Former Cuban President Fidel Castro is dead, Raul Castro, his brother and the country’s current president, announced early this morning on state television. Fidel Castro was 90.
Castro and his band of rebels toppled Fulgencio Batista, the dictator, in 1959, soon declared the revolution was communist, and spent the next several decades as a thorn on the side of the United States—just 90 miles from Florida. In the process, Castro, who stepped down from the presidency in 2006, outlasted 10 American presidents and almost outlasted an eleventh.
A hero to his supporters and to leftist movements around the world, Castro was nonetheless sharply criticized for his country’s dismal human-rights record. He was, as my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg wrote this morning, the last Cold Warrior. Jeff interviewed Castro in 2010 and his reporting of those conversations resulted in several revelations of Castro’s worldview—and his regrets. You can read those conversations here, here, here, and here—and a collection of Atlantic writings assessing Castro and his legacy here.
Donald Trump Says He Will 'Terminate' Cuba Deal Unless Revisions Are Made
(Joe Skipper / Reuters)
President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that he will “terminate” the deal with Cuba unless the Cuban government makes it “a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole.” Trump had previously not said if he would revisit the historic 2015 agreement that normalized relations between the two Cold War-era rivals. It’s unclear what Trump deems a “better deal” or whether the American companies flocking to Cuba in the aftermath of the normalization will support such a move.
If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal.
Fidel Castro’s long life spanned more than half of The Atlantic’s existence to date. Our first reference to the former Cuban president is unclear, but by 1969, contributor Emma Rothschild had journeyed to Havana to witness the revolution Castro had brought into being.
What she found was a city transformed under his rule. “The city streets are as clean as any in the world: ten minutes after Fidel spoke, the Plaza was filled with garbage men, sweeping and scrubbing the stones,” she wrote. “There are no police patrols: only the traffic cops, young girls in khaki miniskirts with sheriff's stars and cowboy boots.”
Of Castro and Cuba more broadly, Rothschild focused on the Caribbean nation’s efforts to be economically self-sufficient—an elusive goal for a nation that survived on large Soviet subsidies. But Rothschild was optimistic, impressed by the island’s revolutionary spirit and the fervor of its self-proclaimed liberator.
In the first decade of the Cuban Revolution, the old Cuba died; in the second, it is to be born again, to grow again like sugar in a field. The unspoken dialectic of Fidel's speech places nationalism and revolution side by side, and synthesizes them, through agricultural development, in the Cuban earth. Castro's language is heavy with an accretion of detail and anecdote, sounding at times like the Georgics of Virgil. "Once droughts have been overcome," he began, "once hurricanes have been coped with through the proper protection of crops; once plagues are eliminated and undergrowth cleared . . ." After ten years of stumbling progress, the country has experienced bitter deprivation. In Havana, strict rationing is now in effect; even the hours to be spent waiting in line for food are rationed. Yet the path of revolutionary development now seems determined. Cuba is to be an agricultural community, the garden of the world.
Those lofty goals did not come to pass. When contributor Stephen Kinzer visited the island in 1977, Cuba’s agricultural revolution had faltered. International prices for sugarcane, one of the country’s most important crops, had plunged. Economic malaise followed. What struck Kinzer was Castro’s ability to bring about large-scale structural changes in the Cuban command economy without dampening his revolutionary rhetoric.
The achievements of the Cuban revolution are familiar. No country in Latin America can yet match Cuba's accomplishments in housing, education, literacy, or health care. But less visible are the sacrifices the Cuban people have made for what they have built. In preparing for austerity, Cubans are not facing something unknown, but continuing a cycle of enforced sacrifice which has existed since the first days of the Castro era. Among his other talents, Castro is a master propagandist, and he has managed a feat that eludes most leaders: he has convinced his people that personal sacrifice is a patriotic duty.
In 1988, The Atlantic published “Havana’s Military Machine,” a dense survey of Cuba’s bloated military structure. By deploying battalions of Cuban doctors, soldiers, and advisors to Cold War hotspots throughout the Third World, Castro had carved out for himself an outsized role in international affairs. But, as John Hoyt Williams noted, those deployments did not come without social, political, and economic ramifications.
