The meek shall inherit very little - Autocrats’ common characteristics

FIDEL CASTRO seized power in Cuba in 1959.

He died aged 90 last week but even in death he exercises authority as a gone-but-lingering puppeteer through a proxy, his brother Raúl. That power lives on also through an authoritarian state that does not tolerate difference. In some ways, Cuba is more like the caliphate IS fantasise about than a modern democracy. It may have exemplary health and education systems but opposition need not be recognised as it is not tolerated.

The millions of words written about Castro were, unsurprisingly, polarised. Some were nostalgic hagiography. Others reactionary diatribes. How else could it be? After all, it is impossible to be neutral about a man who encouraged the Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against America in 1963. El Comandante wanted to advance the proletariat by vaporising millions of workers who, by random fate, lived in America, the country that did so much for so very long to destroy his vision of Cuba.