--- title: What Fidel Castro Meant to Cuba’s Youth description: To the young Havanans, Fidel Castro was, similarly, an abstraction. canonical: https://time.com/4585586/fidel-castro-young-cubans/ author: Julia Cooke article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-11-30T15:09:48.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:54:55.179Z article:section: Ideas og:title: What Fidel Castro Meant to Cuba’s Youth og:description: He was an abstraction og:url: https://time.com/4585586/fidel-castro-young-cubans/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt687a76478d784514/6988b003bc6cfc01a73df73d/fidel-youth-facebook.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1867 og:image:height: 1050 og:image:alt: CUBA-CASTRO-DECEASE-HOMAGE og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: What Fidel Castro Meant to Cuba’s Youth twitter:description: He was an abstraction twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt687a76478d784514/6988b003bc6cfc01a73df73d/fidel-youth-facebook.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # What Fidel Castro Meant to Cuba’s Youth > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: Fidel Castro Dies Aged 90 [Watch (HLS stream): Fidel Castro Dies Aged 90](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/GhhftOhs.m3u8) (3:37)  _Published 2016-11-26. Former President Fidel Castro, who led a rebel army to improbable victory in Cuba, embraced Soviet-style communism and defied the power of 10 U.S. presidents during his half century rule, has died at age 90._ by [Julia Cooke](https://time.com/author/julia-cooke/) ## Julia Cooke Nov 30, 2016 3:09 PM UTC  A girl holds a sign reading "I am Cuba, Fidel, Revolution" as Cubans gather at Revolution Square to pay homage to Fidel Castro in Havana, on Nov. 29, 2016. A girl holds a sign reading "I am Cuba, Fidel, Revolution" as Cubans gather at Revolution Square to pay homage to Fidel Castro in Havana, on Nov. 29, 2016. Rodrigo Arangua—AFP/Getty Images by [Julia Cooke](https://time.com/author/julia-cooke/) ## Julia Cooke Nov 30, 2016 3:09 PM UTC They used to be the first band of attendees to greet a television camera on May Day, young Cubans standing in front of the million people at the plaza, smiling and screaming in the dawn light, waving multi-colored arms like bunting over the crowd barriers, wearing red t-shirts distributed the night before. The place of pride, closest to the cameras and to [Fidel Castro](http://time.com/4305653/fidel-castro-life-in-pictures/?iid=sr-link1), was reserved for the young. They proved something essential, as Fidel aged through the early 2000s: that the revolution was not the exclusive province of the old and gray. Never mind that few of them wanted to be there more than once, if at all, and even then they came for the pride and thrill of the march to the plaza. Never mind that attendance at a certain number of these all-night affairs was compulsory. For the cameras, they served their purpose. To the young Havanans, Fidel was, similarly, an abstraction. For the young, Fidel was a grandparent’s comment that things had been different before, that the seventies and eighties had been better, not like now, with mass enthusiasm exhausted. Fidel was the twentysomething’s cavity filled at the dentist’s—free—and a taste for rice and beans because it was quite literally all he’d eaten as a kid in the years after the U.S.S.R.’s fall. Fidel was the power invoked when the matriarch from whom I rented an under-the-table room tapped her shoulder silently, indicating the military stature of the man who’d rung the doorbell during our daily lunch, that he was impossible to turn away but perilous to have in the house. Fidel was also the eye roll and the _pffffffft_ sound her 22-year-old son made as he followed me into my room to wait quietly until the man departed. Fidel was the trio of cars that sped around the bend of the _malecón_ and the sense that, were you to get in its way while crossing the street, the caravan might well run you over and keep going. In their short lifetimes, the dignity he’d once represented for standing up to corrupt powers had given way to more prosaic concerns, as the revolution’s schools struggled to attract teachers, ration cards became objects of fiction rather than fact and friends, and family scattered across the globe. To the majority of young Cubans, Fidel was a historical but not human figure, a grandfather of fable rather than flesh. He, and the system he put in place, was to be respected and then disobeyed and then, if luck prevailed, left behind. If Fidel was an abstraction to the young in life, he remains so in death. His death is a quiet mood suffusing the city, a photo posted on Facebook of an American newscaster and her crew on an otherwise empty street, an absence of stimulus that contrasts with the complicated grief of the elderly. Without the infrastructural economic changes for which they have been waiting—the legalization of more jobs, of private practice for professionals, of a wholesale market for restaurants and bed and breakfasts, to name only a very few—Fidel’s death means not a great deal to the young. 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