Castro Outlived Him

The death of Hugo Chavez (1954-2013), the most recent South American leader to carry the flag of socialism, was born when Fidel Castro, born in 1926, was twenty-eight years of age. The year of Chavez’s birth was also the beginning year of the Cuban Revolution when Castro, who had fled to Mexico after imprisonment in Cuba, participated in the re-formation of the 26th of July Movement, named after the date, in 1953, when Castro attacked the Moncada Barracks with some followers in Santiago, Cuba. We live, here in the United States, in a kind of cultural isolation as vast stretches of humanity follow quite different destinies. And Chavez is known to us principally because, for political purposes, he was at least in speeches and such antagonistic to the United States… Castro is 86, Chavez died at 58.