A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.
Fidel Castro 1926-2016
Fidel Castro, who towered over his Caribbean island for nearly five decades, a shaggybearded figure in combat fatigues whose long shadow spread across Latin America and the world, is dead at age 90.
With a shaking voice, his younger brother, Raul Castro, announced on state television that his brother died at 10.29pm on Friday night.
Millions cheered Fidel Castro on the day he entered Havana. Millions more fled the communist dictator’s repressive police state, leaving behind their possessions, their families, the island they loved and often their very lives. It’s part of the paradox of Castro that many people belonged to both groups.
He was a spellbinding orator who was also a man of action. His tall and powerful build was matched by an outsized ego, boundless energy and extraordinary luck that carried him to victory as a guerrilla leader in 1959 against nearly impossible odds, then helped him survive countless plots.
He ended American domination of the island’s economy, swept away the old political system and the traditional army, nationalised land holdings and brought reforms in education and health care.
He also was a ruthless dictator, the Maximum Leader who reneged on his promise of free elections, executed thousands of opponents, imprisoned tens of thousands, installed a Communist regime and made his island a pawn in the Cold War. His alliance with the Soviet Union brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was neither Castro’s first nor last confrontation with the United States, though it was certainly the most epic. Faced with hostility from the United States, which sponsored an invasion by Cuban exiles in 1961 and relentlessly (if sometimes comically) plotted his assassination, Castro turned the island into a fortress.
But the guns pointed inward, too. He created a repressive state that rigidly controlled the arts, the press, the airwaves. An efficient secret police force was aided by neighbourhood spies and pro-government mobs that attacked those who dared to call for democratic change. Cultural enemies were vulnerable, too; well into the 1970s, Castro was imprisoning gays and longhaired young people in work camps.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba’s crippled economy imploded, bringing new hardships to a population that already had suffered decades under his mismanagement.
Hundreds of thousands fled the society Castro created but few moments in Cuban history rival the euphoria of January 8, 1959, when the black-bearded comandante rode a tank into Havana with his swaggering rebel fighters, making their way through streets filled with cheering throngs. President Fulgencio Batista had fled a week earlier.
For millions of Cubans, hope turned to bitter feelings of betrayal as Castro quickly pushed aside former comrades in arms, jailed those who protested, ridiculed the idea of elections and converted Cuba to a one-party Communist state and Soviet satellite. He then proclaimed that he had been a Marxist-Leninist all along.
If his open embrace of communism made him a pariah not only to Washington but to many of his own countrymen, Castro nonetheless became an icon to young leftists around the world. Hundreds of thousands would give their lives in fruitless guerrilla movements he inspired in places like El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Namibia, Angola and Zaire.