The surprising similarity of appearance in photographs between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro has made for a motherload of memes. These images circulated around the corners of the web for months before descending onto placards at anti-mandate protests across Canada.
Being the contrarian cartoonist that I am, it seemed right to contribute with some postponed Photoshop frolics of my own. The trouble is, the facts got in the way of the fun. I ended up, you know, researching the claim of Fidel-finangled fatherhood. So I had to attach a warning label to my image, like you’d find on any rushed-to-market product.
But wait - isn’t true that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau visited Cuba with his young wife Margaret in the seventies? It is indeed. But unless Pierre had the National Research Council build a time machine for the couple’s Caribbean adventure, the timeline for a cuckoo’s egg in the Canuck nest is seriously off. They first met with the Cuban leader on January 26, 1976, and Justin was born in 1971.
Not so fast, say the Internet sleuths. The couple previously honeymooned in the Carribbean in April of 1971, just eight months before the birth of Justin. Here is the top hit that appears to be the go-to-source for a purported tropical tryst.
Yeah, come on!
Pierre and Maggy were both rumoured to be on the sexually liberated side. Combine that with doppelganger shots of Margaret’s son and Fidel Castro, and the destination MUST have been Cuba. That appears to be the clickbait-worthy chain of a posteriori reasoning here.
This doesn’t prove it was impossible, of course. Digging a little deeper, I found the clipping this Medium article is built upon:
This report is from April 13, 1971, a Tuesday. The prime minister had left the day before for the “unidentified island” and was “due back in Ottawa Wednesday for the reconvening of parliament.” That would be early in the day. So 48 hours tops, with multiple flights factored in, for a romance between a Margaret Trudeau and Fidel Castro to go from zero to 60 with the husband in the picture. Again, not impossible in an absolute sense, but considering the Trudeaus had never met Castro before, and relations between Cuba and the Anglosphere remained chilly at the time, it seems uh, beyond unlikely. (At that point, the only reported contact between the Prime Minister’s office and Cuba involved an exchange of letters over the exile of FLQ terrorists during the 1971 “October Crisis.”)
The mystery island angle seems to me more like a kid’s peashooter than a smoking gun. And I say this as a caricaturist and satirist who so wanted our PM to be the illegitimate son of the Cuban autocrat. Damn.
Another problem with this Justin-is-Fidel’s-son meme is that Justin Trudeau has the same eyes as Pierre Trudeau, especially in pics from his late teens. In other words, he looks like dad.
And really, is the resemblance between Justin and Fidel really that close?
Oh my.
Oh dear. (Not just the same appearance, but the same inclination to exert authoritarian control over others!)
Curiously enough, there’s also the documented attraction between Pierre Trudeau’s wife and the Cuban rebel leader. In Margaret Trudeau’s memoirs, she reminisced about meeting Castro on the tarmac during the 1976 trip, with baby Michel along:
“I was immediately mesmerized by what I saw: a tall man in green army fatiques immaculately cut and pressed, with incredibly beautiful eyes and a wild, almost fanatical look, which made him physically very attractive."
With baby, nanny, and two government officials in tow, the threesome reportedly went off with Castro and his security detail to a tiny coral key, off Cuba’s southern shore.
The entourage arrived by helicopter in the late afternoon, and together Castro and Trudeau put on diving gear to hunt down the evening’s meal. Margaret later expressed disbelief at seeing her husband outfitted with a speargun: “Pierre was such a pacifist that he won’t kill anything, not even insects,” she wrote, whereas the Cuban leader had “no qualms about killing anything.”
That evening saw a multicourse fish dinner prepared from the day’s catch on open fires. Wine and conversation flowed. Margaret later recollected that “it was as well that Castro and I were not alone.”
She also recalled that Castro had this to say during the trip:
"You know my eyes are not very strong so every day to make them stronger I force myself to look at the sun. I find it very hard. But do you know what I find harder? That is to look into the blue of your eyes. Wait…do you smell something burning, Margaret? IT’S US!”
(Okay, I threw those last two sentences into the quote for effect.)
But even without my irresponsible editing, if those aren’t declamations from a pair on the cusp of a steaming hot Havana night, I don’t know what is. Not that anything that could have occurred in the course of this encounter would have spawned the already 5-year old Justin. Unless you prefer to believe Margaret was being coy, and the reported attraction dates back to and was acted upon during a quickie 1971 side trip to an unidentified island in the Caribbean… Cuba, of course.
For some, these following four converging vectors are enough to seal the deal that Maggie jumped Fidel’s revolutionary bones, leading to the birth of today’s blackface-friendly Prime Minstrel:
1. Testimony: Margaret’s own words.
2. Place: both her and her husband in an undisclosed island in the Caribbean.
3. Time: a narrow but not impossible window for the Caribbean conception of Justin, eight months before his birth.
4. Image: the photographic resemblance between the offspring with the suspected father.
I don’t think we have enough here to convict in a paternity court case. Or prosecute in an imaginary free press. Certainly not enough to convince me. That said, the resemblance remains uncanny. I can’t quite wrap my satire-seeking head around it. So in the interest in flattening the curve of my own cognitive dissonance and keeping up my conspiratorial cred with some Substack subscribers, I offer the following possibility:
The National Research Council - Ottawa’s answer to James Bond’s ‘Q Division’ - did indeed offer time travel tech to Pierre Trudeau. Sometime after returning from their touchy-feely meeting with Fidel in Havana in 1976, the couple climbed into a camper-sized Temporal Travois™, outfitted with a minibar, jacuzzi and water bed, and set the controls for Havana in April 1971. Why? For the semi-socialist prime minister to magnimously offer his randy, imploring wife to the Cuban leader at a date masked by their first outing to the Caribbean, that would also mess with a timeline involving the birth of any retrospectively prime ministerial progeny.
You may object, “couldn’t they have just brought birth control with them?”
Come on. Whaddya want, a smoking gun? Okay, here ya go….from Wikipedia:
Bwahaha, regardless of the potential genetic connection, the undeniable fact is the ideological connection. And Margaret was a certifiable nymphomaniac BITD. Anyway, how about an article on the dubious parentage of that fame-whore Prince Harry?
Whether he is Fidel's son or Pierre's - he simply doesn't have their smarts.