Nov 28, 2016 3 min read

Apologists for Fidel Castro have suggested that he brought literacy and health care to Cuba amid a decades-long economic blockade from the United States, and it stands head and shoulders above its Caribbean peers in both these realms. They also argue that he was a champion for the dispossessed in the developing world – “the wretched of the Earth,” to borrow the title of the Frantz Fanon book that came out just two years after Castro and his fellow guerrillas overthrew a corrupt, U.S.-backed regime in 1959.

Point taken. However, Castro and his cronies also turned Cuba into an insulated, captive state that ran roughshod over human rights in the name of a “revolution” that lingered long past its welcome and more than two decades after other once-closed communist nations ripped down their Lenin statues and embraced democracy and free competition.

That’s a steep price to pay for health care and literacy.

The death of Castro on Friday at age 90 – an event that had long been anticipated, given his evidently fragile health – has sparked hopes that the pace of change in Cuba will accelerate, and the island will shake off the torpor that has infiltrated it, particularly since the 1990s, when the Soviet Union withered away and ended its subsidies to Havana. Once known for his prolix speeches, some of which ran longer than “Gone With the Wind” or “Lawrence of Arabia,” Castro had largely ceded the stage over the last decade to his brother, Raul, who is now 85 and has attempted to improve relations with the United States. The Obama administration has responded by, among other things, easing restrictions on travel by U.S. citizens.

When he made a state visit to Cuba earlier this year, Obama urged its rulers to embrace “the free and open exchange of ideas,” and that Raul Castro should “not fear the different voices of the Cuban people – and their capacity to speak, and assemble, and vote for their leaders.” One can only hope that the incoming Trump administration will maintain this rapprochement. It is more likely that Cuba will change once its contact with the outside world gathers speed.

While in Cuba, Obama also decried the “arbitrary detention” of government opponents there, and met with a group of dissidents. They were part of a long line of Cubans who opposed Castro, and many paid for that opposition with their lives. It is estimated that somewhere around 5,600 Cubans have been killed by firing squads over the last half-century or so. Other Cubans died while being imprisoned, tortured or while fleeing the country. More than 1,000 died in extrajudicial killings. Castro associates were purged in show trials. Gays and lesbians were subject to persecution. Churches have been torn down and pastors arrested.

Simply put, much of Castro’s legacy must be written in blood.

Throughout his long tenure on the world stage, it was easy for some to romanticize Castro, with his ever-present fatigues, beard, cigars and revolutionary rhetoric. But he was a tyrant. That fact must not be forgotten.

Cuba will be better off without him.