mica’s Reviews > Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History > Status Update

Despite his absence, news of Fidel's death on November 25, 2016, sent Cuba into shock. In a symbolic mirror image of his 1959 "caravan of victory," Fidel's ashes were taken by cavalcade from Havana back to Santiago, with crowds of tearful, flag-waving Cubans lining the way. His remains were interred in the Santa Ifigenia necropolis next to the tomb of his hero José Martí.

Che's martyrdom guaranteed his fate as an international super-star. Shortly before he died, the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda gave a portrait called Guerrillero Heroico to a left-wing Italian businessman who was visiting Havana. The image of Che staring beatifically into the distance was soon reproduced in Europe as a silkscreened poster and has become one of the modern era's most reproduced images.

He [Che] was executed on October 9. His last words to the man who volunteered for the job were, "I know you are here to finish me. Shoot, cow-ard, you are only going to kill a man." He was thirty-nine years old.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba fell into an economic crisis from which it has still not escaped; although the socialist system is slowly being modified, it remains isolated by the US trade embargo, a last fragment of the Cold War adrift in the tropics.

Another what-if proposition is more certain: history would surely have been different if Washington had not backed Batista throughout the 1950s. Cubans could never understand why the United States would abandon its noblest founding ideals to support a dictator who terrorized his own people.

It may be idle to speculate, but a more flexible attitude from the United States in 1959, and an attempt to understand what independence really meant to Cubans, might have taken advantage of the enormous reserves of goodwill that remained between the two coun tries. Instead, Washington insisted on its right to control the island.

By 1960, Fidel could see that a confrontation with the US was coming and began to seek out a new patron. The Soviet Union was eagerly waiting in the wings to buy Cuba's sugar and offer economic aid.

In 1959, American businesses owned almost every economic asset in the country, including the best land, the oil and telephone companies, power stations, and train lines. Fidel knew that Cuba would always be under US domination until the stranglehold was broken.

Soon afterward Che sent a message to the White House through interme-diaries, thanking JFK for organizing the botched invasion attempt, which had galvanized the Cuban population behind the new regime's most extreme measures.

When the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion occurred just after midnight on April 17, 1961, the Cuban population was already armed with Soviet-made weapons. Some 1,500 soldiers of fortune, mostly Cuban exiles, landed on the south coast; within three days 115 had been killed and the rest surrendered. It was a resounding defeat.