Castro's regiments saw only sporadic combat from 1977 to 1983, but their number continued to grow, stabilizing at 30,000-35,000 men and then swelling to 45,000, the level maintained today. In 1983 the majority of the Cuban combat units were encamped around Luanda, the capital; those in the field, however, were handled roughly by Savimbi, and in 1984 several thousand men died in large-scale clashes with the rebels. Since those bloody encounters, and owing in part to falling morale among MPLA conscripts, reportedly the Cuban military is beginning to replace Angolan military units in the battlefields of the south. Unfortunately for Cuba's minuscule (and declining) hard-currency reserves, the war-ravaged economy of Angola is drying up as a source of income. Some 3,000 East Germans and 1,500 Russians are also in Angola, but these men run the railroads, manage the economic infrastructure, and advise the Angolan Army and security forces. The Cubans do the fighting and the dying.
A number of elements have recently led to disillusionment within Cuba regarding the Angolan venture. One of these is race. Roughly 50 percent of the Cubans serving in Angola are blacks. Is this because almost all Angolans are black? Some Cubans wonder. So do some outsiders. The former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who spent time in Cuba as a fugitive, wrote despairingly as far back as 1976 that Castro had long displayed a habit of "shipping out to foreign wars the militant young black officers as a safety valve on the domestic scene," asserting that "as Africa runs out of wars of liberation, Fidel Castro runs out of dumping grounds" for his nation's large black minority. Even Cleaver, however, did not foresee that Castro would find a continuing, counterrevolutionary employment for his legions.
Even after the Cold War ended a few years later, Castro’s reputation as a staunch anti-imperialist endured. A central feature of the mythos surrounding him was his escape from countless assassination plots hatched by U.S. intelligence officials. In 2004, Max Holland explored how President Lyndon B. Johnson learned about the truth behind the CIA’s attempts, and how they shaped both his presidency and his views on JFK’s assassination.
Spurred on by the column, [Attorney General] Ramsey Clark finally did what Johnson had suggested during their conversation on February 20: he asked the FBI what it knew about the matter. On March 6 the FBI prepared what is surely one of the most astonishing memoranda in its history. The heading alone was enough to set hearts palpitating at the CIA: "Central Intelligence Agency's Intentions to Send Hoodlums to Cuba to Assassinate Castro." The FBI knew far less than it thought it did about the covert operation, but its information was reliable on three vital points: the CIA did try to have Castro assassinated during the early 1960s; it employed members of the Cosa Nostra in this effort; and Attorney General Robert Kennedy knew about both the plots and the mob's involvement. Before receiving this memo, Johnson had dismissed the rumor as no more credible than the idea that his wife was on drugs. Now he had to grapple with the implications of the revelation and what he should do about it, if anything.”
Castro had his own theories about the JFK assassination. In 2010, he read national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg’s cover story about Iran, Israel, and the dangers of a nuclear war with the U.S. in the Middle East and invited Goldberg to visit him in Havana. There, they discussed a multitude of issues—including Castro’s suspicion that Lee Harvey Oswald had not killed the American president.
Fidel told us at lunch—as he would—that none of his associates or officials had anything to do with the assassination, and that the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, which Oswald had visited, denied him permission to visit Cuba, fearing that he was a provocateur.
I asked Fidel why he thought Oswald could not have acted alone. He proceeded to tell the table a long and discursive story about an experiment he staged, after the assassination, to see if it were possible for a sniper to shoot Kennedy in the manner the assassination was alleged to have happened. “We had trained our people in the mountains during the war”—the Cuban revolution—“on these kind of telescopic sights. So we knew about this kind of shooting. We tried to recreate the circumstances of this shooting, but it wasn’t possible for one man to do. The news I had received is that one man killed Kennedy in his car with a rifle, but I deducted that this story was manufactured to fool people.”
He said his suspicions grew especially pronounced after Oswald was killed. “There was the story of Jack Ruby, who was said to be so moved by the death of Kennedy that he decided to shoot Oswald on his own. That was just unbelievable to us.”
That was only part of a much larger conversation—the only one Castro ever granted to an Atlantic correspondent—about world affairs. During his discussion with Goldberg, the aging former dictator said he regretted asking Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to attack the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He denounced anti-Semitism and its frequent expression by Iran’s then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And then he made a surprising remark about the viability of Cuba’s economic system.
