The Cuban lawyer turned guerrilla who seized power in 1959 with a few hundred fighters, built the Americas' first communist state ninety miles from Florida, faced down ten US presidents across half a century, and ruled actively until illness forced him to hand power to his brother Raul in 2006, then formally left the presidency in 2008 — remembered by admirers as the liberator who gave his people literacy, doctors, and a fierce national dignity, and by critics as the dictator who gave them prison, exile, and silence.
Fidel Castro turned a small Caribbean island into one of the great causes of the twentieth century. A farmer's son and a lawyer, he led a few hundred guerrillas out of the mountains, toppled a US-backed dictator on the first day of 1959, and then ruled for nearly fifty years. He made tiny Cuba a giant of the Cold War, survived a US-backed invasion, stood at the center of the closest the world ever came to nuclear war, and outlasted ten American presidents and the Soviet Union itself before dying in his bed in 2016. To his admirers he is the David who defied the United States and gave his people schools, universal state healthcare, near-universal reading, and a pride no one could buy. To his critics he is the tyrant who held no free elections, jailed and shot his opponents, crushed the press, and drove generation after generation into exile. Both pictures are of the same man, and the argument between them has never ended.