Castro, beginning to end

While trying to find any confirmation of the rumor that Fidel Castro had died (and finding none), I ran across an article about Castro's beginnings:

The world got its first real glimpse of Castro thanks to Herbert Matthews, the New York Times correspondent who traveled into the Sierra Maestra to interview him in February 1957. A few months earlier, Castro had landed in Cuba with a boatload of guerrillas determined to overthrow the widely despised regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista. The landing had gone badly, and by early 1957 Batista was claiming Castro and all his men were dead.

The dictator was wrong. But Matthews' story didn't get it absolutely right either. While he correctly predicted Batista's overthrow, he painted an overly rosy picture of the young Castro and his bearded troops.

Matthews was an enterprising foreign correspondent who got his feet wet in Spain during the civil war in the 1930s, befriending Ernest Hemingway and siding with the leftist cause. In Cuba, he found another underdog cause...

While DePalma argues that Matthews' 1957 articles did not "create Fidel from nothing," they changed his image "from hotheaded loser to noble rogue with broad ideals."

Matthews enjoyed exclusive access to the Castro government, providing him with unique insights into the revolution. But his obsession with being the only journalist who really knew what was going on in Cuba blinded him from uglier aspects of the revolution that did not fit his romantic ideals.

Castro's own lavish praise of Matthews didn't help, including during a famous visit to New York. "Without your help, the revolution in Cuba would not have succeeded," he remarked on a visit to the New York Times.

Draw your own conclusions.

The article then goes on to paint a less-than-optimistic picture for post-Castro Cuba:

With Castro, now almost 80, showing signs of deteriorating health, a post-Castro scenario is beginning to emerge more clearly...

For many years it was presumed that Castro's death would be the end of the revolution, and that a period of likely convulsion would follow. But communist Cuba's survival after the collapse of the Soviet bloc has defied its critics. Latell belongs to a growing school of academics who argue that the system in place in Cuba is more durable than previously recognized. Much of the credit for this belongs to Fidel's younger brother, Raul Castro, an often overlooked and underestimated figure.