A Trickster/Global Synchro from Mind-Blowing Synchronicities

On Friday evening, November 25, 2016, Fidel Castro passed away at the age of 90. He ruled Cuba for 47 years, a despot who jailed and killed those who spoke out against him and kept this island nation isolated from the rest of the world. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled the island in 1959 and again during the Mariel boatlift in the early 1980s.

The U.S. embargo against Cuba has been in place since 1962 and crippled the Cuban economy. In spite of that, Cuba has free medical care and free education through college and beyond. Food is often scarce, though, and according to Cuban friends who still have family on the island, life is hard in ways that most Americans can’t even imagine.

Relations between the two countries began to thaw in December 2014, thanks in large part to the facilitation of Pope Francis and the Canadian government. In March 2016, President Obama became the first U.S. president to visit Cuba since 1928.

With the death of a controversial figure like Castro, we started looking for the global synchronicities. One happened on November 28, 2016. As Cuba entered its first day of nine of the mourning period for Castro and the day of his funeral, American Airlines left Miami on its first commercial flight to Cuba in 55 years. It touched down in Havana at 8:25 a.m., a preliminary step in the thawing of relations between the two countries.

After that, other American airlines prepared for commercial travel from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Orlando: Delta, Jet Blue, and Spirit Airlines, were among them. In many ways, this is a trickster synchro with a global twist: the Cuban dictator dies and the day of his funeral, the first commercial flight from the U.S. landed. One door shut, another opened.

But the open door didn’t last long. Trump’s stance on the thawing in U.S. Cuba relations was as one news site put it, “straight out of 1962.”

In February 2017, before Trump had the opportunity to ban American travel to the island again, Rob, Megan and I boarded a Jet Blue flight from Fort Lauderdale to Havana. There was something enormously exhilarating about it. You could feel it among the passengers, a kind of undercurrent of excitement and curiosity.

The plane landed 30 minutes later and the captain announced in both English and Spanish, “Welcome to Cuba.”

Applause and cheers erupted.

Castro probably turned in his grave.