Fidel is dead, but he is immortal. Few people have known the glory of entering into the realm of legend and history during their lifetime. Fidel is one of these people. He belonged to a generation of legendary fighters – Nelson Mandela, Patrice Lumumba, Amílcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Camilo Torres, Turcios Lima, Ahmed Ben Barka – who, in pursuit of an ideal of justice, threw themselves into political action in the 1950s, with the aim and the hope of changing an unequal, discriminatory world, marked by the onset of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and United States.
During that period, people across half of the world, in Vietnam, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, were rising up. At that time, a large part of humanity was still under infamous colonial rule. Almost all of Africa and a good part of Asia were dominated, subjugated, by the old empires of the West. Meanwhile, Latin American nations, which had theoretically achieved independence over a century and a half before, continued to be exploited by privileged minorities, subjected to social and ethnic discrimination, and often marked by harsh dictatorships, backed by Washington.
Fidel bore the onslaught of no less than 10 U.S. Presidents (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and Bush Junior) and maintained relations with some of the world’s most important post-WWII leaders (Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Khrushchev, Olaf Palme, Ben Bella, Boumedienne, Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Salvador…