Two cheers for Castro, the world will miss him

Under Castro, Cuba acquired a global profile quite disproportionate to its size (about half of Karnataka) or population (one-third of Kerala). And its supreme leader emerged as an icon of the global defiance of American imperialism, a man who withstood the enmity of ten US presidents and escaped assassination attempts by several American administrations. “If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event,” he once said, “I would win a gold medal.”

Few leaders in the so-called Third World spoke so spiritedly against the exploitation of Latin America, Africa and Asia by the West’s rapacious corporations and financial institutions as Castro did. Indeed, the bearded Fidel, whose spell-binding oratory rarely lasted less than two-three hours, and his comrade-in-arms, Che Guevara, who was himself assassinated by the CIA in the Bolivian jungles in 1967, became two of the most inspiring icons for the idealistic youth worldwide.

The world always admires the courageous small guy who takes on the bullying by the big guy. In Castro’s case, the moment of defiance came soon after he and his band of young revolutionaries forced the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who had turned Cuba almost into an American colony, to flee the country in 1959. Castro was not a Communist then, only a strong-willed Cuban nationalist. American arrogance and hostility turned him into a Communist and made Cuba an ally of the Soviet Union in the Cold War era. President Eisenhower broke diplomatic ties with Cuba in January 1961, and the same have not been restored till today. His successor, John F. Kennedy, ordered a covert CIA-backed operation to overthrow the Castro regime in what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs crisis. Kennedy had believed that ordinary Cubans would rise up against Castro. Nothing of the kind happened, and the operation became a fiasco. Notably, there was no popular rebellion against Castro even after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, and Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe in early 1990s.

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