President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday greeted the news that
Fidel Castro had diedby denouncing Cuba’s longtime leader as a “brutal dictator” with a legacy of bloodshed. Trump, who vowed to help the island nation’s people achieve freedom and prosperity, did not explicitly repeat campaign-trail promises to roll back
President Obama’s historic outreach to the island nation.
The entrepreneur’s reaction could scarcely have been more different than the sitting commander in chief’s response. Obama declared that now was the time to “extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people” and largely sanitized deep Cold War-era criticisms of Castro’s record on human rights and economic freedom.
“We know that this moment fills Cubans — in Cuba and in the United States — with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation,” the president said. “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.”
Trump, whose initial reaction to the news was the four-word tweet “Fidel Castro is dead!” took a far sharper tone in a written statement later issued by his transition team.
“Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades,” Trump said. “Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.”
