Laughing under Castro

Cuba is the birthplace of magical realism: there the truth often masquerades as a joke, and jokes often conceal the truths that cannot be spoken.
The joke began on January 1, 1959 and is now the world's longest running joke. It has transformed a nation that once had the third-highest GPA in the Western Hemisphere into a pauper state. It has endeavored to turn a people once proverbially happy and carefree into a grim pessimistic tribe of automatons where individuality and initiative are punis...