He outlived 11 presidents..
Assassination attempts never stopped him.
His people never toppled him.
He ceases to exist.
Fidel Castro is dead.
The AP dispatch summarizes the early beginning through the end:
No other Third World leader prompted so much U.S. hostility for so long. Castro brought the planet to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, sent tens of thousands of troops to aid leftist governments in Africa and nurtured guerrilla movements that fought U.S.-backed governments across Latin America. He endured a crippling U.S. embargo and outlasted 10 U.S. presidents — all of them preaching regime change in Cuba — finally resigning 11 months before Barack Obama moved into the White House, not from U.S. pressure but because of serious illness.
After Castro transferred power to his brother Raul, first temporarily in 2006 and then permanently on Feb. 19, 2008, he survived another eight years in quiet retirement before finally dying on Friday. By hanging on in the shadows, he helped his followers avoid political unrest and ease the island into a communist future without the only leader most Cubans had ever known.
In the aftermath of death, some are giving tribute.. others, like Cuban exiles in Miami, poured into the streets to celebrate the demise of the former dictator..
The NEW YORK TIMES report ponders,
His legacy in Cuba and elsewhere has been a mixed record of social progress and abject poverty, of racial equality and political persecution, of medical advances and a degree of misery comparable to the conditions that existed in Cuba when he entered Havana as a victorious guerrilla commander in 1959.
If you believe in an afterlife, then you believe Fidel has now gone somewhere else.
…to an eternal damnation?
Or did he find forgiveness with God and do enough decent things amidst the mire of dictatorship on earth?
Only he knows that now.
