For the majority of Cuba, anti or pro Fidel Castro, the country has lost a leader and possibly its biggest revolutionary. There are shades of grey to Fidel’s almost five decade long rule. Evidence of this are the tens of thousands of Cuban exiles living mostly in Miami, Florida and across the country, men, women and children who braved the strong Atlantic Ocean to escape to the American mainland and hence be free of Fidel’s Marxist regime.
But there are not many who can say that Fidel wasn’t enigmatic. One cannot put him in the same basket along with Idi Amin and other dictators. But a dictator he was, in many ways. He fought hard against the embargoes imposed on him by America, chose to ally with the Soviet Union and was left to pick up the piece of a broken economy when the Soviet Union split. But even then he persevered. Now, with Raul Castro in power for a decade, there is hope that Cuba will persevere too, unless Trump rolls back Obama’s new Cuban policy. That aside, the world will miss Castro, even if only for the fact that he had the gumption to take on America.
