It is hard to see a more significant event in the modern history of Latin America than the rise to power of the Castro brothers and their supporters in Cuba in January 1959. They introduced a brand of defiance and alternative to the West during the Cold War, and were mostly pawns in a far more complex chess game.
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To this day many prefer to look at the "virtues of the revolution," while deliberately ignoring the executions of Castro opponents in baseball stadiums, the gay "re-education camps" and the general failure of the revolutionary doctrine based on guerilla warfare, (See: Ernesto "Che" Guevara). This was also the case in Africa (Congo 1965) and Bolivia (1966).
Many of the military junta-based regimes that rose across Latin America in the 1970s were a backlash against attempts to import revolutions and there is a very thick and clear line connecting them, as well as the thousands of casualties that followed.
Guerrilla organizations were financially supported and trained under the auspices of the Cuban island, where the Castro brothers played a key role. The Castros, meanwhile, were funded by Mother Russia.
The hatred, the mass murders, the secret police and the thought police, the fear – it was all in the name of revolution. It all started there, and to this day the "zealots of the revolution" refuse to leave. Across South America, the rift caused by the revolution is still alive and kicking, resounding across government-funded universities, with pundits whose mindset is stuck somewhere in the last century, and in a political generation that is still trying (and succeeding) in finding its way into the halls of power.
Still, there is no dispute over the impact the Castro brothers have had. Their successor on the political Left also usually come in pairs: In socialist Venezuela we've seen Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro (1999- to the present day), in Brazil in the time of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (2003-2016) and in Argentina with Nestor and Cristina Kirchner (2003-2015), to name a few.
Raul Castro's retirement is very much the end of an era, but it is far from the end of the regime's dogma. "Raul and Fidel did what they wanted with Cuba," a Cuban-born Israeli told me, "We don't want communism in Cuba anymore. We want an independent state for all that will eradicate the disgraceful poverty."
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