Tuesday, May 12

The helicopters arrived first, their thrumming beat cutting through the pre-dawn stillness of a small Iowa town. At 10 a.m., buses rolled in, white with dark blue stripes. Armed agents in bulletproof vests, marked ICE, moved with a choreographed certainty. They surrounded Agriprocessors, the kosher meatpacking plant that was Postville’s largest employer. Workers in hairnets and smocks, many from Guatemala and Mexico, looked up from the slaughter lines and processing belts. The smell of blood and bleach hung in the air, now mixed with the scent of sudden fear.

Commands were shouted in English and broken Spanish. People were herded into the plant’s parking lot, then onto the buses. Some wept. Others stared ahead, numb. They were taken to the nearby National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo, a site temporarily converted into a makeshift courtroom and detention center. For days, the grounds normally host to 4-H livestock shows became a venue for mass, expedited judicial proceedings. Defendants, still in their work clothes, listened through headphones to translated charges of aggravated identity theft. Most pled guilty, hoping for swift deportation. The community fractured. Stores on Postville’s main street emptied; children did not come to school. The sound of the plant, usually a constant industrial hum, grew quiet. It was a military-style operation applied to a civilian workforce, a tactic of war deployed on a landscape of feedlots and cornfields.

The image was small, printed in the state-run children’s magazine *Iran*. It showed a cockroach. A speech bubble emerged from the insect, containing phonetic gibberish meant to mimic the Azeri Turkish language. The publication date was May 12, 2006. The intent, the editors would later claim, was humor. The interpretation was annihilation.

Ethnic Azeris, comprising nearly a quarter of Iran’s population, saw not a joke but a state-sanctioned slur. Their language, their identity, reduced to pestilence. Protests began in Tabriz, the cultural heart of Iranian Azerbaijan. They spread with a violence that was both spontaneous and deeply historical. Banks and government buildings were set alight. Tires burned in the streets, sending acrid black smoke into the air. Police stations were attacked. The state response was swift and blunt. Security forces used batons, tear gas, and live ammunition. Official reports acknowledged four deaths. Azerbaijani activists cited dozens.

The government shut down the magazine, arrested its editor, and expressed formal regret. But the gesture could not reclaim the image or its meaning. The cartoon acted as a key, unlocking decades of pent-up frustration over cultural suppression—bans on Azeri-language education, the mocking of accents in media, political marginalization. It was a cultural flashpoint that revealed a political fissure. The riots subsided in days. The residue of the insult did not. It demonstrated that within a nation often presented as a monolith of Persian identity, other selves simmer, waiting for a spark, however crudely drawn.

The airfield at José Martí International Airport holds a certain heat, a thick Caribbean stillness. On May 12, 2002, that stillness was broken by the arrival of a jet from the north. From it descended not a sitting president, but a former one: James Earl Carter Jr., a man from Plains, Georgia, now walking onto Cuban tarmac. The act was simple. Its dimensions were vast. For forty-three years, no American president, current or former, had set foot on the island while it was under the rule of Fidel Castro. The embargo was a wall, and travel was a brick in it.

Carter came as a private citizen, yet he carried the ghost of the office. He toured a biotechnology center, spoke at the University of Havana, laid a wreath at the memorial for José Martí. His speech, broadcast uncensored on state television, was a patient articulation of dissent and common ground. He criticized the U.S. embargo and Cuba’s human rights record in the same measured tone. He asked to see political prisoners; the request was denied. He met with Castro for hours, two old men in guayabera shirts navigating a labyrinth of history and ideology.

The visit did not change policy. It changed atmosphere. It created a photograph: an American president and the Cuban *Comandante*, side by side, not as antagonists in that moment, but as men in conversation. It was a crack, a proof of concept. It showed that the journey was physically short—less than an hour’s flight from Florida—and politically infinite. The wall remained. But for five days, someone had stepped through a door.

What does faith look like when it curdles into fanaticism? Sometimes, it wears a black suit and carries a bayonet. On May 12, 1982, Pope John Paul II was in Fátima, Portugal, giving thanks for surviving an assassin’s bullet the year prior. The procession was solemn, a river of devotion. Juan María Fernández y Krohn, a Spanish traditionalist ordained in the schismatic Archbishop Lefebvre’s sect, waited. He believed the Pope was an agent of Moscow and a destroyer of the true Church through the Second Vatican Council. In his twisted logic, the Pope was not merely wrong; he was the Antichrist. Murder would be a sacrament.

As the Pope passed, Krohn broke from the crowd. He wielded a bayonet, a weapon of battlefield thrusts, not theological dispute. The act was absurd, pathetic, and deadly serious. Security guards, perhaps more accustomed to managing enthusiastic crowds than armed clerics, wrestled him to the ground before the blade found its mark. The Pope continued praying, either unaware or profoundly disciplined. Krohn was subdued, screaming that the Pope must be killed.

The event is a footnote, overshadowed by the earlier, nearly successful shooting in St. Peter’s Square. But it holds a darker, stranger question. The first assassin, Mehmet Ali Ağca, was a geopolitical tool, a hired gun. Krohn was a product of the very institution the Pope led—a man so consumed by a purified idea of his faith that its supreme shepherd became its ultimate enemy. His weapon was not a hidden pistol, but a symbol of honorable combat, perverted. It was faith turned in on itself, a howl of absolutism against a pope preaching mercy. The attack failed. The contradiction it embodied did not.