Fidel Castro on The Simpsons Calls Communism Mumbo Jumbo

From The Simpsons

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Run time: 0:14

Clip Description: A cartoon Castro, in private, dismisses the ideology his state is built on. Fourteen seconds, and entirely about the gap between official doctrine and the people administering it.

Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for the role of ideology in authoritarian regimes, and specifically for the argument that official ideology often functions as a coordination and loyalty device rather than as a set of beliefs anyone holds. It connects to personalist rule and to the question of what actually holds a single-party state together once belief has drained out of it.

Possible Uses in Classroom: Use this as a fourteen-second provocation at the start of a session on ideology, before students read anything that treats regime ideology as sincere. It works especially well immediately before a serious text, because it sets up the question the reading then complicates.

Discussion Questions

The joke works because Castro says aloud what the ideology is supposed to conceal. In the study of authoritarian legitimation, the standard claim is that a regime needs a story about why it is entitled to rule. What happens to a regime whose own leadership has visibly stopped believing the story, and can you name a real case where that was apparent well before the regime fell?
Cuba’s regime outlasted the Soviet Union it depended on, by more than three decades. Any explanation has to account for survival after the subsidy stopped. Set out the candidate explanations — external threat and the rally effect it produces, personalist loyalty, the security services, the emigration valve that exports the most discontented — and say which does the most work.
Comedy about authoritarian leaders is itself a comparative variable: it is abundant where the regime cannot reach the writers and scarce where it can. What does the existence of this scene tell you about where it was made, and what would you expect the equivalent joke told inside Cuba to look like?

Assignment

Freedom House and V-Dem both rate Cuba every year, using different instruments and occasionally reaching different conclusions about the direction of travel. Pull both series for the last twenty-five years and put them on one chart. In two pages, identify the years in which they diverge and work out what each index is picking up that the other is not — one weights elections and formal political rights heavily, the other spreads across several distinct components you can disaggregate and inspect individually. Then say which you would use in a paper about Cuba, and why. The hard part is resisting the conclusion that the index closer to your prior is the better instrument.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.