Around the world, Fidel Castro is being remembered by some as a tyrant and by others as a revolutionary—and Cuban-Montrealers were as equally divided on the legacy of one of the most prominent figures of the 20th century.
“Castro was a very polarizing figure. People thought he was a great leader and a revolutionary but I think in a lot of cases, he took people who were very poor and he just made everybody poor,” Montrealer Morris Dascal said.
Dascal was born in the Cuban capital of Havana but his parents brought him to Canada as a baby, while Castro’s rebel forces were still hiding in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the mid-1950s.
His grandparents remained behind, and Dascal says they lost the family-owned factory and home as Castro converted Cuba into a single-party socialist state with a nationalized economy.
“They really lived through the hardest times of Castro,” he said. “That was a real transition for them, when Castro finally came into power.”
Other Cuban-Montrealers are mourning the loss of the only Cuban leader they've ever known.
“When we received the news, it was so hard for me,” recent arrival Alexandre Ocha, who came to Montreal from Cuba only six months ago, admitted. “Very hard, very hard.”
“Last night, "I watched" the video of his brother, Raul Castro, announcing that he passed away,” said Noelia Riverso. “I feel sad. I grew up in Cuba, I studied for free all my life.”
Dascal has never visited Cuba, but he admits he looks forward to travelling there following Castro's death, to see the place his family was uprooted from.
—with files from CTV Reporter Angela MacKenzie