![]() ![]() ![]() He’ll be remembered as much if not more as a tragic caudillo, a reminder that revolutionaries are usually a lot less romantic when they come down from the sierras and govern. At the outset of his insurgency in 1953, Fidel insisted, “History will absolve me!” On balance it won’t. To millions of underdogs in the developing and developed worlds alike, Fidel-like his sidekick Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whose early battlefield death and rock-star portrait did so much to promote the rebel brand that Castro commanded-was a tropical avenger who stood up to superpower in the name of social justice.īut most of those admirers didn’t have to live under his rule. He seared that picture into our own imaginations with his cigars, fatigues and beard, the hours-long speeches slinging Davidic defiance at his imperialista Goliath, the U.S. For the moment, the world will wax nostalgic about the younger, 20th-century Fidel-the torrid icon who did perhaps more than any figure in human history to define The Revolutionary. But even after, Fidel and his regime lingered, faded yet sun-baked into Cubans’ lives like the pastel colors on an old Havana mansion.įidel Castro died at age 90, his brother, President Raul Castro, announced on state television Friday night. ![]() Intestinal surgery forced him in 2006, at age 79, to hand Cuba’s presidency to his younger brother Raúl Castro, a transfer of power that became official in 2008. Presidents, one of whom Castro even took to the brink of nuclear war in 1962-stifled any urge Cubans may have had to tear down their own Berlin Wall during his 49-year-long dictatorship. His paternal charisma and paranoid security apparatus-an alloy that couldn’t be broken by 10 U.S. We’d seen the harrowing economic hardships crippling the island during that post-Soviet “special period.” Communism hadn’t survived in Cuba. “Instead of asking me why communism failed in Russia,” Castro shouted, “why don’t you ask me why it hasn’t failed in Cuba?” The answer was simple: because communism had failed in Cuba. We pressed him repeatedly about the fall of communism until, chafing in his olive fatigues and the Yucatán humidity, he stopped stroking his beard and pounded his fist. Shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Fidel Castro met with a group of journalists on a visit to Mexico. Castro will be remembered as much if not more as a tragic caudillo SHARE Jung/ullstein bild-Getty Images Fidel Castro, circa 1960. ![]()
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