I initially was mainly interested in watching Fidel eat - it was a combination of digestive problems that conspired to nearly kill him, and so I thought I would do a bit of gastrointestinal Kremlinology and keep a careful eye on what he took in (for the record, he ingested small amounts of fish and salad, and quite a bit of bread dipped in olive oil, as well as a glass of red wine). But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.
"The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," he said.
This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, "Never mind"?
I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, "He wasn't rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under 'the Cuban model' the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country."
A few days after Goldberg published the comment, Castro claimed the correspondent had misunderstood him and argued he instead meant “exactly the opposite,” which doesn’t make sense. In his obituary for Castro on Saturday, Goldberg argued Castro had likely wrestled with this fundamental question for most of his adult life.
But the point that he has tried to make for more than half-a-century—that the Cuban people are in better shape than the American people—always struck me as a reach. Assessed a certain way, Cuba’s achievements in health, in particular, can look impressive. But his state never stopped oppressing its own people. It still does, under his brother’s rule. But the Cuban model will not last forever, and this is what Fidel, in his final years, worried about the most.
Former Cuban President Fidel Castro’s death Saturday evoked a broad range of emotions from political leaders around the world. Here’s a general breakdown of their reactions.
Laudatory
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto: “I lament the passing of Fidel Castro Ruz, leader of the Cuban revolution and emblem of the 20th century.
Lamento el fallecimiento de Fidel Castro Ruz, líder de la Revolución cubana y referente emblemático del siglo XX.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro: “To all the revolutionaries of the world, we muar continue his legacy and his flag of independence, socialism, and homeland.”
A tod@s l@s Revolucionari@s del Mundo nos toca seguir con su Legado y su Bandera de Independencia,de Socialismo,de Patria Humana...
The death of #Fidel signals the end of an era. Our comrade is no more but his revolutionary legacy will remain with Namibia forever. pic.twitter.com/VX6v4AjQbw
It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.
Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.
While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for “el Comandante”.
I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.
On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.
Russian President Vladimir Putin: “The name of this distinguished statesman is rightly considered the symbol of an era in modern world history. Fidel Castro was a sincere and reliable friend of Russia.”
Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness:
At this time of Fidel Castro’s passing, we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people. We know that this moment fills Cubans - in Cuba and in the United States - with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.
For nearly six decades, the relationship between the United States and Cuba was marked by discord and profound political disagreements. During my presidency, we have worked hard to put the past behind us, pursuing a future in which the relationship between our two countries is defined not by our differences but by the many things that we share as neighbors and friends - bonds of family, culture, commerce, and common humanity. This engagement includes the contributions of Cuban Americans, who have done so much for our country and who care deeply about their loved ones in Cuba.
Today, we offer condolences to Fidel Castro’s family, and our thoughts and prayers are with the Cuban people. In the days ahead, they will recall the past and also look to the future. As they do, the Cuban people must know that they have a friend and partner in the United States of America.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson:
Fidel #Castro's death marks the end of an era for #Cuba & the start of a new one for Cuba's people
President Fidel Castro will be remembered for his leadership of the Cuban revolution and for advances in Cuba in the fields of education, literacy and health. His revolutionary ideals left few indifferent. He was a strong voice for social justice in global discussions at the UN General Assembly and international and regional forums.
Condemnatory
Vice President-elect Mike Pence:
The tyrant #Castro is dead. New hope dawns. We will stand with the oppressed Cuban people for a free and democratic Cuba. Viva Cuba Libre!
Trump: 'Fidel Castro's Legacy Is One of Firing Squads'
Mike Segar / Reuters
Following his brief remark on Twitter this morning, President-elect Donald Trump released a lengthier statement Saturday afternoon in which he sharply condemned Castro’s human-rights record and said he looks forward to helping Cubans “begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.”
Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.
While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.
Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty. I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.
Obama: 'We Extend a Hand of Friendship to the Cuban People'
President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro attend a baseball game in Cuba in March. (Carlos Barria / Reuters)
President Obama just released a measured statement on Fidel Castro’s death, noting the former Cuban leader’s broad impact on history while also extending “a hand of friendship” to the Cuban people as a whole.
