Or how Dubya and Trump are or will be presidents. Turns out you don’t have to the popular vote in Systems that don’t actually work that way.
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Replacing one dictatorship with another isn’t quite giving it back to the people.
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Long before I was born my father sat on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Mexico, radio silent, with a small tactical nuclear weapon on his prop-driven airplane. If someone had hit the button to launch him, which was the signal for mission go, he would have nuked some target or another, and maybe his carrier would have been there when he tried to return.
I don’t celebrate the passing of human beings, that just seems gross.
But I do celebrate the passing of regimes which disrespect human dignity, including several in the history of my own nation, and certainly including Castro’s.
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and declare war on a tactic, double points if it is one which you have used in past.
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Arguably he was in Tito’s direction. He was a member of the Non Aligned Movement (a “third way” rejecting both Moscow and Washington) as was Tito. People forget that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuba wasn’t strongly aligned with the Soviets, and Che’s adventurism positively annoyed them.
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Castro was never really an ardent communist - Che and Raul were the ideologically committed ones. The US embargo forced Castro to seek alliances and trade elsewhere, and elsewhere was the USSR. Strings were attached, as always.
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I’d argue that Mandela’s abandonment of Socialism in favour of gaining international support led to a hollow victory in South Africa; change of regime has not led to material improvements for many people, and crude populism holds sway.
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Yep - I’m well aware of the NAM, as I’ve written on Yugoslavia quite a bit. But I think some viewed Castro as attempting to hijack the non-aligned movement for his own ends at times.
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This is pedantry I can get behind! 
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If by the Soviet Union you mean Stalin intended, then I agree. His imperialist hypocrisy has been a matter of record at least since the Percentages Agreement, and he was careful to erase all the actual revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky.
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Ask Tito about his views of Stalinist imperialism…
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I don’t really revel in anyone’s death, though sometimes I offer a “good riddance” which is predicated on a person’s continuing negative influence on the world. That death was responsible for their removal from power is merely incidental.
I can’t do that with Castro. He died with no real connection to power in practical terms. We also can’t pretend he was not a revolutionary and that he didn’t have a profound impact on Cuban sovereignty and dubious American corporate suzerainty. Here’s the part I’m not sure people understand about death: You don’t really get a letter-grade when you die. And even if you did, it wouldn’t matter.
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Obama’s was very diplomatic and didn’t seem to sugar coat Castro’s history. Probably written by an actual diplomat, or at least a competent writer.
Trump and Trudeau should look into getting one of those.
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Trudeau has much more history and background on this than Trump. I think his response had a large personal edge to it, which is fair to the extent that Castro was very good friends with Trudeau’s father (Castro was actually an honorary pallbearer at Pierre Trudeau’s funeral in 2000). Comparing Trudeau’s response to Trump’s is like comparing something a family member says at a funeral to the mouse that shits on the carpet once everyone’s gone home.
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I don’t know if he was a benevolent dictator or a selfish one or both. I know my Cuban friends are glad he’s gone and wish his legacy would go with him and join the Trujillo Junta he overthrew in the dustbin of history, but they’re the ones who left. So I won’t pretend to weigh his mark on the world and, since I’m not Cuban or from any of the countries his revolution started armed movements in, I’m not really among the people who should.
But I will say that even the worst of anyone’s enemies all have at least one redeeming quality: their mortality.
ETA: That said, I’ll be making kiss of death jokes when Kissinger finally shucks his mortal coil, and I won’t feel bad about it at all.
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This is interesting, because your phrasing makes me realize not being particularly happy about someone’s death isn’t a cultivated attitude for me. (This isn’t a value judgement of you, more of a rumination on “Hmm, ain’t it funny when folks think different?”) My mother’s side of the family mostly hail from Chile, and let’s just say that Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973 was a motivating factor in their rapid expatriation. When he died, I was twenty, and I remember going up to my mother and asking for her thoughts. She bitterly said, “He died an old man who never faced real consequences.” I think that cemented for me forever something I’d suspected since I was a teenager: Death is a universal constant. It changes nothing and applies equally to all.
It’s not so much a sense that death is a somber mournful occasion no matter who kicks it. Fidel wasn’t my uncle, and he means nothing to me more than any other dead person. People can crack Fidel jokes all they want and I’ll laugh if they’re funny. I think my attitude is more of a “So?” By contrast, Scalia’s death brought me some joy. Not exuberance at the death itself, because again, “So?” The joy was inspired by the positive possibilities it opened up (at the time, and at this point I think I’m going the other way on the joy thing.) With Bin Laden’s death, I found the unremitting ghoulishness of a lot of Americans disturbing, but that concerned the living, and again (especially since at the time it was relatively obvious that he was essentially retired): “So?”
You’re talking about not feeling bad for “kiss of death” jokes, and I’m mostly talking about not feeling the emotional need to make them. I suppose what I’m trying to convey is a lack of feeling. Part of what makes the death penalty so stupid in my eyes is the fact that we all face that particular oblivion and, as a function of the phenomenon itself, can’t live to regret it. There’s a reason death-row inmates are so suicide prone, which should convince anyone that death is not in itself an ultimate punishment. I hate to sound so Tralfamadorian, but so it goes.
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You’re forgetting that Canada has never had an embargo with Cuba. We and other non-US countries have helped them out plenty and will continue to do so. Did you know that in Cuba Terry Fox is considered a hero?
Plenty of Cubans have escaped to Canada and are quite accepting of Canada’s Cuban policy. I’ve known several who, once they receive Canadian citizenship, go back to the old country regularly for vacations.
Basically it’s the difference between supporting a country and supporting its government.
The Miami Cubans are, of course, something else again.
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Isn’t Ted Cruz a Canadian Cuban?
He doesn’t seem to be Castro’s biggest fan.
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