OH, FIDEL.

Che and Fidel

I shouldn't have liked anything about you, Fidel Castro, but I have to confess I did. I liked your abandonment of your childhood's security to fight what you perceived as injustice. I liked your refusal to be cowed by failure and great losses in your fight to liberate Cuba from the corruption of American-based mafia with the might of the U.S. behind it. 

I liked your socialist ideals. You produced more doctors for the developing world than any of your contemporary leaders. You educated Africans in Cuba in great numbers and thereby contributed to the development of several countries on that formerly colonized continent. Your domestic economic policies created as much progress for the working Cubans as suffering. You equalized Cuban society within decades with direct intervention, not the violent, secretive and self-interested manipulations of the current New World Order's bankers and stock brokers. 

But, Fidel, you failed to recognize that your morality remained entrenched in Roman Catholicism. This allowed you to remorselessly torture homosexuals and AIDS patients. This allowed you to abandon all your egalitarian principles in order to justify concentration camps. Your hatred and lust for revenge against those who disagreed with you, as if they were damned by some religious dogma, prevented you from reconciling with the Cuban diaspora, which could have brought back so much good to your island. Your suppression of religions other than Roman Catholicism was tactical while your conflicted Latin Catholicism failed to root out its pernicious influence from Cuban society.

I learned a lot from your successes and failures, Fidel. Whether you did or not becomes irrelevant  to you with your death. Perhaps knowing that more actively would have made your leadership more effective for all of your Cuban people. We will never know.