Fidel’s Century: a Revolution, an Empire, and a Battle That Never Ends

A hundred years after his birth, Fidel Castro anchors the debate on sovereignty once again, in the face of advancing imperialism, with the far right in Latin America still trying to forge its own path. In an interview with Diario Red, Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Lautaro Rivara analyze the continued relevance of the Cuban leader’s thought.

By Camilo Ocampo — Aug 8, 2026

One hundred years ago, on August 13, 1926, in Birán—in the former province of Oriente, today the province of Holguín, Cuba—Fidel Castro Ruz was born. The revolutionary and internationalist leader’s influence and thought have transcended the borders of the island and of time.

Since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, Castro became one of the central figures of 20th-century Latin American politics. His leadership of Cuba, his confrontation with the United States, and his commitment to internationalism turned the island into a beacon and inspiration for political and social movements across the world.

The socialist commander grounded his ideals in the defense of sovereignty as the central axis of his political discourse and of the Cuban Revolution in a context marked by US interference in Latin America and the Caribbean. For Fidel, the self-determination of peoples was inextricably linked to resistance against imperialism.

A century after his birth, that battle seems more relevant than ever. US imperialism has modified its mechanisms of pressure and intervention, maintaining its presence in the region through new political, economic, and military strategies.

The genocidal blockade against Cuba—which for more than 60 years has conditioned the island’s economy and survival—now faces its most brutal offensive, with an energy, financial, and commercial siege while the rest of Latin America watches with astonishment the advance of the far right and a new conservative offensive aligned with Washington.

Updating Fidel’s thought
What relevance do Castro’s observations on imperialism—and the need to build regions capable of deciding their own path—have today?

For Paco Ignacio Taibo II, historian, writer, and director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, speaking of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution demands looking at the current landscape. In his view, imperialism did not disappear. It changed its forms and, today, confronts the region with a more aggressive offensive.

“The imperialism of the blockade that Fidel faced, of the assassination attempts, is nothing compared to the fascist imperialism of Donald Trump,” Taibo II asserted in an interview with Diario Red.

In the Cuban case, the situation has reached a critical point. “The blockade has been there for many years, but the latest phase—the one that cut off the Venezuelan-Mexican solidarity oil that was reaching the island—created an unbearable situation,” he said.

The lack of fuel has effects that go far beyond energy generation. “We have to think about cities in Cuba that have half an hour of electricity a day, at most. Think about hospitals without power, medicine without refrigeration, no transportation,” he said.

There are consequences for food distribution and workers’ mobility. For this reason, Taibo II maintains that the blockade’s objective cannot be understood purely as an economic measure: “This blockade is aimed at destroying the lives of Cubans.”

A noisy right and the loss of historical memory
The discussion about Cuba, he warns, takes place amid a broader information war. “The far right, the right, may be advancing or making noise, but we must not confuse their real advances with media debates,” he argues.

From his perspective, control of private media has contributed to amplifying certain narratives. “You look at the information through social networks, through newspapers, through television, and 70% of what you hear is garbage, outright lies.”

In his view, the advance of Trumpism has encountered limits in Mexico, despite the economic and political pressure exerted by the United States. “I think it has been checked,” Taibo II notes.

The dispute also finds expression in Mexico through the battle over memory. Taibo II recalls the removal of the statues of Fidel and Ernesto “Che” Guevara from the neighborhood of Tabacalera in Mexico City by the district mayor Alessandra Rojo de la Vega and questions why a representation of a historical episode was removed without, in his view, an adequate institutional response.

“Those statues were commemorating a historical fact,” he says. For the writer, the episode also illustrates the need to contest public space in the face of the far right’s advance.

This brings him to another challenge: reclaiming history for a generation that grew up far from the context in which the Cuban Revolution triumphed.

“This generation that has lost historical context,” he says — referring particularly to those between 15 and 35 years old, for whom “the word Cuba evokes who knows what.”

For this reason, he considers it necessary to tell that story again, and not, he said, by repeating slogans, but by explaining “where the Cuban revolution against Batista was generated, what it meant, and what the early years were.”

A century after the birth of Fidel Castro, Taibo II returns to the imperative need to recover the revolutionary leader’s thought. Today, he says, Fidel’s ideas about sovereignty, imperialism, and resistance take on new meanings in the face of forms of imperialism that differ from those the Cuban Revolution confronted.

“I think Fidel’s thought needs to be updated,” the writer says.

The “return” of something that never left
The continued relevance of Fidel Castro’s thought also reaches into geopolitics. Lautaro Rivara, historian and analyst specializing in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, believes that to understand the region’s present it is necessary to recover a concept that for years was sidelined from public debate: imperialism.

“We could say—with all the contradiction that it implies—that we are living the return of something that never left: imperialism and neocolonialism,” he argues.

