Why Fidel Castro’s legacy still haunts Washington

Fidel Castro would have been amused by an unexpected encomium from the belly of the beast on the eve of his birth centenary. Even the title of last month’s US State Department 100-page diatribe, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, could be interpreted as a tribute. Like much else in a report intended to make the case for state capitulation or capture, this is an egregious exaggeration. The idea, obviously, is to illustrate how a small Caribbean island has posed an unacceptable threat to US ‘national security’ for nearly 70 years, and why that nuisance must be eliminated. Yet the supporting text is not mere fiction. Chunks of it could be read as an explanation for why Cuba proved so influential internationally in the decades after the 1959 revolution spearheaded by Castro.A few examples from the report follow: “While Soviet communism was frequently driven by more practical great-power concerns … its Cuban successor was built around a near-singular obsession with the ‘liberation’ of the Global South from its Western colonial oppressors. In the minds of the Cubans, there was only one path to this goal: the destruction of the Yankee imperialist regime.” This ‘obsession’ deserves a red salute.

It acknowledges that “the Cubans were never just a Soviet proxy”, that “the Cuban Marxist project not only survived, but thrived” following the USSR’s demise and China’s turn towards capitalism, and that “Castro’s ideological project now enjoys something approaching ideological hegemony in leftist circles both within and beyond the West”. Apart from Washington’s hege-morons, no one associates the concept of hegemony, ideological or otherwise, with Cuba — except as an appropriate target in its internationalist endeavours over the decades.

Yet it’s hard to disagree with the report’s contention that “For the Western left — particularly in the United States — Cuba was the harbinger of a new kind of revolution. It was animated by a missionary zeal that Moscow had long since forgotten, and offered a novel theory of struggle and liberation”. As evidence, it cites the concept of ‘tercermundismo’, or ‘Third Worldism’, and highlights the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana as “a foundational event in the inauguration of [this] global revolutionary project” that brought together anti-imperialist representatives from 82 nations across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

“In Cuba’s telling,” the report claims, “the oppressed peoples of the world ... all shared one enemy … Yankee imperialism.” That’s not far from the truth. It notes that in urging “revolutionaries to open up a hundred fronts of war against the American empire”, Che Guevara in his message to the conference was urging on not just rebels in the Global South but also “American radicals in the belly of the beast”. It’s unlikely Che would have disputed that imputation. Neither he nor Fidel have challenged the claim that the Soviets “were speaking Third Worldism as a second language. The Cubans spoke it as their native tongue”. That could be explained by their direct experience of US imperialism in the six decades preceding Castro’s revolution.

The State Department report is aimed at maligning almost every progressive movement in the US — from the Black Panthers to Antifa — by linking it to Cuban influence. To the extent that is true, that would be a triumph for Havana. It also provides another cause for kudos by admitting that “a particular affinity for the cause of ‘Palestinian liberation’ was embedded in the founding anti-imperialist and an­­ti-Western cre­ed of the Cuban revolution”. That alone could be seen as an excellent re­­ason for supporting Cuba in its glo­bal endeavours as far away as southern Africa, where Havana’s contribution in Angola abbreviated the lifespan of Western-backed Pretorian apartheid, as Nelson Mandela acknowledged.

Cuba has often floundered on the domestic front, despite tremendous achievements in, inter alia, education and healthcare. During his first campaign, in 2016, Donald Trump declared, “I love the poorly educated.” Fidel Castro and his comrades detested the idea of any Cuban being poorly educated, and remedied the ignorance bred by their US-friendly predecessors. That partly explains Cuba’s resilience in the face of 65 years of economic and military aggression from the north. Its survival thus far amid the imperial denial of fuel, food and medicine has been nothing short of a miracle, but it’s not the first Cuba has accomplished.

Whatever Cuba’s fate, the memories of ‘fidelismo’ will linger, its ghost hovering over the latest spoils of US imperialism. And, sooner or later, history shall absolve him, as Castro predicted back in 1953.

This article was first published under the title “Fidel’s century" in Dawn, an ANN partner of The Daily Star, on August 12, 2026.

Mahir Aliis a columnist at Dawn. He can be reached at mahir.dawn@gmail.com.