Castro departs with lasting legacy

When Fidel Castro and his band of bearded rebels entered Havana just after New Year's Day 1959, Dwight Eisenhower was president of the United States, and few people questioned American hegemony in Latin America.

Castro soon declared himself a Communist, and nearly every government in the region joined the U.S. in condemning his regime. Two generations and nine American presidents later, Castro finally is stepping down as Cuba's leader - widely admired, even if his policies are not widely emulated.

Castro did not win his battle against what he called U.S. "imperialism," a struggle that has impoverished and isolated his people. But he did stick around long enough to see America's grip on the region weaken.

His revolution was, in many ways, the defining event of Latin American history in the 20th century, said Lorenzo Meyer, a professor at the Colegio de Mexico here. "There is no other leader who was able to confront the United States for half a century and survive."

For decades, Latin America was one of the front lines in the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. As Moscow's ally, Castro's Cuba stood at the opposite end from Washington, D.C., of the ideological tug-of-war for the region.

Today, every Latin American government except Cuba's has a democratically elected head of state. Falling trade barriers allow cash and commodities to flow across the region as never before, and the dollar even circulates as the official currency in El Salvador and Ecuador.

But the U.S. is far from triumphant. In some places, new players have emerged to challenge U.S. influence, including the oil-rich government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Even if they do not mirror Castro's policies, many of the region's leaders feel free to look elsewhere to ensure their countries' interests and embrace the same defiant rhetoric that marked Castro's early career. It was a rhetoric that attacked an "oligarchy" servile to foreign interests, most famously expressed in a 1953 speech Castro made while on trial for a failed uprising against the dictator Fulgencio Batista.

"We were born in a free country that our parents bequeathed to us," Castro said. "And the island will first sink into the sea before we consent to being the slaves of anyone."

The improbable triumph of Castro's rebels over Batista six years later inspired a generation of young men and women to mimic his guerrilla campaign: Cuba offered funding and training for their efforts, most of which were quixotic failures.

Castro's agents funded small guerrilla bands in Argentina, Peru and other countries that were crushed quickly. His closest collaborator, the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara, was killed in a disastrous attempt to launch a "continental revolution" in Bolivia.

Still, Castro's survival just across the Strait of Florida changed political calculations across the region.

"For Latin America, the steps taken by Cuban Revolution were a clear example that change was possible," said Jose Gabriel Vazeilles, an historian in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The Cuban regime, while imprisoning dissidents and transforming the island into a one-party state, also built model education and health programs.

The Kennedy administration responded with the "Alliance for Progress," a mini-New Deal designed to address poverty and illiteracy, and promote land reform. Billions of dollars in aid poured southward.

To stop the spread of Castro's so-called Communist menace to other countries, the U.S. backed some of the most violent dictatorships in the region's history, including the military junta responsible for 10,000 deaths in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. The CIA orchestrated a campaign to undermine the democratically elected leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, a Castro ally who was overthrown in a 1973 coup. (next page »)