Cuba's “Maximum Leader”

With his olive fatigues, straggly beard and giant cigars, Fidel Castro was one of the most recognisable political figures of the 20th century. He was also one of the most extraordinary, said The Guardian. Having led a revolution in Cuba in 1959, he set about establishing a Marxist-Leninist state, just 90 miles from the US mainland. Billing himself as a defiant David to the US’s Goliath, he became a giant on the world stage himself. He negotiated on level terms with successive leaders of the two superpowers at the height of the Cold War, and helped bring them to the brink of nuclear war; he outlasted ten US presidents (despite repeated attempts to assassinate him). He inspired revolutions in Latin America, backed liberation movements in Africa, and became a potent symbol of rebellion for left-wingers everywhere. The likes of Jean-Paul Sartre revered him; and for years, his poster adorned thousands of student bedrooms.

At home, Castro was widely loathed for his brutal repression of dissent, and economic mismanagement. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled into exile during the five decades of his rule; many died trying to cross the sea to Florida. But the “Maximum Leader” (as he was officially known) was loved too: a master of oration (he could talk for six hours without pause), he persuaded many of his people that only he could protect them from their enemy across the water; and even after communism began to collapse in the USSR, he clung on. In the second decade of the new millennium, US-Cuban relations finally started to thaw. But Castro – by then retired – never let his hatred for America waver. “We don’t need the empire to give us anything,” he declared earlier this year.