FIDEL CASTRO, 1926-2016: NI REQUIESCAT IN PACE

"Fidel Castro, the controversial Cuban leader who seized power in 1959 and ruled over the communist state for the following five decades, has died aged 90. Castro came to power as a charismatic guerrilla leader after his army of revolutionaries marched into Havana 49 years ago when he was just 32 years old. His younger bother, Raúl Castro, who took over as president of the Caribbean island in 2008, announced that the older Castro had died on Friday. Cuba will now hold a nine-day period of mourning, before a funeral is held on December 4. The 85-year-old said on state television following his brother’s death: “At 10.29 at night, the chief commander of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, died. Ever onward, to victory.” Castro was a divisive figure who initially won admiration from many on the left after leading the Communist party to power. Hundreds of young Cubans gather at Havana University to remember Cuban leader Fidel Castro © EPA But he has also been criticised as a repressive autocrat who treated his opponents brutally".

Madison Marriage & Andres Schipani, "Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies aged 90Z". The Financial Times. 26 November 2016, in www.ft.com.

"A corpse died yesterday".

L'Humanite on the occasion of the death of André Gide in February 1951.

The atrocious mots of the rotten French Communist gutter paper, soiled by its monstrous history of lies and filth, were of course a calumny when applied to the immortal Gide. However, in the case of the now rotting corpse of Fidel Castro, the words are very apt indeed. What is the history of 'Fidel' but a history of lies, foolish ambition, wasted efforts, mass killing and murders of his fellow Cubans. Dictatorship and under-development and mis-development. All ultimately for no positive purpose whatsoever. The idea, the fantasy that Cuba could stand on its own two feet, in opposition to the United States and remain a functioning state, was of course that: a fantasy. Unfortunately, it is a fantasy that first engulfed one man, then a clique and soon, via coercion an entire people. Thankfully, if perhaps too tardily this idiocy been revealed for what it truly is. One can only hope that when Castro's equally atrocious brother Raul also meets his maker in due course, that the poor and misbegotten people of Cuba will act upon the realization of the morbid joke that almost sixty years of Castroism has proven and put an immediate and complete end to it. Before it is too late.