Rue the damage he has done. But lift the embargo against a sad, dysfunctional island

HE HAS been the great survivor of world politics. When Fidel Castro marched into Havana in January 1959 at the head of his troop of bearded revolutionaries, Dwight Eisenhower, Harold Macmillan and Nikita Khrushchev were all in power, and the Beatles were yet to come. Ensconced in his Communist-run island, Castro has weathered ten American presidents and their economic embargo against him. He has outlasted by almost two decades the cold war and his former sponsor, the Soviet Union—long enough to benefit from a new era of anti-Americanism in which Hugo Chávez in oil-rich Venezuela has come to his aid. And now, at last, he is stepping down as Cuba’s president, for reasons of age and ill-health, but of his own volition and with what he clearly hopes will be an orderly succession that preserves his revolution.

He will probably be replaced by his brother, Raúl, who has been running the government since Fidel underwent abdominal surgery in July 2006. Raúl Castro has given many signals that he intends to restart reforms that in the mid-1990s introduced some market mechanisms into the sclerotic, centrally planned economy (see article). Yet reform will at first be slow—not least because while Fidel remains alive, he will have something of a veto over change.