Fidel Castro

Is dead at 90. He will leave an interesting and complicated legacy to think about.

I can't speak at all to Cubans and how they see the man, I don't know any, and am not sure I can trust any statements that come out of the country to be accurate. So my thoughts are pretty much going to be related to me and to American liberals, you know, something I can speak to somewhat accurately.

The American liberal is an interesting creature, many of us tend to have a surprising blindspot when it comes to thinking about complicated people, and Castro certainly qualifies, he was a man who ran an effective and long lasting Socialist government of sorts, one that has every indication of being strong enough to survive his and his brother's passing. This is not an easy accomplishment at all. He also gets a lot of respect for standing up to the USA for decades, we bent before he did, and he was not wrong to do so.

But we tend to gloss over the other stuff, his regime was not exactly a bastion of freedom or equality, it still isn't either but we don't talk about that at the moment. There is a large Cuban expatriate community in Florida, and they didn't go there for fun, if you were an undesirable in Cuba your life was at risk, and an undesirable was not a well defined group, it certainly included homosexuals, but it also consisted of people who failed to meet standards of ideological purity that are themselves not well defined, as well as those who simply angered someone more powerful than themselves, such as writers and musicians.

I speak in the past tense here, but I really shouldn't, things by many accounts are getting better, but dissent is still a very dangerous pastime in Cuba.

Basically, the man was a dictator who abused his power for decades to oppress his people, the fact that he accomplished anything at all is and should be secondary to that, at best he was a bad man who did a couple sort of admirable things, but he was not a hero or someone to emulate. Regardless of what Jill Stein might have us believe.