Castro's legacy

摘要

He has been the great survivor of world politics. When Fidel Castro marched into Havana in January 1959 at the head of his troop of bearded revolutionaries, Dwight Eisenhower, Harold Macmillan and Nikita Khrushchev were all in power, and the Beatles were yet to come. Ensconced in his Communist-run island, Castro has weathered ten American presidents and their economic embargo against him. He has outlasted by almost two decades the cold war and his former sponsor, the Soviet Union-long enough to benefit from a new era of anti-Americanism in which Hugo Chavez in oil-rich Venezuela has come to his aid. And now, at last, he is stepping down as Cuba's president, for reasons of age and ill-health, but of his own volition and with what he clearly hopes will be an orderly succession that preserves his revolution.