Fidel Castro may have resigned as Cuba’s president, but he remains a towering figure, loved and hated across continents. Long after he ditched his cigar and traded military fatigues for tracksuits, Castro remains both a Cold War icon and a model of resistance to the world’s lone superpower.
Castro made clear in his resignation announcement Tuesday that he has no plans to disappear — he’ll keep writing his columns as “Comrade Fidel,” doing his best to guide the revolution.
“This is not my farewell to you,” he wrote. “My only wish is to fight as a soldier in the battle of ideas … Perhaps my voice will be heard.”
Castro’s tattered band of rebels caught the imagination of Cubans — and others worldwide — as they toppled Fulgencio Batista’s corrupt dictatorship in 1959 amid exulting crowds.
But darker images soon took hold: Castro’s victorious rebels held impromptu trials and firing squads for hundreds of Batista followers, followed by prison for those who challenged the new system.
By the tens of thousands, desperate refugees risked their lives to flee across shark-filled waters — part of a mass migration that transformed the face of Miami and other communities across the United States. Ever since, many of those exiles have dreamed of the day when Fidel Castro would no longer run Cuba — a dream denied by his brother Raul’s likely succession on Sunday.
Castro’s “half-a-century-old reign of terror has come to an end, yet the system he created all those years ago to maintain total control over the population remains,” said the Cuban-American National Foundation, a leading U.S. anti-Castro group.
Still, Castro’s flamboyant defiance of 10 U.S. administrations enthralled millions, especially in Latin America. Many were inspired by Cuba’s universal health care, lack of malnutrition and relatively egalitarian system in a world where the gap between rich and poor yawns ever wider. They believed Castro’s Marxism could solve poverty and injustice in the hemisphere.
Castro’s early attempts to spread revolution across the Americas largely fizzled, including a Cuban-backed effort by Ernesto “Che” Guevara to bring revolution to Bolivia, where he was captured and killed in 1967.
But Cuban-backed rebels toppled Nicaragua’s government in 1979 and battled until peace treaties were signed in the 1990s in El Salvador and Guatemala.
As the Cold War faded, Castro emerged as a mentor or confidant to a new generation of leftist Latin American presidents, including Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.
In a recent meeting with Castro, Chavez referred him as “the father of all revolutionaries in this America” and told him, “You will never die.”
“Fidel, you know it, we will take charge of continuing to fan the flame.”
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