IT probably would not be considered particularly ageist to contend that no nation’s fortunes ought to be linked to a supreme leader having been in office for several decades.

Yet there was something distinctly unpleasant about the jubilations in Miami that greeted the announcement in Havana that Fidel Castro was going on sick leave for the first time since he assumed power in 1959. Although the relevant statement about intestinal bleeding following an operation — reportedly on account of a stomach tumour — came from Castro himself, it did little to dampen speculation that the president may already be dead, or at least dying.

Although the available evidence does not necessarily favour such a conclusion, to many of Castro’s detractors his demise would signal the death of the revolution he led 47 years ago. Others believe that several aspects of the revolution will be preserved, at least in the short to medium term, even without Fidel at the helm. In truth, there’s more than an element of wishful thinking in both these opinions. No one really knows what lies ahead.

Much will depend, of course, on what the United States has in mind. For nearly five decades it has sought to undermine the revolution — with some success. The embargo it slapped on the tiny Caribbean island in 1961 remains in place: it has, on occasion, been tightened but never relaxed. The relentless blockade by Cuba’s giant neighbour denied the island’s economy the opportunity of developing under normal conditions. For nearly three decades, it relied mainly on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for trade (and aid). Meanwhile, the embargo gave the regime in Havana a standing excuse for poor economic performance — an excuse that was invariably widely accepted, because it was always at least partially valid.

Once Cuba lost its communist trading partners towards the beginning of the 1990s, the revolution attracted obituarists by the dozen. Their predictions of the Castro administration’s imminent demise proved premature as Cuba entered what was officially designated a Special Period. This involved belt-tightening, but also leeway on a limited scale for private enterprise, as well as an increasing focus on tourism, rather than sugar, as the economic mainstay.

Against the odds, Cuba pulled through — and it managed to do so without sacrificing the revolution’s most noteworthy gains: free education up to university level and a system of health care that is not only the envy of the Third World but also more efficient than state-operated medicare facilities in many developed countries. Cuba’s doctor-patient ratio of 1:170 is superior, for instance, to the 1:188 average in the US. The average life expectancy of Cubans is 77.3 years; in the US, the figure is 77.4 (and five years lower for African-Americans).

Similarly, in terms of infant mortality, Cubans are only marginally worse off than the citizens of the world’s richest country. There is, however, one significant difference between the two: the US annually spends $5711 per person on health; the comparative Cuban cost is $251.

A month ago, the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which was set up by the Bush administration in 2003, issued a report claiming that “chronic malnutrition, polluted drinking water and untreated chronic diseases continue to affect a significant percentage of the Cuban people”, adding that “conditions will not improve as long as Fidel Castro remains in power”.

This must have come as a surprise to the United Nations, which recently declared Cuba to be the only country in Latin America where there is no malnutrition - despite, one might add, chronic shortages, although conditions have noticeably improved in recent years and the CIA Fact Book attributes a hardly unhealthy growth rate of eight per cent to the Cuban economy.

The spurt is due in no small measure to Cuba’s close relationship with Venezuela, which provides petroleum to the island in exchange for medical expertise. However, the oil is a kind of bonus: most of the humanitarian missions Cuba operates in 68 countries earn nothing more tangible than goodwill.

Its generosity in flying across hundreds of teams of doctors as well as medical equipment has widely been acknowledged in Pakistan; what is perhaps less well known is that when the final batch of medical workers returned to Havana, Castro turned up at the airport to thank them in person.

The internationalist spirit has been evident in Cuba since the earliest days of the revolution, and there was a time when it included armed assistance. The US inevitably sought to portray Cuba as a Soviet proxy in the context of military missions, but that wasn’t always the case. At Nelson Mandela’s inauguration a dozen years ago, while embracing his Cuban counterpart the new South African president reportedly whispered, “You made this possible” — a reference to the crucial role played by Cuban soldiers in reversing South African aggression against Angola, a defeat that is acknowledged to have abbreviated apartheid’s life-span.

