Well the thing is guys.. Castro and his communist Cuba were / are a mixed kind of thing, good and bad.
We all have different impressions.. overall in my mind, it seems like Castro was not as bad as Hitler or Stalin, or Pol Pot, or Mao, or Hussein or Ghadaffi or anything like that. Castro was like.. more "bad guy" than Hugo Chavez, but it seems like he wasn't as bad as the very bad dictators of the world.
Another thing to keep in mind -- it ain't like South America's got all angelic politicians, that's for sure. The whole continent's a mess and has been, for centuries.
One dictator after another -- right wing fascist dictators, communist dictators, on and on.
You have to remember folks, a lot of people look in at OUR culture and they criticize us too --
we have 2.2 million people in prison. The US imprisons the most people in the world, per capita.Of the communists, Castro was HUGE.
He was a figure on the world stage for what, sixty years? It just is what it is, he's a major figure in world history.
I saw on CNN, they interviewed one Cuban man in Cuba and he said that Fidel made his country world famous, and without Castro then Cuba would have just been a "pebble in the ocean."
And there's just a lot of folklore stuff, about Castro. As Onlooker posted: "He survived 638 assassination attempts by the CIA." I don't know if that's an accurate number, but it is in fact true that the CIA tried to take him out at least dozens and dozens of times. And he somehow survived, every time. (just so everyone knows, the US government doesn't make attempts on world leaders anymore, per an executive order back in late 60s I think)
Castro's life was so big, one could take just one aspect of it -- like just the assassination attempts against him -- and make a feature length documentary or book about it, and it's fascinating. It's amazing the guy lived to 90 years old, lol.
Or, one could write a book about Cuba's medical system -- communist, yep, but yet they churned out tens of thousands of doctors.
It's just a whole society down there -- is it wacky and weird and different to our eyes? Yes, but, it's their culture.
What the US should do is have friendly relations and gradually encourage more democracy and human rights, but it shouldn't be done in a way that's threatening to their system and government. (to start being heavy handed would be like being the first ones to start problems over again, as it stands the Cubans have been working with the US in good faith)
Fidel did all he did, while under EMBARGO and constant pressure from the US, for sixty years. And, the Cuban exile community after him all that time too.
It just seems to me like maybe Cuba's earned its right to be left alone, and Obama made peace and America made peace and we chose to move on about Cuba, a year ago. Why start it all up again?
We can't FORCE rapid immediate change with all our allies and partners in the world. What the right thing to do, is encourage GRADUAL change -- but be nice about it, don't be an ass about it.
As I already posted, one must remember that (a) latin america's been full of "awful dictators" for centuries now. (b) Castro led a guerilla revolution against an awful US-backed right wing dictator, Batista. The poor suffered a lot under Batsita -- and American mobsters from Chicago ran the swanky casinos. And big American corporations had fiefdoms in Cuba, barely paying the poor any kind of money at all.
Did you guys ever see the "Godfather" movies? Part of that, was about swinging Havana in the 50s, and when Batista fell.
Here's something ironic -- the swanky hotels and maybe casinos are starting to come back. But these days, rather than the Chicago mob, it's the communist Cuban military that runs the tourism department!
The whole thing has come full circle.
But the thing is -- it's a sovereign country. That has to be respected, folks. It's not an enemy of the US anymore -- rather, tourists are having a good time down there, the Cubans are nice people, what's the problem?