Rory Carroll and Jonathan Watts have offered a rather sour assessment of Fidel Castro’s legacy (Castro’s legacy: how the revolutionary inspired and appalled the world, 26 November) which mostly ignores Cuba’s enormous contribution as an inspiring model of development. Yes, Cuba is materially poor, but it is socially rich and has shared that wealth internally and internationally. Under his leadership, illiteracy and tuberculosis in Cuba were quickly eradicated and unprecedented models of healthcare and education created that are the envy of the world.

A small island nation of 11 million people, blockaded by the world’s last superpower, has punched well above its weight in terms of humanitarianism. The Cuban Henry Reeve contingent has intervened in disasters and emergencies around the world to save 80,000 lives in 20 countries where 7,000 Cuban health specialists have offered their services. Cuba helped break the back of apartheid South Africa. More recently, Cuba has helped broker the peace agreement in Colombia, thus ending one of the longest-running conflicts in the hemisphere. Fidel taught the world an important lesson: that the real wealth of any country is its people and material resources are best applied to addressing social need. In the so-called “developed world” still grappling with recession and austerity post-2008, we could perhaps follow Cuba’s lead and prioritise social justice and compassion over profit and greed.

Stephen McCloskey

Director, Centre for Global Education

• Many on the left of politics have been paying tribute to Fidel Castro because of the socialist aspects of Cuba under his rule. But given that Castro’s Cuba is also strongly associated with abuses of human rights and restrictions on liberal values, it doesn’t make sense for the political left to sympathise with, and praise him. Either such abuses of human rights are necessary for establishing that kind of socialist state or they are not. If they are necessary then the example of Cuba has shown that such a socialist state is unacceptable as a social system. If they are not necessary, then by committing such human rights abuses in Cuba, so that they become associated with the idea of a socialist state, Castro has unnecessarily caused significant damage to that idea. But either way, Castro hasn’t helped the socialist cause and shouldn’t be lauded as one of its champions.

David Wall

Northampton

• The vitriol surrounding the death of Fidel Castro is only possible because of the rewriting of history and forgetting that every time a progressive government emerged in Latin America the US – by direct or covert means – sought its destruction.

Currently Cuba’s under-five mortality rate is 1,204 per million, which is the lowest in Latin America and half the rate of seven other countries. Unlike Cuba, the US did not meet the UN Millennium goals of reducing child deaths (0-4) and currently Cuba’s rate is 15% lower than the US rate at 1,384pm. If, in this century, the US had had the same child death rate as Cuba there would on average have been 5,539 fewer dead American children. For the average child it’s better to be born a Cuban than in the US.

Prof Colin Pritchard

Southampton

• While many of us admire the Cuban revolution and the changes it brought by overthrowing the US-backed brutal dictator Batista, and the wonderful health and education systems, I’m not sure that many Cubans wanted to replace one dictator with another or even that Che Guevara ever thought that he fought so that Castro could cede power to his brother as if Cuba were a monarchy. Many leftists still support brutal dictators like Assad. It is time for a democratic left that stands for the people.

Mohammed Samaana

Belfast

• Without presenting myself as an apologist for Castro, let’s get a little perspective here. Despite history being rewritten by the bitter dispossessed mafia-type businessmen who were thrown out of Cuba, Castro’s revolution deposed the worst dictator in Latin America who was hellbent on turning Cuba into the world’s leading supplier of prostitutes (11,500 in Havana alone), drugs and gambling opportunities. Neither the police force nor government officials would do anything without a bribe, and Batista (who himself came to power in a violent coup) made the mafiosi families immensely rich while the people starved.

Ejected from the country and their mansions and assets confiscated, they finished up in Florida from where they have conducted a 58-year-long propaganda war, brokered over 500 failed assassination attempts, attempted a pathetic invasion, stole the Barcadi and Tropicana brands from Cuba and generally ensured that its fruit and sugar rotted in the fields.

On the plus side, education was among the best in the region, exceeding even the US for literacy rates. There was healthcare for everyone, more doctors were trained than anywhere else, and sent to help in disasters and epidemics worldwide. Everyone in Cuba was fed, at least up to the standards of wartime rationed Britain. There was little they could not have achieved in economic terms had it not been for the blockade.

Dorian Kelly

Colchester

• Castro leaves a mixed legacy. It was Cuban military support of Angola, in particular the role played by Cuban-piloted MiG fighter planes, that halted the advance of the South African apartheid regime’s military into Angola at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. This military and psychological defeat helped lead to the independence of Namibia, hence Nelson Mandela’s comment that the battle “marked an important step in the struggle to free the continent and our country of the scourge of apartheid”.

Paul Brannen MEP

Labour

• Perfect timing for the Xmas shopping frenzy: “The consumer society is the expression of a completely irrational mode of life and consumption, and it will never serve as a model for the 10 billion people who will supposedly inhabit the planet when the dreadful oil age is over. That economic order and those models of consumption are incompatible with the world’s limited and non-renewable essential resources ... They also clash with the elementary principles of ethics, culture and moral values.”

– Fidel Castro: My Life

Mike Bor

London

• These dreadful Cubans putting people in prison on that island without trial. Our American allies would never do that.

Eric Clyne

Arbroath

• Fidel Castro must have had the last laugh when he saw that the United States had chosen Donald Trump as their new president.

Ivor Yeloff

Norwich

• The question is: did Castro Fidel while Raul learned?

Dave Shields

Rugby

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