A fact from Fidel Castro appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 9 October 2009.
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Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I agree that the prior version of this article was decidedly POV. I dispute whether the last edits made it NPOV. I suspect Castro-as-dictator is provable, regardless of what one thinks of the benevolence of his dictatorship. I also strongly suspect that there are people who consider him a dictator outside of the United States. The Cuban Missle Crisis section could also be rewritten in a way that sounds less like an attempt to defend the USSR. Granted, like any article NPOV edits have the risk of making it into he said-she said, but I think collectively we can reach something closer to consensus. - PhilipR21:34, 28 July 2005 (UTC)Reply
I strongly suspect there are poeple who consider him a dictator outside the US, too. Nevertheless, the main proponent of the argument and the only nation to take active action against Cuba has been the US; these actions, including the Bay of Pigs invasion, the blockade after discovering the planned installation of missiles and the decades-long embargo, are insufficiently described. In the case of a president, "weasel words" are unavoidable to avoid bogging down the article with quotations.
OTOH, his status as a dictator is not something that can be proved conclusively one way or the other until his government is over. He's been party leader for a long time, but it wasn't until the 70s that he was elected PM and then president, and many of the arguments wielded by supporters and critics alike are clearly evaluative. It may, after all, be possible that Cubans actually prefer decades of Castro to the likely alternatives (I'd be sorry to be in that situation, but that's an entirely different matter).
Finally, I tried to put the CMC in perspective; Castro's request for military support came immediately after the BoP invasion, and the connection between both has been documented. Besides, the idea of employing missiles as a deterrent was Raúl Castro's, not Kruschev's. I don't think the USSR needs to be attacked on these grounds. 62.57.4.18514:46, 3 August 2005 (UTC)Reply
