Fidel Castro in interviews liked to compare himself to Don Quixote. And there was indeed a larger than life, fantasist quality about the Cuban leader. Yes, a sense that this was an honourable, righteous man, fighting the good fight for the oppressed, but slightly preposterous and always much put-upon. Castro was a showman revolutionary who became, with his friend and comrade Che Guevara, for a whole generation in the '60s and '70s, potent symbols of the global struggle against imperialism who inhabited many a student bedsit wall.
The reality was more prosaic. The impoverished Cuba he led – and transformed – survived for 50 years as an outpost of socialism and offshore reproach to the capitalist US, largely because of the annual $5 billion subsidy that came from the Soviet Union, and later the cheap oil from his admirer Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Castro's legacy is a Cuba which can boast first-world education and health services – its export of doctors to the world is one of the country's major sources of revenue – but a country crippled economically by decades of a US trade embargo that President Obama in 2014 began to ease. Workers in this "workers' paradise" on an average $15 a month famously joke that "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".
Castro’s death at 90 marks the turning of a page in South America’s history. He had been for 50 years both an icon and ally of the continent’s now fading radical left and champion of the international non-aligned movement, and a demon incarnate for the US. The tiny threat he really posed to the US from his base on an impoverished island of 11 million was amplified by the post-McCarthy-era anti-communist hysteria and the Soviet brinkmanship of the 1962 missile crisis. His two personae, of hero and demon, fed off each other to bolster a near mythical status.
Contrary to popular myth, however, Castro’s overthrow of the corrupt and brutal Batista regime in 1959 was no communist revolution any more than Castro was a communist in those days. It was a populist rising to re-establish democratic norms and social justice in the profoundly unequal Cuba of its time. But hostility from the US and a willingness by the Soviet Union to embrace a new ally saw Castro embrace the latter’s ideology and authoritarianism with relish. In the 60s he would declare himself a “Marxist Leninist”.
In recent years as Fidel took a back seat in retirement tending his garden, brother Raul Castro has moved the economy towards gradual marketisation, but not without some sniping from the wings. In his final valedictory to the Communist Party conference this year, the unrepentant elder brother was reiterating the need to stick to socialist ways despite the growing rapprochement with the US. Donald Trump's election on a pro-embargo platform may limit Cuba's choices.