The rise and fall of Cuba’s revolutionary epic

The Cuban Revolution was more successful at exporting its epic narrative than any other tangible commodity. Not even sugarcane, tobacco or rum can compare. The face of Che Guevara transformed into left-wing merchandise, the stoic image of Fidel Castro with a cigar in his mouth defying the 600 assassination attempts orchestrated against him by the CIA, and the slogan that Cuban education and healthcare are the best in the world have been an important part of the global progressive ideation from 1959 to the present. Sartre, Beauvoir, Maradona, Guayasamín, and García Márquez are just some of the renowned figures who succumbed to the heroic myth of an island that, along with its bearded leader, built a precarious but socialist and happy paradise right under the nose of the Yankee empire.

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