Fidel Castro is no more..your thoughts about him?

What am I supposed to think about him?
Cuba has a lot of problems but he did provide universal health care to his countries people.
so that was one plus in his favour.

Is he gone?
I think that the US and Cuba could have coexisted had he decided to go ahead and be a puppet for the US. Because he chose not to be the US tried its damndest to punish not only him but all those innocent Cubans in the alltogether vane hope that they would overthrow him and install someone along the lines of Somoza or Allende who would lick the boots of the US corporations and as long as he did could do as he pleased with the citizens of the country.
Fortunately for Cuba Castro stood strong and although the US did is its worst to the innocent Cuban populace they manage to persevere.

Oppressive asshole dictator.

Trump wannabe.

He should have signed with the Giants when they wanted him.

I have sympathy for the man and his David vs Goliath stance vs the US. A pitty that he never understood that pure communism doesn’t work. One can instill a dose of social justice in all sorts of ways, eg free healthcare, but a state monopoly on means of production is just as bad as a capitalist monopoly à la trust barons.

We were in Cuba 10 yr ago for vaccations. Great place for tourists but don’t try and eat in a ‘normal’ state restaurant… it’s barely eatable, something like a stalinist KFC… The people were all very nice but they felt like in a giant prison. A nice prison, with music everywhere.

He certainly gave us a run for our money. He did some very good things for the peasant class in the beginning, but then he held his country and his people back and became blinded by his ideology. He was an abusive autocrat. It would be nice to see Cuba turn toward Social Democracy. It is a rich country with very industrious people. Cuba has the potential to be one of the richest countries in the Western Hemisphere. I would like to see that happen again and soon..

I think he probably thought he was doing what’s best for Cuba’s citizens, but in my mind his regime was oppressive and eventually became foolish. He was stubborn and proud, and didn’t allow Cubans to be innovative and prosper. He also helped to make Miami-Dade County just short of 70% Hispanic. About half of those Hispanics are Cuban.

He did educate everyone and had socialized health care that was supposedly decent care, but I truly think the Cubans would have been better off with a democracy.

Even with him dead it doesn’t really affect the state of Cuba today. I guess there are small signs things are changing, especially with America opening relations to some extent. I think the biggest thing about America lifting the embargos and allowing travel is most Cubans who fled, fled to America. That’s why it’s so important compared to Canada or Europe. Family members will be in touch and I think this will influence change.

I honestly don’t know much about him. I remember hearing that he was absolutely ruthless/brutal to his political enemies involving torture and executions. I heard he’d put his enemies in tires, lit them on fire and rolled them down a hill (was that from the movie Scarface?). The thing is, there’s so much anti-commie political propaganda that was injected into US culture, that there are not many facts about the guy I know are completely accurate other than him being a communist dictator.

^^ Pure propaganda indeed. While Castro did jail a few hundreds political opponents at any given time, to my knowledge there was little violence, torture or killings. All the latin american dictators supported by the US were committing mass massacres, meanwhile.

And the revisionism has begun…

Considering that Hollywood can’t even get US history right I wouldn’t take anything they say about other countries at face value.

As a homage to the departed:

Victor Jara – A Cuba
https://youtu.be/HQ_5ed-O_dU

(unlike the Che, Castro was never an international star. There are not many songs about him. Even Jara’s number here is about the Cuban revolution, and just mentions Fidel in passim)

Like any other leader he had his positives and negatives. I think his intentions were good but he lacked the ability to really manage a country long term .

I went to Cuba this year and i have to say it is a beautiful country but a hot mess. It desperately needs foreign investment. They have no money.

Fidel was just an average charismatic dictator that didn’t have a long term plan.

He fought for the poor but at the same time didn’t know how to maintain his strategy long term.

Cuba must now move forward . IT will be a long hard road though.

The end of an era. And good riddance!!!

Another leader come and gone, he will was not the first, and certainly will not be the last. for not being a super power, he outlasted many US Presidents, and none was able to crush him like a bug.

Two places to have been this month:
Chicago when the Cubs won and Miami last night.

^^I was thinking Calle Ocho is a place to avoid with the news. All those crowds.

^^Well, you wouldn’t go to Miami to avoid crowds at a time like this, no more than you would go to Berlin to avoid crowds when the wall went down. Calle Ocho is just one venue, and very real as to both pro and con with the potential of street fights. It’s the price of witnessing history being made. South Beach would have been another choice—party town without the buzzkill.

^^I’d tend to avoid the crowds typically. I do understand your point. I don’t always feel compelled to “witness” history that way. If I was still living on South Beach I would just be in it, but to actually go towards it, not very inclined to do things like that usually. That’s me. Once in a while I break that rule.

He never nuked anyone.
Never committed genocide against natives.
Never supported a system of slavery either.

He enslaved his people and made his island a prison. For the many who braved his despotism, his prisons were torture chambers run by sadists. He was a cruel, vicious tyrant, as bad as and in many ways worse than Machado, Cespedes and Batista. Even the idealist Guevara saw this and got the fuck out.

Do you have evidence of mass torture, Espiritus?

A dictator. All dictators deprive the people that they control the basic right to pursue their lives as they see reasonably see fit in a social context.
And if that is not evil enough, a murdering dictator at that. I have been to Cuba several times and unless they are bureaucrats or cops the people live dead end lives.

As usual Americans are quick to condemn others while ignoring their nation’s own human rights abuses.

My thought about him aren’t that interesting. I do wonder about the future of Cuba. The people shown on the news are in mourning for him. In Florida people are dancing in the streets.

He was a cruel, vicious tyrant, as bad as and in many ways worse than Machado, Cespedes and Batista.
Add in Pol Pot, Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, Pinochet, Somoza, etc. it would seem cruelty and viciousness is more an innate trait of man then the so-called goodwill man is supposedly born with.

Anyone who seriously think Fidel Castro was anywhere near comparable to Pol Pot, Stalin or Pinochet (US-backed, by the way) isn’t living on Earth.

Honestly, as far as single-party dictatorships go the Castro regime has been fairly benign (especially after the tumult of the 1960s).

I saw many Cuban-Americans on Morning Joe this morning. Soledad O’Brien was very interesting talking from the Afro-Cuban perspective as she called it. She referenced a lot of what is quoted in this article. She talked about how it’s complicated, and how Castro was brutal, but gave black Cubans more opportunity than Batista.

The thing to remember is that Castro came to power by opposing Batista, a rather ruthless US supported dictator. Castro was the result of oppressive, cruel government policies toward their own populace and the US policy toward him, based on unrealistic fears of socialism and communism, fostering isolationism served only to increase Castro’s power not to weaken it. A different, more progressive policy involving US/Cuban relationships would have resulted in a much reduced Castro power structure and the Almighty US Dollar would have eventually seduced Cuba as it has much of the rest of the world.