Castro

ByBelen Fernandez for Al Jazerra. As of the year 2006, Fidel Castro, Cuba's revolutionary leader, who has died aged 90, had reportedly been the subject of no fewer than 638 assassination plots by the CIA. Following the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959, the US political establishment labored to portray the country as not merely an ideological disaster, but also a bastion of malevolence and a downright existential threat. It is within this context that Fidel's legacy must be analysed. And it is this context that grants him legitimacy as a symbol of resistance against hegemony. Despite sensational braying over the decades about the Cuban menace, Castro never posed a physical threat to the US. Rather, the danger always lay in the example he set, which exposed the possibility of challenging the pernicious self-declared US monopoly over human existence - and for which he merits remembrance as a hero.