So many Cubans wanted to leave the country that in Castro, in a typical fit of pique at the U. The brothers kept the state afloat by allowing foreign investment in hotels and resorts; but that created what critics called tourism apartheid, a Cuba where foreigners ate lobster at swank restaurants but Cubans were lucky to eat rationed meat once a week.
The crisis, in fact, seemed to harden his iron fist, forcing a world that once hailed his fierce anti-imperialist legacy to focus instead on his dismal human-rights record. In he ordered fighter jets to shoot down two, unarmed small planes piloted by Miami exiles for venturing into Cuban air space.
Four exiles were killed. Castro bore little of that attachment to his own family, despite siring nine children. Nor did he have much of a private life, often moving from house to house in Havana out of fear for his security.
His wife Mirta divorced him in ; they had a son, Fidel, who has served as a Cuban government official. Fidel had five other sons with a second wife, Dalia Soto; another son and two daughters from three affairs. Like those famous Cohiba smokes, Castro in his last years was little more than a symbol of a bygone era. Fidel tried to remain relevant by penning rambling op-eds on world affairs. But by now he was a geriatric convalescent in a track suit, not the dashing subversive in fatigues, and he faced the one thing he hated more than being contradicted: being ignored.
Because Spain fought so hard in the 19th century to hold on to Cuba, the island in the 20th century harbored an exaggerated sense of its geopolitical importance—and so did Castro, and so did his exile enemies. In fact, in many ways it already ended, years ago.
For a Caribbean island, rooted historically and geographically in the sea between the US and Venezuela, it was a cruel blow to lose the taproot of its commerce. Cuba had had previous experience of a monopolistic trade relationship, with Spain, its far-off madre patria , but the Soviet Union was even further away, and had little in common with Cuba except political rhetoric. The close Soviet link was to have a serious disadvantage in that it gave Cuba little opportunity to experiment economically.
Guevara had hoped in the early days that the island might escape from the tyranny of sugar production and diversify its economy, but Castro perceived this to be an empty dream. Sugar was the only significant product Cuba could exchange for Soviet oil. Perhaps Castro should never have made the effort to go it alone.
Some thought the price was too high. The US was, and is, immensely powerful — and very close. The baleful experience of Nicaragua, 30 years after the Cuban revolution, showed that the passage of time had not made the task of securing sovereignty any easier for a small Latin American state.
Isolated from Latin America in the s by the US blockade, Castro made efforts to assist revolutionaries who sought to turn the Andes into a new Sierra Maestra. The impact was considerable, yet brought Cuba little political reward. No revolutionary group was able to repeat the example of Cuba in the early years, and even when Guevara himself joined the fray in Bolivia in , his expedition was to end in disaster a year later.
When Allende, a friendly socialist, won the presidential elections in Chile in , Castro counselled caution. The victorious Sandinistas of Nicaragua received the same message in Castro knew from experience that building socialism in one small, developing country was not an easy option.
The large Soviet economic support for Cuba was never going to be matched in Chile or Nicaragua. Guevara, by touring Africa in the early s and then going to fight with guerrillas organised in the eastern Congo by Laurent Kabila, later president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also helped to bring Africa into focus in Havana.
There was a further dimension. For Castro, Cuba was not just a Caribbean country with Hispanic connections. His championing of them came at the same time as the civil rights movement was growing in the US, and this may have contributed to the nervousness of the US government over his regime. Castro displayed a personal interest in the Angolan expedition, as he did two years later in Ethiopia, when Cuban soldiers were sent to assist the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam.
The Cubans helped the Ethiopians to push back the Somalis from the Ogaden. The policies of glasnost and perestroika espoused by Mikhail Gorbachev in the s brought a dramatic unravelling of the Cuban revolution.
The stability and survival of their states depended on Russian support, although Cuba, the fruit of a popular revolution, had greater staying power than East Germany. Unlike some in the Cuban political elite who appeared willing to embrace changes in the Soviet system, Castro recognised that they would lead to disaster.
For Cuba, the writing was on the wall even before the collapse of the Soviet Union after the failed coup against Gorbachev in August Castro knew that the US had made clear to the Russians, in , that future economic assistance to the Soviet Union would depend on an end to Soviet aid to Cuba. Castro declared a state of emergency, of the kind that would have been imposed had there been a military invasion.
Now, he returns to them. He has already prepared his final resting place, a mausoleum alongside his former guerrilla comrades in the Sierra Maestra, at the site of their old base camp. Cuba sponsored covert guerrilla missions to dozens of countries in Latin America and Africa, and dispatched troops to fight in wars in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. That, at least officially, is how the Communist Party wants Cuba to be seen today.
And indeed, there is much that is unchanging in Cuba. The formal end of the Castro era has elicited polarized reactions among Cubans, with Party loyalists expressing unquestioning faith in the system, and disbelievers signalling cynicism about the future.
Last November, after one of them was arrested, the movement organized a sit-in and hunger strike in Havana, which was broken up by the police after ten days, and was followed by an unprecedented street protest of hundreds of people outside the ministry of culture. Both actions garnered widespread media attention, and the government has responded with police harassment of activists, occasional arrests, and a vituperous trolling campaign by commentators on state media.
I believe it has given back to us something we Cubans had lost: our civicism. We had forgotten that we had the right to protest and had the right to demand freedoms. Despite the constant threat of a US invasion as well as the long-standing economic embargo on the island, Castro managed to maintain a communist revolution in a nation just 90 miles km off the coast of Florida.
Despised by his critics as much as he was revered by his followers, he maintained his rule through 10 US presidents and survived scores of attempts on his life by the CIA. He established a one-party state, with hundreds of supporters of the Batista government executed. Political opponents have been imprisoned, the independent media suppressed. Thousands of Cubans have fled into exile.
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro said "revolutionaries of the world must follow his legacy". The Soviet Union's last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, said: "Fidel stood up and strengthened his country during the harshest American blockade, when there was colossal pressure on him. For French President Francois Hollande, Castro embodied Cuba's revolution in both its "hopes" and its later "disappointments". Pope Francis, who met Castro, an atheist, when he visited Cuba in , called his death "sad news" and sent "sentiments of grief".
From US President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened to reverse his predecessor's work to build ties with Cuba, came a brief tweet exclaiming the news:.
In Miami, where there is a large Cuban community, there have been celebrations in some parts of the city, with people banging pots and cheering. A Cuban exile group, the Cuban Democratic Directorate, said Castro left "legacy of intolerance" and had set up a "vicious totalitarian regime".
Divisive legacy captivates world media. UK opposition: Castro 'huge figure'. Although the announcement of Fidel Castro's death caught many Cubans unawares, it can't be said that they weren't partly expecting it. In a sense, they have been preparing for this moment, a post-Fidel Cuba, for several years now as he retired from public life and largely disappeared from view.
But now that it has actually arrived, some are asking whether it will make any political different to Cuba's trajectory.
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