Havana is gearing up for the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth on August 13, 2026. Fidel Castro died in 2016 after handing power over to his brother Raul in 2006. Communists the world over claim him as one of their own, and international visitors are being hosted by the dictatorship to celebrate this anniversary. In 2006, Forbes magazine reported that Fidel Castro’s net worth was $900 million. One of his body guards, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, who defected, wrote a tell-all book,The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo, detailing Fidel’s 29 luxury homes, four yachts, and private island (Cayo Piedra) – not to mention other luxuries. This, in a country where 89% of the population lives in extreme poverty.

This was not always the case. Prior to the 1959 revolution that ushered the Castro brothers into absolute power for the next 67 years and counting, Cuba had a sizable middle class and strong labor unions that protected Cuban workers’ rights. Even under the Batista dictatorship, an independent judiciary survived, and Cuban lawyers represented their clients, not the dictatorship.

All of this ended in the months after 1959 and has yet to return. This did not result in the working class taking power, but in a new class of elites seizing and hanging onto power. It is the Castro family, military elites, and their inner circle who sit on cash reserves of $18 billion, living lives of opulent wealth in Cuba, Europe, and the United States, while millions go hungry in Cuba, and die of easily treatable diseases.