For Rivara, the abandonment of the concept of imperialism after the fall of the Soviet Union did not mean the phenomenon disappeared. “The fact that important sectors of academia, the mass media and politics have abandoned the category of ‘imperialism’ does not mean the phenomenon has disappeared,” he maintains.

Although its mechanisms have changed, US power continues to operate in Latin America through various forms of intervention, dependency, and pressure. He also nuances the point: the landscape is not identical to the Cold War either.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, the subsequent rise of progressive governments, and the emergence of a tendentially multipolar world modified the geopolitical conditions. The old military dictatorships and the US National Security Doctrine gave way to new forms of intervention and dispute.

In this context, Rivara situates the so-called Shield of the Americas, promoted by Donald Trump, as an expression of this new phase. He described it as an alliance of ultra-conservative governments aligned with the White House that revives threats such as migration, drug trafficking, corruption, and so-called “unusual and extraordinary threats” to justify new modalities of US intervention.

The reference invokes a logic familiar from the Cold War. The US National Security Doctrine converted anti-communism into a justification for US political and military intervention in Latin America. Operating within that framework was also the School of the Americas—a US military training institution that for decades trained members of Latin American armed forces whose history became bound up with militarization and the region’s dictatorships.

For Rivara, current practices differ but retain the same underlying logic. Hence, some former presidents and intellectuals have spoken in recent years of a “new Plan Condor” or “Plan Condor 2.0.”

The far right and local elites
The other dimension of this dispute appears in the growth of Latin American far-right movements. Rivara warns that this cannot be explained solely by the internal dynamics of each country.

“Latin America and the Caribbean is unknowable through a purely national–state reduction,” he argues. For the analyst, the political transformations of each nation are traversed by regional and global dynamics of accumulation, exchange, and power.

The resurgence of supporters of Fujimori [Alberto Fujimori, the former dictator of Peru whose daughter, Keiko Fujimori, was recently named president] and Pinochet, he maintains, forms part of a radicalization of the dominant classes confronting the hegemonic crisis of the collective West with an exasperated, paranoid vision.

The emergence of the far right also has internal causes: the exhaustion of progressive reform agendas and the persistence of political actors linked to former dictatorships. Rivara adds international factors: US stimulus, the social effects of the pandemic, neoliberal exclusion, and the transformations brought about by techno-capitalism.

Adding to this dispute is an element that could reshape the regional map: China’s economic and commercial growth and the consolidation of the BRICS.

A region without common leadership
Faced with this offensive, the problem for the left and progressive governments is the absence of a regional strategy capable of responding in a coordinated manner.

Rivara acknowledges that Latin America has a more developed Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist consciousness along with integration mechanisms that would have seemed unthinkable a few decades ago. But he also points out their limits.

“The powerlessness of regional leadership is today evident,” he says, noting the difficulties facing various governments and integration projects.

The result is a moment of “lethargy” in state integration and a retreat of the political and social actors that have historically defended continental unity.

For this reason, recovering a central idea in Fidel’s thought means accepting that no Latin American country can face the pressures of the great powers alone.

“The only way to escape peripheral fatality is through the construction of greater united forces,” he argues. The multipolar world, he adds, may represent an opportunity—but “never as a guarantee.”

In this perspective, Fidel’s continued relevance lies not only in the slogans of the Cuban Revolution but in a question that remains open: how to build regional sovereignty on a continent where the economic, political, military, and media pressures of the great powers continue to shape the direction of its peoples.

An unstoppable march
A hundred years after Fidel Castro’s birth, various parts of the world have turned the date into an occasion to recover his legacy through conferences, book launches, exhibitions, gatherings, and documentary screenings dedicated to his life and to the impact of the Cuban Revolution.

In Mexico, as part of solidarity actions with Cuba, Fiedel Castro’s legacy has also been reclaimed through cinema. One such work is Fidel de Cerca, a documentary by filmmakers Eduardo Flores Torres, Gabriel Beristáin, and Cuban director Roberto Chile. The film moves away from chronological recounting to approach the man behind the figure through archival material and testimonies from family members, friends, collaborators, and various figures from Cuban political and cultural life. It seeks to look at Fidel beyond the uniform and the political speech and to reconstruct the strategist, the leader, and the human being.

A hundred years on, the discussion about Fidel does not end with his biography. It returns to the issues that ran through his political life: sovereignty, imperialism, solidarity, and Latin American integration.

In his last public speech, delivered at the Palace of Conventions on April 19, 2016, Fidel, aware that his time was running out, left us with a final reflection:

“Our turn will come for all of us, but the ideas of Cuban communists will remain as proof that on this planet, if one works with fervor and dignity, the material and cultural goods that human beings need can be produced—and we must fight without respite to obtain them.”

And, Fidel concluded, “we will set out on the march and perfect what we must perfect, with meridian loyalty and united strength, like Martí, Maceo and Gómez, in an unstoppable march.”