Yesterday and today (3/21-22) are sad days in American history. For decades, leftists and Hollywood liberals have made the pilgrimage to Cuba to pay homage to Fidel Castro and Raul Castro. It’s very chic, it’s very shi-shi, for leftists to celebrate vicious communist dictators.

Communist Havana has always been a magnet for the radical chic of the left, drawn like moths to the flame of this western outpost of totalitarian Communism. Back in the 1960s, the visitors included Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael, while Che Guevara himself received Jean-Paul Sartre. Today, the President of the United States joined them.

I have this to say to Mr. Obama:  You, the President of the United States, have now legitimized the corrupt and ignored the oppressed.  What’s American about that?  Nothing.

I have this to say to the people of Cuba who are witnessing this gaudy spectacle in Havana: America has not forgotten you. When I am president, I will never forget you.

I first became aware of Donald Trump when he chose to make cheating on his first wife front-page news.

It was the early '90s. Donald and Ivana Trump broke up over the course of months. Not that divorce is shocking, mind you; among the glitterati marriage seems more unusual. Nor is infidelity exactly novel.

But it requires a particular breed of lowlife to advertise the sexual superiority of one's mistress over the mother of one's children. That was Trump's style. He leaked stories to the New York tabloids about Ivana's breast implants -- they didn't feel right. Marla Maples, by contrast, suited him better.

She, proving her suitability for the man she was eager to steal from his family, told the papers that her encounters with the mogul were "the best sex I've ever had." It wasn't just Donald Trump's betrayal that caught my eye, nor just the tawdriness: It was the cruelty.

It is seldom that the fate of a nation can be traced to what happened on one particular day. But that may be what happens in the United States of America today, Tuesday, March 15, 2016.

That is because the front-runners in both political parties are not merely inadequate but appalling -- and the vote in today’s primaries in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina may be the last chance for the voters to unite behind someone else.

The trends that brought us to this crucial day go back for years. But whatever the paths that led to this crossroads, we are in fact at a crossroads and our future, and our children's futures, depend on whether we can come up with some presidential candidate better than either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

In other times and in other conditions, one bad president could not ruin a great nation. We survived Jimmy Carter and we may survive Barack Obama, but there is no guarantee that we can survive an unlimited amount of reckless decisions in a dangerous world.

Charismatic leaders like Trump who articulated the just grievances of the people have often risen to power on the basis of that talent alone. And those who put them in power have often paid a catastrophic price afterwards. That story was repeated in countries around the world in the 20th century.

Will that story be repeated in America in the 21st century? The vote today may give us a clue.

Donald Trump recently picked an interesting quote of Benito Mussolini’s to re-tweet on Twitter:

On one hand, I can understand the sentiment. I myself have often quoted Emiliano Zapata’s famous line “Better to die on your feet, than live on your knees” and it doesn’t necessarily mean I know much about Zapata (which I don’t), much less whether I would have agreed with him about much else.

Still, Trump’s use of “Ilduce2016” in his tweet hashtag caught my eye as somehow strange, almost a little too enthusiastic.  So I found myself wondering, if Trump finds this historical figure inspiring, perhaps we should study the other teachings of the “Duce” to see whether there are other areas where their philosophies are similar.