Interestingly, the statement falls short of condemning Castro outright for his human-rights record, perhaps to preserve Obama’s diplomatic gains with Fidel’s brother Raul, or perhaps to deny Fidel the posthumous pleasure of a sitting U.S. president’s outrage.
At this time of Fidel Castro’s passing, we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people. We know that this moment fills Cubans - in Cuba and in the United States - with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.
For nearly six decades, the relationship between the United States and Cuba was marked by discord and profound political disagreements. During my presidency, we have worked hard to put the past behind us, pursuing a future in which the relationship between our two countries is defined not by our differences but by the many things that we share as neighbors and friends - bonds of family, culture, commerce, and common humanity. This engagement includes the contributions of Cuban Americans, who have done so much for our country and who care deeply about their loved ones in Cuba.
Today, we offer condolences to Fidel Castro’s family, and our thoughts and prayers are with the Cuban people. In the days ahead, they will recall the past and also look to the future. As they do, the Cuban people must know that they have a friend and partner in the United States of America.
Cubans in Miami rejoiced at the news that Fidel Castro’s death. Many Cubans left the island soon after the revolution; others came during the infamous Mariel Boatlift. Their numbers have steadily risen since the 1959 revolution that brought Castro to power. Although numerous polls show younger Cubans in Miami care little for the resentments their Cuban-born parents harbor toward Castro, there were several spontaneous celebrations when news of Castro’s death emerged.
Reaction from world leaders to Fidel Castro’s death was swift. President-Elect Donald Trump said: “Fidel Castro is dead!” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Castro a “remarkable leader.” Chinese President Xi Jinping said China had lost “an intimate and sincere friend,” and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said the Cuban leader promoted bilateral relationships based on “respect, dialogue and solidarity.” Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, said his country “mourns the loss of a great friend.”
Vice President Vance is worried that the U.S. is running low on weapons.
In closed-door meetings, J. D. Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles.
Two senior administration officials told us that the vice president has queried the accuracy of the information the Pentagon has provided about the war. He has also expressed his concerns about the availability of certain missile systems in discussions with President Trump, several people familiar with the situation told us. The consequences of a dramatic drawdown in munitions reserves are potentially dire: U.S. forces would need to draw from these same stockpiles to defend Taiwan against China, South Korea against North Korea, and Europe against Russia.
For a brief moment this weekend, the president appeared introspective.
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For a guy who had just been rushed out of a ballroom at the sound of gunfire, he seemed remarkably calm. For a president who regularly attacks the press, he seemed unusually gracious. For a fleeting period on Saturday night, Donald Trump appeared introspective, or at least as introspective as he’s capable of being in public.
“It’s always shocking when something like this happens,” he told reporters in the White House briefing room, standing in his tux and appearing to speak without notes. He briefly seemed to consider how familiar he was with threats to his life, and how the shock doesn’t fade: “Happened to me a little bit. And that never changes.”
The legal right spent decades empowering the presidency. Now it must reckon with the system it helped create.
Julius Caesar styled himself as a servant of the republic, claiming to speak for the people even as he disregarded laws and norms to govern by caprice. The Roman republic did not survive him.
The second Trump administration has revealed American Caesarism in nearly full bloom. Despite ambitions to fundamentally change the course of the country, this administration has no real legislative agenda. Instead, the president governs by executive orders, emergency decrees, and extortionate transactions, using his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He’s launched foreign military adventures and full-blown wars seemingly based on personal whim, and has made the military a political prop and a tool for domestic law enforcement. With Congress sidelined and the courts reluctant to check Donald Trump’s excesses, America has been left with what some legal scholars have described as an “executive unbound”—and with a president who threatens to supplant the republic in all but name.
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
The pontiff has proved unwilling to subordinate his faith to politics, or to adjust his commitment to the Gospel in exchange for access to power.
American presidents and popes have clashed before, but the battle of words and wills between Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV is unprecedented.
The distinctiveness of their clash is not due mainly to the fact that Robert Francis Prevost is the first American-born pope, though that is significant. After all, Leo can’t be dismissed as a foreigner who is speaking about a country and culture he doesn’t understand. When he is critical of America, on matters ranging from war to mass deportation to those who “manipulate religions and the very name of God,” it comes from a place of love and devotion.
