Fidel Castro is no more

End of an era: Cuban leader who defied the US was 90

Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the US for nearly half a century, bedeviling 11 US presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of a nuclear war, died on Friday. He was 90.

His death was announced by the Cuban state television. In declining health for several years, Castro had orchestrated what he hoped would be the continuation of his Communist revolution, stepping aside in 2006 when he was felled by a serious illness.

He provisionally ceded much of his power to his younger brother Raúl, now 85, and two years later formally resigned as president.

Raúl, who had fought alongside Castro from the earliest days of the insurrection and remained minister of defence and his brother’s closest confidant, has ruled Cuba since then, though he has told the Cuban people he intends to resign in 2018.

Castro had held onto power longer than any other living national leader, except Queen Elizabeth II. He became a towering international figure whose importance in the 20th century far exceeded what might have been expected from the head of state of a Caribbean island nation of 11 million people.

He dominated his country with strength and symbolism from the moment he triumphantly entered Havana on January 8, 1959.

He completed his overthrow of Fulgencio Batista by delivering his first major speech in the capital before tens of thousands of admirers at the vanquished dictator’s military headquarters.

Castro wielded power like a tyrant, controlling every aspect of the island’s existence. He was Cuba’s “Máximo Lider”. Countless details fell to him, from selecting the colour of uniforms Cuban soldiers wore in Angola to overseeing a program to produce a superbreed of milk cows. He personally set the goals for sugar harvests. He personally sent countless men to prison.

But it was more than repression and fear that kept him and his totalitarian government in power for so long. He had both admirers and detractors in Cuba and around the world. Some saw him as a ruthless despot who trampled rights and freedoms; many others hailed him as the crowds did that first night, as a revolutionary hero for the ages.

Even when he fell ill and was hospitalised with diverticulitis in summer 2006, giving up most of his powers for the first time, Castro tried to dictate the details of his own medical care and orchestrate the continuation of his Communist revolution, engaging a plan as old as the revolution itself.

By handing power to his brother, Castro once more raised the ire of his enemies in Washington. The US officials condemned the transition, saying it prolonged a dictatorship and again denied the long-suffering Cuban people a chance to control their own lives.

But in December 2014, President Barack Obama used his executive powers to dial down the decades of antagonism between Washington and Havana by moving to exchange prisoners and normalise diplomatic relations between the two countries, a deal worked out with the help of Pope Francis and after 18 months of secret talks between representatives of both governments.

Though increasingly frail and rarely seen in public, Castro even then made clear his enduring mistrust of the US. A few days after Obama’s highly publicised visit to Cuba in 2016 -- the first by a sitting US president in 88 years — Castro penned a cranky response denigrating Obama’s overtures of peace and insisting that Cuba did not need anything the US was offering. “Fidel Castro,” said Henry M Wriston, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1950s and early 1960s, “was everything a revolutionary should be.”

Castro was perhaps the most important leader to emerge from Latin America since the wars of independence in the early 19th century. That image made him a symbol of revolution throughout the world and an inspiration to many imitators.  But beyond anything else, it was Castro’s obsession with the US, and America’s obsession with him, that shaped his rule.

Castro’s defiance of the US power made him a beacon of resistance in Latin America and elsewhere, and his bushy beard, long Cuban cigar and green fatigues became universal symbols of rebellion.

In April 2016, a frail Castro made what many thought would be his last public appearance, at the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist Party. Dressed in an incongruous blue tracksuit jacket, his hands at times quivering and his once powerful voice reduced to a tinny squawk, he expressed surprise at having survived to almost 90, and he bade farewell to the party, the political system and the revolutionary Cuba he had created.

“Soon I will be like everybody else,” Castro said. “Our turn comes to us all, but the ideas of Cuban communism will endure.”

No one is sure if the force of the revolution will dissipate without Castro and, eventually, his brother. But Castro’s impact on Latin America and the Western Hemisphere has the earmarks of lasting indefinitely.

“We are going to live with Fidel Castro and all he stands for while he is alive,” wrote Matthews of The Times, whose own fortunes were dimmed considerably by his connection to Castro, “and with his ghost when he is dead”.