The CIA, meanwhile, was passionately devoted to the idea of abbreviating Castro’s life-span: by Havana’s reckoning, it was involved in no fewer than 638 plots to bump off the Cuban leader, following an abortive attempt to strangle the revolution in its infancy in 1961. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the embargo were ostensibly a response to the revolutionary government’s decision to nationalise the industries owned and operated by US multinationals such as United Fruit. There was, of course, more to it than that. In Washington’s view, the primary concern in such circumstances revolves around the likelihood of an example that other nations might emulate.

Cuba established an unacceptable precedent by choosing independence over the neocolonial status that had characterised it since the turn of the century. Worse still, it turned into the first communist state in the western hemisphere.

These were paths it could not be allowed to follow, not only because the idea of a communist entity 90 miles from Florida stuck in Uncle Sam’s craw, but also because of the risk that other semi-dependencies in the region the US regarded at its backyard may be tempted to follow suit.

However, for a variety of reasons — including Soviet support, as well as the fact that revolutionary Cuba’s armed forces evolved from Castro’s Rebel Army, which relegated the possibility of a coup by US-trained officers — the change that Cubans had opted for could not be reversed, despite the collective punishment meted out by Washington over the decades. Other Latin American countries — Guatemala under the reformist Jacobo Arbenz, Salvador Allende’s Chile, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas — were not so fortunate, despite the fact that each of them boasted a popularly elected government. US support for the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002 suggests that the regional hegemon’s preferred strategy for regime change remains intact.

Many of these lessons were not lost on Cuba, which has steered clear of multi-party democracy. That is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a commendable achievement. Restrictions on the freedom of _expression fall in the same category: open debates on policy and strategy would arguably have benefited Cuba in numerous ways. Similarly, prisoners of conscience can hardly be construed as an advertisement for Cuban socialism.

Deplorable aspects of the Cuban revolutionary experience do, however, need to be put in perspective. Subversion from across the Florida Straits cannot lightly be dismissed as a spectre that the communist authorities in Havana conjured up as a means of entrenching their dictatorship.

In fact, that aspect of the geopolitical reality will acquire even greater significance in a post-Castro scenario: however appealing the idea of an open democracy, it will inevitably involve the influx of millions of dollars - accompanied, of course, by a plethora of free-market strategies — from Miami and Washington. What are the prospects of the Communist Party as well as local groups of dissidents, whose anti-communism in many cases does not extend to a blanket disapproval of the revolution’s achievements, standing a chance against the imported chimera of instant prosperity?

Well before Castro bowed out, the US had already appointed a “transition coordinator” for Cuba. The “freedom” and “democracy” that Washington has in store would, in all likelihood, entail a return of sorts to the pre-revolutionary era, when Cuba was a coveted playground for all manner of American gangsters and pimps while the local population put up with indignities and profound inequities.

The ideal alternative would be a social democracy that consolidates revolutionary gains while dispensing with the repressive apparatus that has allowed ideologically motivated propagandists to dismiss the island as a tyranny. But even if that should come to pass, will it be sustainable?

Notwithstanding the autocratic aspects of Castro’s rule, the depiction of him as a tyrant was always a gross caricature: repression in Cuba never came close to scaling the heights reached by US client states in the region, and even today by a long stretch the most atrocious facilities in Cuba are concentrated on a US-occupied slice of the island known as Guantanamo Bay.

Yes, Castro should have retired years, perhaps even decades, ago. Had Cuba been left alone, he may actually have felt comfortable doing so. The resilience of the revolution he spearheaded with a handful of comrades 50 years ago will be sorely tested in the months and years ahead.

The affection he attracts among the masses in Latin America offers a clearer reflection of his place in history than the hatred he inspires among US-based ideologues. Only time will tell, meanwhile, how safe the brightest aspects of his legacy are in the hands of his successors in Havana, as well as his popularly elected friends and admirers in Caracas and La Paz.

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