US Government, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
This cartoon by Spanish artist José Ángel Rodríguez López depicts a meeting between the presidents of the U.S. and Cuba as well as the Pope. Titled “Francis, Obama, and Raúl”, this illustration was drawn in 2014 after President Obama met with President Castro and continued to normalize relations between the two countries. This meeting was facilitated by the Pope and Canada, who worked in the background to get the two leaders together.
The image’s basic meaning is just to depict caricatures of the three men and celebrate such a historic meeting. But for Cubans, the cartoon may also be a reference to an urban legend that claimed Fidel Castro joked that he did not believe relations between the U.S. and Cuba would improve until there was a black U.S. President and a Latin American Pope. Along that line of thinking, the image highlights three leaders that were significant milestones in their respective groups, with Obama being a black American as President, Raúl being a president of Cuba that was not his brother Fidel and that seemed more open to calming tensions, and Pope Francis who was the first Latin American Pope.
López, José Ángel Rodríguez. “Francis, Obama, and Raúl.” In The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, Alfredo Prieto, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, 651–651. Duke University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smxrz.135.