driver, Eduardo de la Torre, “recalled the episode as if he were giving a lecture of eternity”.
De la Torre was a student at the time, according to Solans, and remembered a press conference Castro gave in 1973 where “Bryan Davis, a journalist from an English agency” asked Castro when he thought Cuba and the US would re-establish relations.
Castro responded, according to the two narrators, with his prophetic quip.
“Mind you, boy, nobody believed the commandante,” de la Torre told Solans, before comparing Castro favorably to Jesus Christ because he had “resurrected” so many times. “How many times have the international press killed him off, and how many times has he come back to life?”
But Solans does not attempt to fit his vignette of a quirky Havanan cab driver with any historical record, and none appears to exist to corroborate his claim. Rafael Rojas, author of A Brief History of the Cuban Revolution, told Mexico’s El Universal: “I don’t believe Fidel Castro ever said these ‘prophetic’ words.”
Rojas suggested that the saying, whether Castro’s or someone else’s, was invented for what it sounds like: an elaborate joke. “In Cuba there’s a popular saying for thinking up something impossible. They say: ‘It’ll happen when a frog grows hair.’”
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Solans or his cabbie did not invent the line themselves – it predates his article at least by a few months. Shortly after the US and Cuba announced their rapprochement in December 2014, the Havana Times mentioned the line is “a habitual joke these days on the island, put in the mouth of a fictional Fidel Castro in the 1960s, and that sums up very well the changes that have taken place in the world since then.”
Around the same time, Mexican columnist Ortiz Tejeda included the line in an op-ed, as part of a joke – this one featuring Che Guevara instead of a patsy journalist – that he heard from another journalist. “Fidel, when are we going to have diplomatic relations with the Yankees again,” Che tosses Fidel.
“The day when the US president is black and the pope an Argentinian like you,” Fidel lobs back.
Others have called the story “an urban legend” dated to 1977, the same year Castro told Barbara Walters in an interview that he thought the US and Cuba could restore relations between 1980 and 1984, during Jimmy Carter’s second term in office.
The interview likely should have put to rest all doubt about Castro’s skills of prediction: in 1980 Ronald Reagan knocked Carter out of office in the biggest electoral defeat since the Great Depression.
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