Why Fidel Castro’s communism failed

has prised open the debate once again: What will be history’s verdict on Castro?

His revolutionary ascent to power in 1959 came at a time when the communist movement was meandering in the post-Joseph Stalin USSR and the ideological divergence between Mao Zedong’s China and Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union was widening by the day. Ironically, Castro’s death has come at another important historical juncture—as the world is entering 2017, the 100th year anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution which brought Vladimir Lenin to power in Russia. A ruling on Castro, in such a scenario, cannot be extricated from a verdict on communism itself.

The essence of what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels arrived at in the 19th century was the inevitability of future utopia in industrialized societies which have seen a long phase of capitalism. The utopia would be preceded by a class struggle culminating in a dictatorship of the proletariat. While the Soviet Union became the centre for the communist movement, a charming idea promising global equality quickly spread to faraway lands. Much of the romanticization with Cuba has to do with the fact that a tiny island nation was able to stand up to the “bully” US while being just a hop, skip and leap away from Miami in Florida.

The resistance to the US, however, came at a high cost for the Cubans themselves. There was no space for freedom of speech and political dissent in Castro’s oppressive rule. The island nation saw good progress in literacy and healthcare but many nations were able to achieve that without a brutal regime in place. The extent, and not the existence, of repression varied in different socialist countries. A generous view would be that the desire for equality trumped the cause of liberty. A more realistic view concludes that the ideology lent itself to dictatorial regimes that were simply interested in perpetuating themselves.

If the generous view is granted, Marxist political philosopher G.A. Cohen provided one of the best bulwarks for socialism without dismissing the libertarian concerns. Even market ideologues, according to Cohen, would prefer the equity of socialism in certain circumstances like, say, a camping trip. If market-based pricing becomes the