Donate NowPBS NewsHour takes us to Cuba after Fidel Castro’s death to report on the cruelty and charisma that the former president used to dominate his country for half a century. Along the route that his ashes traveled from Havana to Santiago, multiple generations of Cubans express none of the Castro loathing heard in the United States—only love. But outside the cities, impoverished Cubans who feel more free to criticize their government say the economic promises of the revolution have not been fulfilled. Dissidents describe how Cubans can criticize the government, but only generically, and not in public demonstrations. That doesn’t mean, though, that Cubans haven’t figured out ways to evolve. Cubans trade hard drives full of the entertainment unavailable to them online or on television. And half a million Cubans have joined the private sector, making exponentially more than government employees and, in so doing, are challenging the revolution’s socialist principles. Moving forward, the Cuban government will need to maintain the safety net of free education and health care that so many Cubans hold up as the revolution’s greatest legacies, but at the same time ease widespread economic frustration that Castro’s policies helped create.
