The death of Fidel Castro makes a good topic for class discussion. Was he a brutal dictator, which is how Donald Trump described him, or a revolutionary hero? It's also an opportunity to talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Here are a couple of cartoons I used with my EM Normandie students.
The first one by Ben Jennings from The Guardian refers to the numerous (failed) CIA assassination attempts on Fidel Castro (note the American flag on the arrow). Apparently one plot involved an exploding cigar, which you can see in the cartoon.
The second cartoon by Bob Moran from The Telegraph shows Castro's coffin in the back of a hearse (funeral car). However, the car is in a pitiful state. It's got a broken windscreen, and the tail light and rear bumper are hanging off. The wheels of the car are also missing, and it's propped up on concrete blocks. I take this to be a metaphor for the Cuban economy during the Castro era — it didn't go anywhere. The irony is that the car is American! There could also be a reference to the idiom 'the wheels come off', which is used for saying that things start to fail or go wrong, especially after a period of success. • They were leading 3–1 at half-time, but then the wheels came off and they ended up losing the game.
ALSO SEE
• Fidel Castro Death (cartoon collection from Cagle.com)
