Napoleon is said to have remarked that if only a cannonball had hit him when he was riding into Moscow in 1812, he would have gone down in history as the greatest man who ever lived. In similar fashion, Fidel Castro outlived the moment of his greatness, if not the romance of his appeal.

Fidel. A single word suffices to evoke the man who descended from the Sierra Maestra with his ragtag army to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, purge Cuba of American domination, proclaim the empowerment of the poor, and embody Latin America’s thirst for an end to government by the pampered coteries of imperialism.

His message in its moment was electric. Fidel was the bearded hero of the voiceless “pueblo.” An unequal, corrupted continent was ripe for revolution; Ernesto “Che” Guevara set out from Havana in the mid-1960s to foment it.

Scarcely a nation in Latin America escaped the storm, from the Chile of Salvador Allende to the Nicaragua of the Sandinista revolution in 1979, from Argentina’s vicious military crackdown on leftists with its tens of thousands of “disappeared” to Brazil’s harsh government of the generals. The ideological potency of Fidel’s victory was singular.