Cuba's Fidel Castro dies at age 90

Cuba's Fidel Castro has died at the age of 90. The Guardian has a very good write-up about Castro's legacy in Castro’s legacy: how the revolutionary inspired and appalled the world.

Historians will debate Castro’s legacy for decades to come but his revolution’s accomplishments and failures are on open display in today’s Cuba, which – even with the reforms of recent years – still bears the stamp of half a century of “Fidelismo”.

The “maximum leader” was a workaholic micro-manager who turned the Caribbean island into an economic, political and social laboratory that has simultaneously intrigued, appalled and inspired the world.

“When Fidel took power in 1959 few would have predicted that he would be able to so completely transform Cuban society, upend US priorities in Latin America and create a following of global proportions,” said Dan Erikson, an analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank and author of The Cuba Wars.

The most apparent downside of his legacy is material scarcity. For ordinary Cubans things tend to be either in short supply, such as transport, housing and food, or prohibitively expensive, such as soap, books and clothes.

Castro's death seems anti-climatic. He's been out of power for some time while his brother Raul has been running the show. The island has undergone radical reforms (at least for them) during those years. US-Cuba relations have begun to normalize. As a non-Cuban, non-Cuban American, that's easy for me to say. 

It seems to be fitting that his death comes shortly after the Colombian government and FARC signed another peace deal, perhaps ending the longest-running conflict of the Cold War in the Americas. While Castro inspired many of the revolutionary movements in Latin America, he became more selective after the failed effort in Bolivia that cost Che Guevara his life. Revolutionary movements had to prove themselves before Cuba would provide them with meaningful support. 

Castro also supported negotiated settlements to the wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the early 1980s, prior to many others. It would take several years for insurgents, governments, and the US / international community to successfully resolve those wars via negotiations.