Michael Chanan

A more interesting question to ask after his death is not what Fidel Castro was – a revolutionary hero? a tyrannical dictator? a beneficent dictator? – but who would now call themselves a Fidelista and what will become of Fidelismo? The Havana where I arrived the day before his burial at the other end of the island was certainly subdued, but how to interpret the silence that the TV news bulletins during the previous week had all remarked on? It wasn’t just that the authorities had banned music and alcohol during the mourning period. An old friend of my own age ruminated: ‘People were silent’, she said, ‘because they didn’t know what to say.’ Or as a new friend, an equally thoughtful young woman of 26 put it, ‘He already wasn’t there.’ Read more