Nor does it have to do solely with the nature of the disagreements, most specifically the war waged by Trump against Iran. Past popes have criticized past presidents for going to war.
What makes the Trump-Leo collision most unusual is the manner of the disagreement, not on the part of the pope—whose criticisms have been direct but restrained—but on the part of the president.
The shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner made clear who gets saved first.
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On one level, the system worked. The perimeter held. A would-be assassin was tackled in the hallway outside the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner. The one bullet that found a human target—a U.S. Secret Service agent—was halted, in part, by the officer’s phone and bulletproof vest, according to a law-enforcement summary report that we reviewed. A counterassault team promptly swarmed the stage with assault rifles and night-vision equipment in case the lights were cut. The government’s top leaders—president, vice president, Cabinet officials, speaker of the House—were ushered to secure locations in a matter of minutes. No one died in the attack.
Instead of a crackdown on his enemies, Trump wants his ballroom.
When an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk in September 2025, the MAGA movement seized the moment to demand a campaign of repression. Vice President Vance called for an ambitious program to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” He named the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and The Nation magazine as examples of candidates for the retaliation he had in mind. The people who faced consequences after the killing almost universally did so for things they had written or said, not for acts of violence. In November, Reuters counted some 600 cases of people who were fired, suspended, or otherwise disciplined for their speech about Kirk’s life and death.
Now another gunman has attacked political targets. At the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a man discharged a firearm in the vicinity of hundreds of people from the worlds of politics, media, and business—among them, the president and vice president of the United States. Although much about the event remains unclear, the available evidence suggests that the gunman was motivated by an anti-Trump agenda. Yet this time, MAGA’s immediate response to political violence has been much less aggressive. At his press conference after yesterday’s attempted shooting, President Trump cited the attack as proof of the need for his wished-for White House ballroom. Social-media accounts that take their cues from the White House promptly echoed the message.
The administration could exert much greater control over the industry—but just how far would it go?
AI companies are beginning to entertain the possibility that they could cease to exist. This notion was, until recently, more theoretical: A couple of years ago, an ex-OpenAI employee named Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote a lengthy memo speculating that the U.S. government might soon take control of the industry. By 2026 or 2027, Aschenbrenner wrote, an “obvious question” will be circling through the Pentagon and Congress: Do we need a government-led program for artificial general intelligence—an AGI Manhattan Project? He predicted that Washington would decide to go all in on such an effort.
Aschenbrenner may have been prescient. Earlier this year, at the height of the Pentagon’s ugly contract dispute with Anthropic, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned that he could invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA), a Cold War–era law that he reportedly suggested would allow him to force the AI company to hand over its technology on whatever terms the Pentagon desired. The act is one of numerous levers the Trump administration can pull to direct, or even commandeer, AI companies. And the companies have been giving the administration plenty of reason to consider doing so.
The Israeli prime minister’s focus is, as always, on himself and his near-term political needs. The plight of American Jews is simply not his concern.
The relationship between the United States and Israel is in crisis. Six in 10 Americans have a negative view of Israel, and a majority of those under 50 in both major parties view Israel as well as its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, negatively. After the brutal Gaza war, a large percentage of liberal-leaning Generation Z considers Israel a pariah state. Democratic candidates are scrambling to distance themselves from Israel and its controversial leader; earlier this month, 40 of the 47 Democratic senators voted against a military aid package for the country. And hostility toward Israel is spilling over into hostility toward Jews. Liberal influencers, activists, podcasters, and even politicians are invoking age-old anti-Semitic tropes with frightening regularity.
The people we were died at the exact moment our child did.
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My husband, David, hates Valentine’s Day. He once called it “New Year’s Eve with nuclear weapons.” I pretend not to care. Still, when the day passes entirely unremarked on, a woman can’t help but feel overlooked.
On Valentine’s Day 2024, David found a way out. He booked a speech on February 14 that required traveling from our home in Washington, D.C., to Toronto. I couldn’t object—he was getting paid. Anyway, I had my own plans: an “anti–Valentine’s Day” dinner hosted by one of the foreign embassies.
As I got ready, I called our oldest daughter, Miranda. She answered from her Brooklyn bathroom, getting ready for her own party. She propped her phone up beside her sink and laughed when I told her about her father’s strategic Valentine’s Day escape.
