Fidel Castro survived numerous US efforts to eliminate him and overthrow his government, succumbing in the end to a lengthy illness. His influential but highly complex legacy was heavily influenced by the US’s behaviour.

Eighteen months after taking power in 1959, Castro turned to the USSR, positioning Cuba as a junior member of the Soviet imperial alliance and taking its bureaucratic communist system as his political and economic model to implement on the island.

As Che Guevara explained in an interview, Castro’s decision was as much the result of US constraints as the revolutionary leadership’s political and ideological choice. And as long as the Soviet bloc massively subsidised the Cuban economy, the Castro regime was able to provide an austere but secure standard of living that guaranteed Cubans’ basic needs, particularly in the areas of health and education, in spite of recurrent shortages of consumer goods and a chronic housing shortage.

This was accompanied by a substantial degree of social mobility, facilitated, in great part, by the departure of the upper and an important part of the middle classes. This mobility, plus the elimination of racial segregation, undoubtedly improved the lot of the island’s black population, although the “colour blind” ideology of his government and the lack of affirmative action policies kept alive an institutional racism that became aggravated with the development of the tourist industry in particular, which clearly discriminated in favour of white Cubans.

But it was the provision of the basic necessities and a significant degree of social mobility that formed the backbone of the popular support for Castro’s regime, a support that was strengthened with the revival of a popular anti-imperialism that had been dormant in the island since the 1930s.

Castro’s most significant contribution to the communist model was his ability to channel popular support into popular mobilisation. But while encouraging popular participation, he actively prevented popular democratic control and maximised his personal political power instead.

It was provision of basic necessities and social mobility that formed the backbone of popular support for Fidel’s regime

He freely utilised repression, not just against class enemies and US agents, but against anybody who presented a threat to his one-party rule, whether from inside or outside the revolutionary ranks. His personal control from the top was a major source of economic irrationality and waste. His campaign for a 10 million-ton sugar crop in 1970 was economically disastrous, and not only failed to achieve its goals but greatly disrupted the rest of the economy. His “battle of ideas” campaign shortly before he left office was economically incoherent and suffered from his intrusive style of micromanagement.

After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the performance of the economy fell precipitously. It has recovered since then, and has surpassed the GDP it achieved in 1989. But other important indicators such as real wages and pensions, which in 2014 were still at 27% and 50% of their 1989 level, have not, while social spending has continued to decline. Many of the revolution’s gains that were made in education and health have been lost.

In the educational system, the massive loss of teachers fleeing from the low pay prevailing in the educational sector has only been partially recovered, and private tutoring (often provided by public school teachers in their spare time) has grown exponentially. Numerous hospital facilities, school buildings, libraries and laboratories are in a serious state of disrepair. At the beginning of the current school year, 350 school buildings were closed because they were a threat to health and safety.

Outside of Cuba, support for Castro came not so much from his alliance with the USSR and adoption of communism, but on his persistent challenge to the US empire with his support of movements abroad against the local ruling classes and American imperialism. Yet while it is true that Fidel Castro remained firmly opposed to US imperialism until he died, his Cuban foreign policy, especially after the late 60s, stemmed more from his defence of Cuban state interests than from the pursuit of anti-capitalist revolution, as such.

Under the pressure of a USSR intent on avoiding any interference with the US sphere of influence in Latin America, Castro reduced his support for guerrilla warfare in Latin America. That is why in the 1970s he turned to Africa, knowing that his policies in that continent were strategically more compatible with Soviet interests, in spite of their many tactical disagreements in that area.

This also explains why Cuba’s African policy had quite different implications for Angola and apartheid South Africa, where it was generally on the left, than for the Horn of Africa, where it was not. Castro supported a “leftist” bloody dictatorship in Ethiopia and indirectly helped that government in its efforts to suppress Eritrean independence, mostly because the Ethiopian dictatorship had taken the side of the Soviet Union in the cold war. Similar reasons led Castro to support the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and, at least implicitly, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The Guardian view on Fidel Castro: man of history | Editorial Read more

In terms of his political talent, Fidel Castro was not versed in Marxism, not even, as in the case of Che Guevara, in its Stalinist version. Instead, he was steeped in the politics of Cuban populist nationalism. But most of all he was a canny revolutionary politician, and although he did not particularly distinguish himself as a strategist, he was a master tactician able to sense where the political wind was blowing and take advantage of it, domestically and internationally.

It was his tactical skills that made his political leadership the single most important factor in Cuba’s history since the late 1950s. His legacy, however, has been fading with the changes introduced in the Cuban economy by his brother, Raúl, towards the implementation of the Sino-Vietnamese model, combining political authoritarianism with an opening to the capitalist marketplace.

The role that foreign capital and political powers such as the US, Russia and China are likely to play in this process seriously threatens the prospects for Cuban national sovereignty – perhaps the only unambiguously positive element of Fidel Castro’s legacy. Barack Obama’s policies have signified a degree of recognition of that sovereignty. It is uncertain what Donald Trump’s policies will be in this regard, although the appointment of Mauricio Claver-Carone, a Cuban-American extreme rightwinger, to his transition team is a very ominous sign.